Latest / The Everyday Awesome Project / 2: Emotional Fitness: Build Strength, Flexibility, and Endurance for Life
Transcript
- 0:29Polly Mertens: Hey superstars, welcome back Polly here and Sam and we are here today at Everyday Awesome Project to talk about.
- 0:37Polly Mertens: Emotional fitness Emotional fitness, literally probably, no, not probably For sure.
- 0:45Polly Mertens: My favorite thing, our favorite thing, oh my god, dude, it's so good, it's so good.
- 0:50Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, we had to do this soon in the recording because it was like we have a lot to say about this and as we prepared for this, we realized we have too much to say in one episode.
- 1:00Samantha Pruitt: So stay tuned, I'm sure there'll be more.
- 1:01Samantha Pruitt: Oh yes, but today we're going to at least cover the basics.
- 1:05Polly Mertens: Yeah, yeah, you and I have written whole coaching programs and week-long things around this subject matter.
- 1:11Polly Mertens: Let's tell the audience what it is, and even you and I have different ideas about this based on our personal experience, which is also so frickin' fabulous.
- 1:22Polly Mertens: It makes me really happy to have that complimentary mindset.
- 1:26Samantha Pruitt: And I love that we come about it from a slightly different direction, which can just be so dynamic for people.
- 1:33Samantha Pruitt: So this conversation I think you guys are in store for some good yummies here and I hope you stay till the end.
- 1:40Samantha Pruitt: We've got some ideas on how to build this, so we'll tell you about what it is and where we're going with this and then how to get stronger at it.
- 1:48Samantha Pruitt: So tell me, I want to start with your definition, because I really think when you told me how you came up with it and where it's built for, you is so organic, mine is more, you know, a study and stuff.
- 2:00Samantha Pruitt: So what is?
- 2:01Samantha Pruitt: emotional fitness.
- 2:02Samantha Pruitt: How did you come to establish that?
- 2:04Samantha Pruitt: How do you see it?
- 2:05Samantha Pruitt: How would you define it?
- 2:06Polly Mertens: I guess, yeah, for me it was definitely a personal study and a personal evolution of experiencing my own life and a multitude of suffering, so physical suffering and mental, emotional suffering.
- 2:20Polly Mertens: So in my own path and journey to wellness, healing body and brain, I discovered some pretty key elements that I was lacking, didn't have skill set around, didn't have a lot of the attributes to being successful in these areas.
- 2:39Polly Mertens: So as I went on my own personal journey, I decided to use that moving forward into in my own coaching world.
- 2:46Polly Mertens: So how I perceive emotional fitness for myself and for people that work with me is that it's basically three pillars of an entire human's life.
- 2:57Polly Mertens: So there is an element of strength, an element of flexibility and an element of endurance.
- 3:04Polly Mertens: Now when people hear those three things strength, flexibility and endurance they generally think of athletics, of sports, and of course I am an athlete and that is a huge component.
- 3:15Polly Mertens: But I am speaking about the mental, emotional strength, flexibility and endurance of a human as well as the physical strength, physical flexibility and physical endurance of the human.
- 3:29Polly Mertens: So those three pieces are physical and mental to me, and so how I started to develop in my own personal life was I had to feel heal, a lot of physical issues, but completely intertwined and not separate in any way, even remotely possible, was my mental and emotional state in those places that I was suffering.
- 3:52Polly Mertens: So I developed a program that would build a person as in me, a person's strength, a person's flexibility and a person's endurance in all of those aspects.
- 4:03Polly Mertens: So when you started.
- 4:04Samantha Pruitt: So what you haven't inserted here and I'll just insert it is I know you, because I know your story and anybody who hasn't heard it.
- 4:10Samantha Pruitt: You should definitely go back and listen and learn about this beautiful human that I have the opportunity to work with, and that is.
- 4:17Samantha Pruitt: There were some breakdowns.
- 4:18Samantha Pruitt: Yes, there was a few breakdowns happening, so physical and mental and so did you know when you were having these breakdowns like oh I know the recipe for this.
- 4:29Polly Mertens: I just knew how to suffer.
- 4:32Polly Mertens: I was really good at it.
- 4:33Polly Mertens: I mean I've got, like you know, a grades in that.
- 4:36Polly Mertens: Yeah.
- 4:38Samantha Pruitt: And so was it like baby steps that helped you, or were you bumping around, learning emotional fitness?
- 4:44Samantha Pruitt: Or did you just get like to this enough point and you're like I need to get my body in shape and wherever, and that was the start, or was it?
- 4:52Samantha Pruitt: Oh, I know my emotions.
- 4:53Samantha Pruitt: I'm not good at this.
- 4:55Samantha Pruitt: I'm overreactive or whatever.
- 4:57Samantha Pruitt: I'm frustrated all the time, or something.
- 4:59Polly Mertens: What was this?
- 5:00Polly Mertens: No my journey definitely started on the physical side of the spectrum because my body literally broke down and I was experiencing illness.
- 5:09Polly Mertens: So when that started for me it was predominantly physical dysfunction and suffering.
- 5:15Polly Mertens: And as I started to rebuild my physical body, my mind and emotions got in the way.
- 5:22Polly Mertens: So, even though I physically started to make some baby steps towards healing and rebuilding this broken body, my brain and my emotions were not having it because they were so invested in that state of misery and dysfunction.
- 5:36Polly Mertens: So I realized then I needed to work on all of these aspects of me, the whole person, samantha.
- 5:44Polly Mertens: Otherwise, if I just get healthy and fit, you know what is that going to do for me?
- 5:50Polly Mertens: If, ultimately, my mental and emotional state are still broken?
- 5:54Polly Mertens: It's not going to work.
- 5:56Polly Mertens: So that's how it went down.
- 5:58Polly Mertens: Yeah, it was a long journey lady.
- 6:01Samantha Pruitt: No doubt, and we'll.
- 6:02Samantha Pruitt: I'm hoping we'll have some opportunity to share some more of their stories, and what I want to add to this is just one little fine point to add here.
- 6:11Samantha Pruitt: People have often said, or you see on the web emotional intelligence, emotional mastery, emotional fitness.
- 6:18Samantha Pruitt: Let's just take a moment to share what that is for us.
- 6:22Polly Mertens: And so.
- 6:22Samantha Pruitt: I have a quick little one liner.
- 6:23Samantha Pruitt: You know what is emotional intelligence versus emotional fitness?
- 6:26Samantha Pruitt: Let's say, emotional intelligence is knowing what to do.
- 6:30Samantha Pruitt: Emotional fitness is putting it into practice.
- 6:32Samantha Pruitt: Action, right.
- 6:33Samantha Pruitt: It's like you can know that you need to go to the gym, you can know that you need to lose 10 pounds, you can know that you want to run a marathon, but like the action of it, right.
- 6:43Samantha Pruitt: So like you don't get fit by thinking about doing pushups, you do pushups, yeah.
- 6:48Samantha Pruitt: And I think you and I would both agree that how we've both transformed our body, mind, emotional, all of that is through the action of it, doing the work.
- 6:56Polly Mertens: I've read a lot about those things too, and so have you Totally.
- 6:58Polly Mertens: But it didn't through osmosis, just transform our bodies and brains.
- 7:04Polly Mertens: Yeah, it was the sweat.
- 7:05Polly Mertens: Yeah.
- 7:06Samantha Pruitt: So I would say where we are with this and why we wanted to share this with people is, if you know, just don't listen to this.
- 7:14Samantha Pruitt: Like like, oh, I'm just taking notes and getting tips and stuff, but it's like, please, please, please, take some of the action steps that we share with you or find your own, but do not let this just be something you listen to and then go back to your life, because nothing will change.
- 7:29Samantha Pruitt: You know the definition of insanity If we keep doing the same things over and over again.
- 7:34Polly Mertens: How did you find this?
- 7:35Polly Mertens: What was your path?
- 7:36Polly Mertens: I know it was quite different than mine.
- 7:38Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, well, I would say it wasn't as linear Like I think yours was linear.
- 7:43Samantha Pruitt: So, as I just right now I'm thinking about this, one of my personal breakdowns was 20 years with an eating disorder, right, and so, if I sum that up, you know, to just try and be brief, there's a lot of dysfunction, whether you call it the physical dysfunction of you know what I was doing to my body with food, the emotional dysfunction of the shame and the guilt and the stories I was telling myself, things like that.
- 8:09Samantha Pruitt: So a lot of things were off course, right, I.
- 8:13Samantha Pruitt: One of my paths out of that was attending a personal development workshop called the Landmark Forum.
- 8:20Samantha Pruitt: I'm a huge fan of it.
- 8:21Samantha Pruitt: There's a lot of different work out there that you can do.
- 8:23Samantha Pruitt: It changed and transformed my life.
- 8:25Samantha Pruitt: That sent me on a journey to learn more about this.
- 8:28Samantha Pruitt: I was like whoa what you know I learned about personal development from a friend attended.
- 8:36Samantha Pruitt: That, let's say, cleaned up my act after that, in 10 weeks of, you know, pursuing accountability with people and sharing authentically and learning about myself, learning more about what I was doing, what was causing the shame, things like that.
- 8:50Samantha Pruitt: The journey has since then been 15 years of deep personal development work.
- 8:56Samantha Pruitt: So yeah, like you said, there's a lot more.
- 8:58Samantha Pruitt: I would say the thing that I learned the most, or the person I learned the most from about emotional fitness is Tony Robbins, you know, and there's a lot of teachers out there and other people that have great work on emotional fitness or ways of going about this but his he calls it the triad is so clean and simple.
- 9:16Samantha Pruitt: For me it just clicked right into place.
- 9:18Samantha Pruitt: He has a great way of making big concepts very simple, and so I'll just say the way he looks at the triad is it's like a triangle, like three sides of a triangle that make up our emotional state.
- 9:33Samantha Pruitt: So if our emotional state is in the center of this triangle, one side is what we focus on, or where our attention is.
- 9:40Samantha Pruitt: Like, if I'm focusing on this, you know, rude driver, that's, you know in the car next to me, you know, right, yeah, if I'm focusing on that, I'm not going to notice the beautiful trees outside my car, I'm not going to, I'm not going to notice the gift of my heartbeat or the wind in my hair or something like that.
- 9:57Samantha Pruitt: Where my focus goes, that's going to send me in an emotional state.
- 10:01Samantha Pruitt: The other angle is the of that triangle is our story.
- 10:05Samantha Pruitt: So what's the story I tell myself.
- 10:07Samantha Pruitt: I can tell myself that that guy's an asshole.
- 10:08Samantha Pruitt: Or I can tell myself, like that guy's having a bad day right, like I can feel empathy for him or sympathy for him, and if I do, then I'll feel differently inside.
- 10:18Samantha Pruitt: And then the third angle of that is physiology, and there's a lot to that, but it's basically all of the things physiologically.
- 10:25Samantha Pruitt: So where our eyes are, are they going up, are they going down?
- 10:28Samantha Pruitt: Are we breathing short?
- 10:29Samantha Pruitt: Are we breathing fast?
- 10:30Samantha Pruitt: Are we moving our body?
- 10:32Samantha Pruitt: Are we sitting still, you know?
- 10:34Samantha Pruitt: So those three things create the emotional state.
- 10:37Samantha Pruitt: So that alone helped me and helped me a lot with the coaching clients that I was working with, who were coming with a lot of disturbing patterns and behaviors that they weren't happy with.
- 10:47Samantha Pruitt: So and just started strengthening for myself, putting that into practice in my life, like noticing when I was triggered, you know, from the outside world, something that I was focused on, that I didn't focus on, or something I was telling myself that well, let me ask you a question about that.
- 11:05Polly Mertens: So I love that.
- 11:07Polly Mertens: That's beautifully stated and relatively simple to sort of manage, if you will.
- 11:14Polly Mertens: How does that feed into the physical aspect of the body?
- 11:18Polly Mertens: So the emotional experience said human is having good, bad or indifferent, and how is it attributing to their physical makeup, if you will, their physical experience or body's having?
- 11:33Samantha Pruitt: Without going too much into it but trying to help people get an idea.
- 11:37Samantha Pruitt: So I think this I used to coach my clients one-on-one and this was something I would help them understand.
- 11:43Samantha Pruitt: I think you can get it quickly is if I said to you, sitting in the next room, behind a closed door, you can't see this person, but just imagine for a moment somebody that's deeply depressed.
- 11:53Samantha Pruitt: I said, what would that person look like to you?
- 11:56Samantha Pruitt: Would they be standing up, tall, jumping up and down, or would they be sort of slouched over and kind of hunched on the couch or on a chair or something?
- 12:05Samantha Pruitt: Would they be breathing deep or shallow, right Would they?
- 12:08Samantha Pruitt: Would their eyes be up, like uplifting, or would they be sort of down, focused, avoiding glance?
- 12:14Samantha Pruitt: And what do you think they'd be thinking, right, like what would their focus be if they're depressed?
- 12:19Samantha Pruitt: Now, if I said that, say you know, I go, okay, aside from that person, what if we looked behind another door and another room?
- 12:25Samantha Pruitt: In this example is somebody who's just won the lottery, you know, or they just, yeah, they're excited beyond me, you know, like you can just see the difference in their body, Right?
- 12:35Samantha Pruitt: So if we look at it from those three sides of that triangle, it just naturally you can start to see the differences right.
- 12:43Samantha Pruitt: So how does that parlay to the human physical?
- 12:45Samantha Pruitt: Well, one of the things Tony says and I've seen it in my life is we actually do emotions, we don't just have them, we do them, we execute them through our body.
- 12:55Samantha Pruitt: So somebody who falls into depression, you know, has a pattern of, you know, talking poorly to themselves, lack of confidence.
- 13:03Samantha Pruitt: They'll slouch their shoulders, they'll go inward, they won't talk very loudly, they'll take shallow breaths instead of loud breaths.
- 13:09Samantha Pruitt: You can put yourself into emotional states and you can then get yourself out of it, and that's some of the things that I've personally taught myself and teach my.
- 13:20Samantha Pruitt: You know clients and so you can do your emotions and one of the things I'll just throw is a quick tip here that comes from Tony's work and that is the fastest way to change an emotion is the leg of the triangle called your physiology.
- 13:34Samantha Pruitt: So like interrupting with a physical pattern, and I think you would say that like, oh, do something on the daily, like you're actually sometimes on the hourly.
- 13:43Samantha Pruitt: Well, and I think one of the things I see from you the most is you walk into a gym and you tell me this story all the time, like you walk into a gym and you'll feel the energy low or running group or any kind of fitness.
- 13:54Samantha Pruitt: Something hails you, and what do you feel compelled to do?
- 13:57Polly Mertens: Well, besides, immediately make human contact.
- 14:00Polly Mertens: People are all trying to look away from me.
- 14:02Polly Mertens: I get fired up because I'm there to express myself physically, but also emotionally, in community.
- 14:12Polly Mertens: You change your state and you go into 1000% and I want to deliver that to the room, whether those people are ready or not.
- 14:23Samantha Pruitt: So that is a choice, like so good, yeah, and that's, that's what we want people to understand.
- 14:28Polly Mertens: Hey, to be clear though, sometimes I don't want to go to the freaking gym, I don't want to run, I don't want to do these things.
- 14:34Polly Mertens: So it's not like I, you know, wake up, all you know rainbow, sunshine and sparkles, and like on fire for all the things.
- 14:42Polly Mertens: I am human also, and so sometimes I can barely get myself there and it ain't pretty at all, and I walk in and I have the funk.
- 14:51Polly Mertens: But I know from all these years now that I better do something about it and I empower myself to make that shift.
- 15:00Samantha Pruitt: I just want to touch upon that because it's so beautiful what you're bringing up.
- 15:03Samantha Pruitt: One of the things that you and I have talked about in the past is like where do people get stuck?
- 15:08Samantha Pruitt: Like what stops people from there's a lot of stuckness, right, that's goopy.
- 15:12Samantha Pruitt: So you're, you're admitting, and I admit like, yeah, it's not all rainbows shooting out of our eyeballs every day.
- 15:19Samantha Pruitt: I mean, yeah, we create these states.
- 15:21Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, like, we design who we want to be and how we want to step into the world, and where do you think that that comes from?
- 15:27Samantha Pruitt: Or what?
- 15:27Samantha Pruitt: What do you see as stuckness and how do you either avoid it or how have you changed it in your life?
- 15:32Samantha Pruitt: So where do you, where do you see people getting stuck?
- 15:34Samantha Pruitt: What does it look like?
- 15:36Polly Mertens: I see a lot of self limiting beliefs in the humans that I work with and I hang out with, and I have had those myself, so I know that that is a big component.
- 15:46Polly Mertens: I see a lot of unworthiness.
- 15:49Polly Mertens: So people that have somehow determined the value of themselves or somebody has told them, but they have taken this on as a belief for themselves, that they are not worthy of a great physical athletic body or a great mind or just feeling good, just feeling good and actually being in love with their life.
- 16:13Polly Mertens: Yeah, a lot of people are having those.
- 16:16Polly Mertens: Those are the two primaries that I see they're addicted to feeling bad instead of choosing to feel good like
- 16:22Samantha Pruitt: with purpose or passion, or just like feeling good as they want to.
- 16:26Samantha Pruitt: How do you feel to see people getting stuck, you know, and what you just mentioned, as I talked about that triangle earlier, that's the story, right?
- 16:33Samantha Pruitt: And so a belief is just a thought you keep thinking, right?
- 16:37Samantha Pruitt: So, whether you hear it, and unfortunately, in the work you've done I'm sure the work that I've done we see people come with patterns, with beliefs, as you call them, and they, some of them, aren't even aware of them.
- 16:48Samantha Pruitt: Some of them, no, they come in and go I have low self confidence, or I have low self esteem, or I can't get myself motivated, or I'm a procrastinator, or whatever.
- 16:56Samantha Pruitt: The pattern is that they feel like they're running.
- 16:58Samantha Pruitt: That's in the subconscious mind, right?
- 17:01Samantha Pruitt: So those patterns, those grooves in the neuro plasticity of their mind, is just something they've been running as a story for a long enough time.
- 17:09Samantha Pruitt: Unfortunately, for a lot of us, those stories get established as young kids.
- 17:14Polly Mertens: Yes, and we don't realize it.
- 17:16Samantha Pruitt: Yes, and so people are walking around, like you said, with these beliefs and they're wondering you know, why doesn't my life get better, why doesn't whatever?
- 17:23Samantha Pruitt: And first step is awareness, Like they have to be aware, like, oh, that belief, that story that I tell myself, that little and oftentimes the story, I think some people think that it's true and it's them.
- 17:36Polly Mertens: Let me just double down on something.
- 17:38Polly Mertens: A limiting belief is a story.
- 17:41Polly Mertens: Yeah, you tell yourself over and over until you believe it until you believe it and you act upon it.
- 17:48Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, and you keep it.
- 17:49Samantha Pruitt: And so what happens?
- 17:50Samantha Pruitt: It's an old program, well, and so what happens and this is just the way that the mind works is you go out into life, you experience something, you act from a belief or a story.
- 17:59Samantha Pruitt: I'm not good enough.
- 18:01Samantha Pruitt: You go into a room.
- 18:02Samantha Pruitt: The behavior we just talked about, like how?
- 18:04Polly Mertens: you bring it with you.
- 18:05Samantha Pruitt: You bring it with you and then nobody wants to talk to you.
- 18:09Polly Mertens: Like what if you?
- 18:10Samantha Pruitt: had the limiting belief.
- 18:10Samantha Pruitt: Oh, you totally vibe it.
- 18:11Samantha Pruitt: So you have a belief.
- 18:13Samantha Pruitt: I go into a room and I like that place on fire.
- 18:16Samantha Pruitt: Or yeah you know, or you know I'm here to be of service.
- 18:19Samantha Pruitt: Yes, exactly, and so that is what you carry with you as a belief.
- 18:23Samantha Pruitt: You've established it.
- 18:23Samantha Pruitt: I don't think you came out of the womb jumping up and down.
- 18:27Samantha Pruitt: You know for other humans like hey.
- 18:29Samantha Pruitt: But you know.
- 18:30Samantha Pruitt: But you do now because it makes you feel good in your body and it makes you feel good to see the reaction.
- 18:35Samantha Pruitt: But, if so, part of how you've established that you, you know when you started your breakdown journey yeah, I wouldn't say that you walked into the gym every morning right after that like dude and no, you have videos of me in baggy sweats, the hoodie, the whole thing.
- 18:54Polly Mertens: Ymca embarrassed to even walk in and be there.
- 18:59Polly Mertens: I'm not worthy, I shouldn't be here.
- 19:01Polly Mertens: What the hell am I doing here?
- 19:03Polly Mertens: The amount of emotional abuse I gave myself it was insane, but it didn't stop me, but it was pretty brutal and I think people who I hope are listening to this don't expect you know you.
- 19:19Samantha Pruitt: And I would never say like, oh, wherever you are in your journey, you should just be able to run a marathon all the time.
- 19:24Samantha Pruitt: No, you should.
- 19:24Samantha Pruitt: You know, it should be no problem for you Because we've both lived.
- 19:28Samantha Pruitt: I mean, I came out of the doldrums, 20 years, 20 years of an addictive shame all of that stuff and rebuilt since then just as you did, and so it is.
- 19:38Polly Mertens: I didn't transform till almost 30.
- 19:40Polly Mertens: So that's 27, 28 years I really had 29 was kind of the break open to do it differently, so a trainwreck.
- 19:49Polly Mertens: I mean I'm just going to be honest about that.
- 19:52Polly Mertens: I got a lot of stories.
- 19:54Polly Mertens: We'll have an episode on that at one time.
- 19:56Samantha Pruitt: Let's just talk about trainwrecks.
- 19:57Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, totally Well, we're going to have a story about comebacks, and those are usually from oh, what are my other favorite subjects?
- 20:04Polly Mertens: So how do people get unstuck?
- 20:06Samantha Pruitt: Yeah.
- 20:06Samantha Pruitt: So you know, I think there's a lot of strategy.
- 20:10Samantha Pruitt: So one of the things that, like I said, I want people to begin to understand is how they're causing it right.
- 20:16Samantha Pruitt: So you've talked about beliefs, patterns we've talked about, we've touched upon that a little bit.
- 20:22Samantha Pruitt: So I would say one of my biggest like aha moments from a teacher that I've studied with that I just absolutely love, says you know, like let's take doubt as a limiting belief or a stuckness right, like I don't, I doubt that things are going to work out for me, or I doubt that I can do that or whatever.
- 20:40Samantha Pruitt: And she was asked you know, how do you, how do you get rid of doubt?
- 20:43Samantha Pruitt: And that's hilarious.
- 20:48Samantha Pruitt: She says you get rid of it by not having it before you have it.
- 20:52Samantha Pruitt: And so I would say what that looks like is, if you plan to run a marathon, you go and you train like you don't just show up to your races like fresh from the start, like I'm gonna run this marathon, yep, you have time alone.
- 21:07Samantha Pruitt: Like what they say is what is it champions do in public or, sorry, they do in private what it takes to be a champion in public.
- 21:15Samantha Pruitt: And that's what emotional fitness is as you do the work at home on your own time, that inner journey, those those little mental push ups, those little times with yourself, whether it's self talk in the mirror or just catching things.
- 21:28Samantha Pruitt: And I love the triad because it's so simple for me to use.
- 21:31Samantha Pruitt: You know, if I just pause, like one of the things is, if I pause and notice, like first step is, oh shoot, I'm triggered, I'm not feeling good in my body, and I think a lot of people don't recognize it early enough.
- 21:46Samantha Pruitt: They just for me, not feeling good is kind of like I have a body ache, I'm getting some whoa, I need some body work.
- 21:53Samantha Pruitt: What's going on here?
- 21:54Samantha Pruitt: What's out of whack?
- 21:55Samantha Pruitt: Awareness and that it's not okay, like, not like.
- 22:00Samantha Pruitt: I know a lot of sorry man, but men that don't go to the doctors early enough and things get worse, or their joints, or they get breakdowns physically.
- 22:09Samantha Pruitt: I think the same thing is true for us mentally.
- 22:11Samantha Pruitt: We just talked about beliefs are created by thinking, thinking, thinking, the same thought.
- 22:16Samantha Pruitt: So it's when I find a not good feeling thought, when I find myself in a state that I'm like what am I doing?
- 22:23Samantha Pruitt: Where's my focus?
- 22:24Samantha Pruitt: What am I?
- 22:25Samantha Pruitt: What's the story I'm telling myself Can I do something physically Like?
- 22:28Samantha Pruitt: That's how I, in the moment, begin to address that.
- 22:33Samantha Pruitt: That's when it's shown up in my life Like I've bumped into something that's triggered me, if you will.
- 22:37Polly Mertens: So there's two things there is not feeling good physically in this one body that you get, which is part emotional as well, and then not feeling good mentally, emotionally.
- 22:48Polly Mertens: We need to explain to people how these two things are integrated.
- 22:52Polly Mertens: They are not separate.
- 22:55Polly Mertens: You are not a separate person who is either thinking or feeling going on about life, but the physical body is detached from that experience, and vice versa.
- 23:06Polly Mertens: Right, let's break that down for just a minute for people, because my emotional fitness program and my philosophy is that these things are all integrated and you need to develop these three pillars.
- 23:18Polly Mertens: It's not unlike what Robbins is about here.
- 23:22Polly Mertens: But but I really am invested in that physical experience being 50% of the journey, because if and I know this from personal experience and so do you if our physical bodies don't feel good and a majority of the population currently is not feeling good in their physical body, and so we are seeing a mental health crisis, unprecedented mental health crisis let's talk a little bit about that integration and how people need to recognize that they're one in the same.
- 23:56Polly Mertens: They're one human, so if they're suffering in one area, it's also everywhere else.
- 24:02Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, and I would add to it because you know how much part of spiritual journey my life is.
- 24:09Samantha Pruitt: You're my woo friend.
- 24:12Polly Mertens: Yeah.
- 24:12Polly Mertens: So I would say you know, we have.
- 24:13Samantha Pruitt: I think we have more bodies than just the physical.
- 24:16Samantha Pruitt: So I would say, we have my philosophy is we have an mental body, an emotional body, a physical body and a spiritual body, and the physical body is the one that we're most in tune with, where we most see.
- 24:29Samantha Pruitt: But those other bodies are a part of us.
- 24:32Samantha Pruitt: You know, if you do any research and studies on auras and you know the outer energy field, you know you, you can walk up to somebody and you can feel them three feet before you touch them, right.
- 24:46Polly Mertens: That's part of that emotional, spiritual, physical body that I'm talking about Everybody's walked into a room and been like what's going on?
- 24:53Samantha Pruitt: here.
- 24:53Samantha Pruitt: That's energy, yeah, so I think just being a little bit aware of that as well, I just wanted to kind of put that in there.
- 25:00Samantha Pruitt: So how is it interrelated?
- 25:03Samantha Pruitt: It's, there's a lot there to unpack.
- 25:05Samantha Pruitt: So I think what's important for us to help people with is tools, strategies, ideas on how they can be managing in the moment.
- 25:16Samantha Pruitt: Like we talked about, you get a triggering moment like the car cuts you off the, you get bad news at work, you get an email that's scathing you whatever.
- 25:25Samantha Pruitt: You have a bad moment with your spouse or something like that.
- 25:30Samantha Pruitt: So those are those triggering moments.
- 25:31Samantha Pruitt: The outer environment is influencing us and then, like we talked about, like what, what are the champions doing?
- 25:38Samantha Pruitt: What are the champions of emotional fitness doing besides those moments?
- 25:43Samantha Pruitt: Like how do you prepare for that?
- 25:44Samantha Pruitt: How do you get to that starting line of running an emotionally fit race?
- 25:49Polly Mertens: on your own.
- 25:50Samantha Pruitt: So what would you say?
- 25:51Samantha Pruitt: Some of your um?
- 25:53Polly Mertens: I want to dig into that Because I'm all about those things and I want to again kind of double click on the concept in case people didn't hear me the first time that their body and their brain, mind, emotions are attached.
- 26:10Polly Mertens: I do see a lot these days with the influence of online living, life, et cetera, versus the real world, that a lot of people have detached these two things.
- 26:22Polly Mertens: So I just want to drive home the point that an integration of sorts and unpacking how you might have disjointed yourself Maybe you're treating yourself for mental health but you're not doing anything for your physical health or vice versa needs to be examined.
- 26:38Polly Mertens: So I'm seeing a lot of that.
- 26:39Polly Mertens: So how I would suggest that said humans or I just have done myself and the hundreds of people that I've coached, I've worked with.
- 26:48Polly Mertens: I break it down into kind of a simple training methodology, because I know that a lot of people can relate to that, especially if you have any kind of athletic background or if you're interested in getting healthy and fit, and a lot of people find me because they're interested in getting healthy and fit.
- 27:05Polly Mertens: Little do they know we are going to do a deep dive into their mental, emotional health in every other aspect of their life.
- 27:11Polly Mertens: Hence life coaching.
- 27:13Polly Mertens: Right, it's all the things.
- 27:15Polly Mertens: But I break it down into, like I said, these three pillars, if you will, of strength, flexibility and endurance, and I have them unpack these areas.
- 27:25Polly Mertens: Where are the pain points?
- 27:27Polly Mertens: Right?
- 27:27Polly Mertens: So most people will very easily say, well, my body is fine, my health is fine, but I really am having a hard time in my professional career or in my relationship space or in whatever some other area of their life.
- 27:42Polly Mertens: But because these things are integrated, we do have to have a little bit more of an open mind there.
- 27:48Polly Mertens: So hopefully that's a conversation that you have with them, right, to kind of explore, and you might discover some new things about yourself.
- 27:54Polly Mertens: But how do you ultimately build strength, how do you build flexibility and how do you build endurance?
- 27:59Polly Mertens: They're very individual and so generically, I could say that one would obviously build strength in arenas of their life, whether it be physical, mental or emotional, by doing challenging things, by building the muscles of their emotional state, building up strength to be able to handle stressful situations.
- 28:26Polly Mertens: Life is stressful.
- 28:27Polly Mertens: Relationships, interpersonal relationships, the economy so many things create stress in your life, right, most people are worn down there, and they're worn down because they're not in there and I'm like, oh, I love what you're saying there, because how I went about it was a little bit differently, but it was absolutely with what you're talking about.
- 28:48Samantha Pruitt: I used to call them.
- 28:49Samantha Pruitt: So a lot of my coaching is in success and habits creating and breaking habits and one of the things that I've seen for myself and for my clients is I call them small wins.
- 29:00Samantha Pruitt: So especially and I'll just play off my background in eating disorders and addiction it's years, it's decades, like in my case, of losing trust with yourself.
- 29:15Polly Mertens: Oh wow, breaking promises to yourself, exactly.
- 29:19Samantha Pruitt: So I just wanted to share.
- 29:19Samantha Pruitt: I'll try to unpack this briefly, but basically, if you can picture and I'm trying to be too graphic here, but picture someone with an eating disorder mine was bulimia, which is you eat and then you throw up what you eat and whatnot.
- 29:33Samantha Pruitt: So not a great graphic, but bear with me.
- 29:35Samantha Pruitt: So imagine you have.
- 29:39Samantha Pruitt: So what that might look like for me was stressful day and a lot of people with addiction whether it's drinking, smoking, smoking, pot, food, whatever she usually is something like there's disturbance in the body.
- 29:51Samantha Pruitt: They don't know how to cope with that.
- 29:53Samantha Pruitt: So oftentimes these are the things that they reach for to change their emotional state.
- 29:56Samantha Pruitt: They reach for around can something external.
- 30:00Samantha Pruitt: So I would reach for food.
- 30:02Samantha Pruitt: I would get wrapped up, distracted in the food.
- 30:04Samantha Pruitt: Alcoholics get wrapped up, distracted and become inebriated to not feel what they were feeling before because we don't have the tools.
- 30:12Samantha Pruitt: So you have this evening of distraction.
- 30:16Samantha Pruitt: Let's call it changing your state.
- 30:18Samantha Pruitt: However, you end the night, wake up the next morning, go I'm never doing that again, shame, guilt.
- 30:25Samantha Pruitt: And then, eight hours later, you've walked through a life of the usual stresses of life Same pattern of behavior, things are showing up in life and lack of emotional fitness to deal with those things.
- 30:37Samantha Pruitt: So what you get is just that more and more breakdown of just the wariness of life.
- 30:44Samantha Pruitt: I don't know how to handle this life.
- 30:46Samantha Pruitt: I'm not strong enough.
- 30:47Samantha Pruitt: I don't know how to change my emotional state.
- 30:49Samantha Pruitt: So what do you do that next night?
- 30:51Samantha Pruitt: Pick up the can, pick up the pipe, pick up the food, and you do it again.
- 30:57Samantha Pruitt: And so if you do that enough times, I can remember waking up in the morning decades into this and going, why bother, I just don't even trust you anymore.
- 31:08Samantha Pruitt: You can say, oh, yeah, sure, I couldn't tell you how many times I said this is the last time.
- 31:16Samantha Pruitt: I mean I say that in jest, but I know people out there that have been there.
- 31:20Polly Mertens: Yeah, can relate to.
- 31:22Samantha Pruitt: It's a tough road.
- 31:23Samantha Pruitt: When you try and you're like willpower, willpower, that's not willpower, right, and there's a long reason for that.
- 31:29Samantha Pruitt: So what happens is you come you know, whether you're doing it for a year or 20 years, like I was, you don't have that relationship with yourself that you believe yourself right.
- 31:40Polly Mertens: This is so interesting because what I am thinking while you're telling the story so beautifully is the opposite side of that, from my experience, or from some of the especially, I've worked with a lot of troubled youth.
- 31:53Polly Mertens: Yeah, they come with a lack of muscles.
- 31:56Polly Mertens: I came with a lack of muscles around showing up to do the hard thing which was, by the way, the hard thing wasn't the running or the workout or the fitness element.
- 32:08Polly Mertens: The hard thing was me giving a shit about myself and showing up to do whatever was about to happen.
- 32:15Polly Mertens: So do I trust myself because I've said I'm going to do it and I'm going to show up and I'm going to make these things happen, dedicated to whatever that path is towards my goals?
- 32:26Polly Mertens: And then, same thing, I wouldn't show up or I wouldn't do the work.
- 32:30Polly Mertens: And so what I experienced from my own journey becoming an athlete and working with troubled youth in particular to develop them as athletes from zero was just showing up alone, was building the muscle, and then the rest was the easy part.
- 32:48Polly Mertens: So many people are not showing up for their own lives right now in a multitude of ways, but if you think about it from an athletic standpoint and talk about it from a training.
- 32:58Polly Mertens: Like you know, if you don't show up and do the workouts, you won't make it to the start line of whatever that goal is.
- 33:05Polly Mertens: And you definitely won't make it to the finish line but over the course of day after day, showing up and showing up for yourself.
- 33:13Polly Mertens: That is the magic, that's one way to become unstuck.
- 33:19Samantha Pruitt: Show up and that's where you talk about your, I think part of your leg, of your foundation, about endurance, right, so it's having that endurance to do what's hard, you know, do the things that you don't feel like doing all the time, or saying yes or saying no when you mean no right, and you know.
- 33:37Samantha Pruitt: So what I was saying about the small wins, as you were saying, you know, like, how do we build these little habits and reinforce this is we build them with small things and I often encourage because habits can have lots of old history is build that muscle almost in other areas.
- 33:56Polly Mertens: Like yours.
- 33:58Samantha Pruitt: I get it's very direct.
- 33:59Polly Mertens: you know it's very focused on the fitness, like go and do the workout or whatever, but it was required of me to build all the businesses I have built, to be contributing on these high performance teams in a professional way.
- 34:11Polly Mertens: Same thing, yeah, show up, be present, bring the goods.
- 34:16Polly Mertens: And sometimes I didn't think I was worthy of being at those tables, of being in those opportunities, right.
- 34:22Polly Mertens: So I had to overcome those hurdles.
- 34:24Polly Mertens: Showing up was half the battle, right, and then understanding that I was worthy and I had something to contribute.
- 34:34Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, huge, and that was a mindset shift for you.
- 34:37Samantha Pruitt: Absolutely, I know it.
- 34:38Samantha Pruitt: I mean, you can't go from getting yourself to do those things from you know a week before not getting yourself to do those things without a mindset shift.
- 34:48Samantha Pruitt: Yeah right, the story you started telling yourself is it's worth it without a lot of sucking?
- 34:52Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, it's worth it, I'm worth it.
- 34:54Samantha Pruitt: Something like the way you started talking to yourself change.
- 34:58Samantha Pruitt: In that enough moment and we've talked about those where you have those breakdowns you're like I'm not going to live like this anymore.
- 35:04Samantha Pruitt: Oh yeah, so you know we're talking about this from.
- 35:07Samantha Pruitt: You know some addiction, some.
- 35:08Samantha Pruitt: You know big turnarounds and stuff, but I think there's also some let's call it some smaller things and some other ways that I wanted to show you Daily actions.
- 35:17Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, so one of the things that I think we both agree, because I think my number one value is health and vitality.
- 35:24Samantha Pruitt: I think yours just seeing you in life is probably that with no it or not, and so I think that's a perfect foundation and with when people don't have a foundation of their health and their vitality and they put health as a secondary to other people, their job, whatever responsibility.
- 35:44Polly Mertens: It's a losing proposition.
- 35:45Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, we've seen it over and over, we've done it and we've also seen it, yeah, so first, and foremost, I think you know, and you see this in little ways, we would call it the hangry moments that women, you know, like the hangries and stuff.
- 35:56Samantha Pruitt: It's like if you're not taking care of, you know, decent and healthful food, exercise, self-care, all of life is going to feel harder, right, and so it's prioritizing yourself, putting yourself care in a place where you're at the center of your little mini universe and you matter.
- 36:12Samantha Pruitt: And those are those little small wins you know.
- 36:15Samantha Pruitt: So, like we talked about, if you wanted to get in shape for a triathlon or a race or something, you've got to be in the gym lifting different body parts.
- 36:24Samantha Pruitt: You've got to get on the trail, you've got to get whatever.
- 36:26Samantha Pruitt: Get on the bike, do those little things.
- 36:28Samantha Pruitt: And the same thing is true with your self-care.
- 36:30Samantha Pruitt: Right so if you want the foundation of how you feel, because life is way harder.
- 36:35Samantha Pruitt: I think you've seen it with arc lines and you've seen it with the breakdown in your life of trying to manage and be emotionally fit in a life where you don't feel good Impossible.
- 36:48Samantha Pruitt: Life is infinitely more challenging.
- 36:50Polly Mertens: Yeah, you get swallowed whole, yeah, yeah, and then you wonder why you've disappeared.
- 36:54Samantha Pruitt: So reprioritizing yourself, I think, is one of them.
- 36:56Samantha Pruitt: Another thing, and this goes to the work that I've studied with you know, understanding the mind and how our brains work and subconscious is actually choosing the environments we put ourselves in, and by environments I mean the people and the places that we physically put ourselves in.
- 37:13Samantha Pruitt: What do we put in our ears?
- 37:15Samantha Pruitt: What are we listening to?
- 37:16Samantha Pruitt: What are we watching on television?
- 37:18Samantha Pruitt: What are we reading?
- 37:18Samantha Pruitt: Who are we surrounding ourselves with?
- 37:21Samantha Pruitt: What does our environment look like?
- 37:24Samantha Pruitt: Feel like you know?
- 37:25Samantha Pruitt: Are we?
- 37:26Polly Mertens: Is it beating us down Right, or is it building us?
- 37:29Samantha Pruitt: up, yeah, and it's choosing those.
- 37:31Samantha Pruitt: So finding people and places to either insert ourselves, remove ourselves or readjust who's in our life and who we're giving time to.
- 37:40Samantha Pruitt: And, yes, you can say no to those people that aren't you know lighting you up.
- 37:44Samantha Pruitt: Like no, can't talk to you now, Can't see you right now, whatever.
- 37:48Polly Mertens: Yeah, and we've spoken a lot about I call it the A-Team analogy, right?
- 37:51Polly Mertens: But like building a team of people, when you decide you're going to want to do something pretty epic and change your life which, by the way, you should all be deciding that right now you know, yes, build an A-Team of people.
- 38:02Polly Mertens: It can be a coach, it can be friends, it can be whatever that's going to look like for you.
- 38:06Polly Mertens: One person, 10 people, whatever it is.
- 38:08Polly Mertens: You need to help facilitate that as well.
- 38:10Samantha Pruitt: Your everyday awesome team, right?
- 38:13Polly Mertens: Yes, we're on it.
- 38:15Polly Mertens: You can call us.
- 38:16Polly Mertens: Let's have a convo.
- 38:18Samantha Pruitt: I would say also something that I had a coach years ago help me with.
- 38:22Samantha Pruitt: So I look at life as energy and we can talk a lot about that, but we are naturally designed to be light beings and energy just flowing through us right.
- 38:34Samantha Pruitt: And then we walk out into the world and there's a lot of friction and resistance and things that we pick up along the trail, and so one of the things I had a coach help me with was noticing, in small and big ways, the things that I was tolerating in my life, the little resistances that were creating friction in my energy field, and what that looked like very specifically was she said I want you to go home and write a list of 100 things in your home that you're tolerating 100 things.
- 39:00Samantha Pruitt: I was like, yeah, I mean pick 20, whatever.
- 39:03Samantha Pruitt: This is why I want to live in a tiny house with some things, 100 things so I walked around room from room, little tiny chips of paint or the tile or the carpet had a stain on it or whatever.
- 39:14Samantha Pruitt: I didn't like the faucet and the sink, whatever.
- 39:16Samantha Pruitt: And she's like tackle the first 10.
- 39:18Samantha Pruitt: I knocked out 10.
- 39:19Samantha Pruitt: My energy went.
- 39:21Samantha Pruitt: I don't know how to even explain this.
- 39:23Polly Mertens: Like I can't.
- 39:23Samantha Pruitt: It's fascinating.
- 39:24Samantha Pruitt: It went through the roof.
- 39:25Samantha Pruitt: I was so uplifted because I stopped looking at things that like just you know those irritants if you will.
- 39:33Polly Mertens: You know, what I love about this example that you're giving is anybody could do this right now.
- 39:39Polly Mertens: Oh my gosh, just one of the 10 pain points.
- 39:43Polly Mertens: Yes, okay, because people, you know, have a lot of those.
- 39:47Polly Mertens: Let's focus on 10, right, and so maybe we can eliminate one this week or even this month.
- 39:52Samantha Pruitt: Yeah, and you know that can even look like for me I've done this over and over again is we all have a drawer or a closet or a space in our car or something or a purse that is just filled with stuff we don't need or is just out of balance, out of organization, overflowing, overwhelmed, something.
- 40:11Samantha Pruitt: So I love cleaning up drawers.
- 40:13Samantha Pruitt: It's very indicative.
- 40:16Samantha Pruitt: I don't know how it works.
- 40:17Polly Mertens: I love cleaning up lives.
- 40:19Samantha Pruitt: I'm thinking of the people, but this is people empowering themselves.
- 40:22Polly Mertens: Or the places.
- 40:23Polly Mertens: Yes, that's true.
- 40:24Samantha Pruitt: So it's like just find a drawer in your house, Find a closet and just like, take it, you know a drawer isn't so overwhelming.
- 40:33Samantha Pruitt: I'm not saying like, rearrange your whole freaking house, Like a drawer you can tackle usually within an hour or two, right, and just pick that and see how you feel after just noticing, and you might find some things in there that I don't know sparks some creativity, sparks some something else in your life.
- 40:50Samantha Pruitt: It's paying attention to those areas of resistance.
- 40:53Polly Mertens: I hear a lot about people not being motivated, so I just want to drive home that point before we start to close here that people always say to me I'm just not motivated right.
- 41:03Polly Mertens: And they generally are coming from an athletic fitness perspective.
- 41:06Polly Mertens: So if there is a stuckness of the story, you're telling yourself I am not motivated, right, you're continuing to feed that cycle and taking that out into the world, but very, very simply unpacking that and doing away with that old frame of mind with some very simple daily things as well.
- 41:33Polly Mertens: Right, like so, maybe you can't make a massive shift in your nutritional plan right now, or your exercise plan or your career path or the relationship that you're in family dynamics, but, like you took this process, I'll break it down to 10 things, right, but there's one out of 10 things that you can absolutely change today.
- 41:53Samantha Pruitt: And another one I just want to throw in there because I can't help myself and I won't go into the studies that they have done on this, but just stop saying out loud the things that are frustrating you.
- 42:03Samantha Pruitt: Purely.
- 42:03Samantha Pruitt: You can have the thought, you can be frustrated with the thing, you can be upset, whatever, just don't speak it.
- 42:09Samantha Pruitt: And there's a lot of evidence and a lot of research as to how your subconscious mind hears what you say and speaks it into reality and speaks it into reality, believes it, it perpetuates it, etc.
- 42:19Samantha Pruitt: So if you do nothing else, just shut your mouth.
- 42:22Polly Mertens: You know what.
- 42:23Polly Mertens: Everybody knows.
- 42:23Polly Mertens: It's because they have that friend that does that and you're like I just can't listen to that friend anymore, Don't be the listening for somebody else's.
- 42:29Samantha Pruitt: Don't be that person.
- 42:30Samantha Pruitt: Yes, stop that, stop that, but stop it for yourself, like that is something it's take.
- 42:35Samantha Pruitt: This is a muscle.
- 42:36Samantha Pruitt: Yes, this is a muscle.
- 42:38Samantha Pruitt: This is a muscle you can start to know.
- 42:40Samantha Pruitt: Stop speaking into your own ears things that you don't like about yourself, whether people, the way the world is, whatever.
- 42:47Samantha Pruitt: Just stop it.
- 42:48Samantha Pruitt: Stop it.
- 42:49Samantha Pruitt: It's okay if it lives inside of you.
- 42:51Samantha Pruitt: I had this go on recently where I said with my mom she was complaining a lot and I said why don't you use your inside voice for those Inside your head?
- 43:02Polly Mertens: Not now.
- 43:02Polly Mertens: I hear my 80-year-old mother.
- 43:04Samantha Pruitt: Mom, could you please use your inside voice, Use your inside voice and tell yourself those things so I don't have to hear them.
- 43:09Samantha Pruitt: It's one thing right, and it's a gift to the people around you when you stop repeating or reminding people of the things that are irritating you, it will you know.
- 43:19Polly Mertens: And then can you please call us so we can unpack that and have you eliminate that.
- 43:22Polly Mertens: Okay, we're gonna wrap.
- 43:23Polly Mertens: So much more, so much more, so much more.
- 43:24Polly Mertens: What are some closing?
- 43:25Samantha Pruitt: thoughts.
- 43:25Samantha Pruitt: Well, I just want to say, if you remember, only one thing from this segment we didn't say this, but I want to drive it home very succinctly, because all of this comes down to emotional state.
- 43:35Samantha Pruitt: Yes, right, so you deserve to feel good.
- 43:38Samantha Pruitt: So I would say you and I have a belief that your life is meant to feel good, and so just start practicing that, believing that Feeling good 99% of the time is a choice.
- 43:49Samantha Pruitt: So if you don't feel good, adjust something Like Samantha's talked about.
- 43:54Samantha Pruitt: Look at your strength, your endurance, your flexibility.
- 43:57Samantha Pruitt: As I've said, your state, your story or your you know, I'm sorry your story, your focus or your body.
- 44:03Samantha Pruitt: You can change those.
- 44:05Samantha Pruitt: So that's.
- 44:07Polly Mertens: You deserve to feel good.
- 44:08Polly Mertens: You deserve to feel good.
- 44:09Polly Mertens: Well, remember, beautiful humans, how your life feels is way more important than how it looks, and again, you can choose to find your awesome in every day.
- 44:21Samantha Pruitt: Let's do it.
- 44:22Polly Mertens: Thanks, lady.