Latest / The Consistency Warm-Up: Prime Your Brain for Your Most Consistent Year Yet / Warmup 2: Attitude is the Strategy [Week 1]

Transcript

Warmup 2: Attitude is the Strategy [Week 1] · The Consistency Warm-Up: Prime Your Brain for Your Most Consistent Year Yet

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hi guys, welcome to week one of the consistency warmup.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: You've already gone through the pre-work, and today is all about what we're gonna focus on for the first week.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: In the first episode, we talked about the idea of the heart having to take care of itself first.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I introduced you to the idea that in order to really be consistent, we have to be selfish like a heart.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: A heart pumps blood to itself before it pumps blood to the rest of your body.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: In the same way that when we're consistent, we show up for ourselves first.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: We take care of our needs, we take care of our happiness.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: And by doing so, we're able to fuel ourselves and fortify ourselves to keep going.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: That means that on our bad days, we have the ability to keep going because we have something left in the tank.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so I want to continue to build on this analogy and have you think about a heart, like an actual heart in your body.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: If you've ever been a runner, if you've had a season of working out more or doing more cardio, you've probably experienced conditioning.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: And what that means is a certain level of activity feels really challenging.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then as you do it more and more and more, it actually gets easier.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: And that's because your heart is a muscle.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: And as you put it under more stress, it gets stronger.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: But this is a process.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if you decide that you want to have better heart health, you can't just wake up tomorrow and say, I'm gonna go on one, I'm gonna do one CrossFit workout, and then my heart will be more conditioned.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: The thing is, your heart actually gets less strong in the process of that workout, and it isn't until later that it grows back stronger.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: The more we condition our heart by working out physically, by pushing the limit in a run or in a cardio workout, the stronger that it gets.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so conditioning our heart is a process.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: We can't get stronger without repetition.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: When we think about consistency, it often feels like we think about a streak.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: We're like, I'm going to have a streak of consistency.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to start now and be perfect.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: And that is what the definition of consistency is.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: But what the real definition of consistency in my book is the act of continuing.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's messing up or having a bad day or having a moment and then deciding to keep going anyway.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: Week one this week is really making peace with that.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: You will get weaker before you get stronger.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: It will feel like more work before it feels like less work.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: We can't get consistent without doing the rep of continuing to show up.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: There's a story I heard, and I don't even know if this is true, but I think it's really powerful, that Michael Jordan used to do a hundred free throws after every single basketball practice during his career.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: This is like one of the greatest basketball players of all time, but he still understood that the reason that he is so good, the reason that he shows up consistently is because he was putting in the reps.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: And when he was doing those 100 free throws, it wasn't like if I make the first 50, then I don't have to do the second 50.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: It was like, no, I am here to practice, and that alone is the task.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: The task isn't to get it in a hundred times.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: The point was that he showed up to practice the act itself.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: Conditioning your heart, conditioning your mind is a process, not an event.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: It is not a one-time show.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: It is something that you do again and again and again and again and again, and then it gets easier.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: I want to encourage you to think about this quote that I read in a book called Be Your Future Self Now.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: And the quote is: it takes courage to get into the game because once you're in the arena, you will fail.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I love this quote because often when we start out on a journey of any kind, we kind of tell ourselves this story that we're hopeful that we won't mess up at all.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: We're like, okay, if I have the perfect running shoes and the perfect workout clothes and the perfect alarms and the perfect training fuel, I will never have a bad run.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: I will never have a day where I don't want to go for a run.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: I will never have a day where things feel awful.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: And that's really just a story that we're telling ourselves because no one anywhere ever started a journey and didn't have a day where they messed up.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so the point of getting consistent isn't actually to do it so well that you never mess up.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: The point is to seed the belief today that you will fail this month.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: And those of you who get to November 30th and feel really, really consistent and really, really proud of yourselves will not be standing there because you didn't fail.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: You will be standing there because you did fail and you kept going anyway.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: One of the reasons why a lot of us aren't consistent now is because we predict that we won't be.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so as you start to imagine what it's going to feel like when you have your first failure this month, when you wake up one morning and you intend to do a workout and you sleep through your alarm and you hit snooze and you let yourself down, I want you to imagine what you're gonna do in that moment.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to think about how you're gonna talk to yourself in that moment.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you even write down a statement.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things that I've been saying to myself recently, and you're welcome to borrow this as your mantra, is attitude matters more than strategy.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Attitude matters more than strategy.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: I've spent a lot of my career and I've spent a lot of my fitness journey really focused on tactics and strategies.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: I like someone to tell me the answer, but I've realized in my own personal lived experiences and just using my body and my health as an experiment that how I show up matters a lot more than the strategy.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: What makes the biggest difference in your consistency is more often going to be the attitude that you show up with versus the strategy that you show up with.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: So for me, what I'm thinking about is how can I change my attitude?
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: What can I think about to change my mindset?
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: And this reminds me of a recent client.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: She's been a one-on-one client for about eight weeks.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: And she shared a question uh two weeks ago on a Thursday, and she said, I'm already spiraling a little bit about this weekend.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: We have all these events going on, Halloween holidays are coming up.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: I just feel like there's no way that this weekend goes well.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I challenged her to say, it kind of seems like you've already decided that.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: It kind of seems like you're telling yourself the story that because you've had a bunch of weekends in the last several months that haven't gone great, that it's just gonna happen all over again.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I encouraged her to really consider what she wanted this weekend to feel like.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: How did she want to feel at the end of these meals?
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: How did she want to feel on Sunday night?
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: How did she want to feel in these parties?
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like who was she excited to connect with?
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: Who was she excited to talk with?
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: If none of these events had anything to do with food, what would she be looking forward to?
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: And she shared with me that she feels a little bit like Eeyore sometimes.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like she always sees that glass half empty.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it occurred to her, even in reflecting on all the ways it could go right, how rarely she actually asks herself that question.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: How rarely she thinks in her brain, what if everything went right?
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: She said to me, I need to stop being Eeyore.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: I know that this is how my brain works, and I can see that it's not serving me.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so she's working on trying to think through who her new spirit animal is going to be.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: She's like, Eeyore cannot be my spirit animal anymore.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean that we are blind to the circumstances in front of us, but it means that we can acknowledge things that are going wrong and still choose to move forward.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: And as this client was struggling with, she was ruminating a lot on how past weekends had gone wrong.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: But when we sit in unstructured, like incoherent thoughts and we have a lot of emotion around them, we're usually sitting inside our limbic brain, which my past coach called our toddler brain.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: But when we pause and look at our own thoughts, when we observe our own thoughts, we engage a part of our brain that's called the prefrontal cortex.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: And the prefrontal cortex is actually the part of our brain that's responsible for building complete sentences.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: And this parent brain is what my coach called it, helps us actually structure and bring words to these swirling emotional thoughts.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: And when we do that, when we objectify what we're, it makes our thoughts feel less scary because we're putting it into words.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: We're hitting the brakes on the emotion of it all.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: And doing that can actually be the very thing that allows us to move forward.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: So when my client actually looked at her thoughts and she examined them and thought about how things could go right, and she thought about all the reasons why her past experiences won't just automatically be relived again, it all felt a lot less scary.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: So that is our focus for week one.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: We are gonna notice our thoughts so that we can make them less scary, so that we can engage that parent part of our brain that actually brings words to what we're experiencing.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: And in doing so, we're gonna try to change our attitude.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: When we feel like those incoherent racing thoughts are telling us only negative things, we're gonna think, okay, but what if I actually could influence my attitude right now?
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: What if I could choose to stay positive even when things are going wrong?
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: And in doing so, what if I can stay in motion?
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: What if I can keep practicing and getting the reps so that I get stronger?
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: We are conditioning our brains to do this work more automatically.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that means step one is doing it more manually, right?
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: Or like taking the car out of automatic, putting it into manual so that we can actually get curious and sit with some of our thoughts.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: I am so glad that you're here.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so proud of you for doing this work.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: And as you have light bulb moments, like even as you're listening to this, please come share them in the chat.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: This goes directly with what I was just talking about in terms of the rumination, is when we ruminate on thoughts after we are thinking about things or listening to things, instead of processing them and putting words to what we're feeling, we rob ourselves of the complete transformation.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: So you coming and processing and sharing your thoughts inside of our group chat during the month of November and sharing what you are realizing about your attitude, about getting reps in, about what's holding you back, about your resistance to failure, all of that is going to become really important evidence for you to keep going.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: So do not be afraid to use the chat.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I can't wait to see what you come up with.