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Courtney Townley 0:00
Welcome to the Grace & Grit Podcast made for women who want their healthiest years to be ahead of them, not behind them. Join your host Courtney Townley right now. As she breaks down the fairy tale health story, you have been chasing all of your life, indispensable action steps and lasting change.
Hello, my friends, and welcome to the Grace & Grit Podcast. This is your host, Courtney Townley. As always I know there are a million spaces in places where you could be right now. So the fact that you’re here, it means a lot and I’m so happy that you’re here.
Now, a lot of you know my story in terms of how I’ve evolved through the health industry. In fact, my story is the reason I’m so passionate about the work that I teach today. I started off like a lot of people do in their careers very naive. I didn’t know much. All I knew is I loved movement, and I wanted to help women become better movers. But through the past 20 years, I have learned a lot about behavior, change what works and what doesn’t. And a lot of that I’m going to be sharing with you inside of that free class, the Women’s Health reimagined class. But I’m telling you this now because today’s topic is about kind of changing some thoughts that are preventing you from creating progress. And what I’ve learned over my career is while actions are awesome, and very powerful and very important, how a woman thinks about her process is and really about herself is really the game changer.
And I’ve gotten to a point in my career where I’m not interested in helping women just to achieve a goal. I’m not interested in the once in a lifetime transformations. Because life is transformation. That’s what life is you will forever be transforming. So I want to equip you with skills and tools that will help you to gracefully move through those transformations at every age and stage of life. And truth be told, at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what information I give a woman about nutrition or exercise. It doesn’t matter how awesome the plan or protocol is. It doesn’t matter how eager a client seems to change her behavior. None of that matters if she doesn’t learn how to manage her mind, which I believe this age and stage of my life and career is really the biggest barrier for women creating the level of health they truly crave.
Most of you know I mean if you’ve been listening to this Podcast even for more than one episode, that You know that health does not grow in negligent and hostile and toxic places, which the mind can really easily become without proper attention and direction. If you aren’t exerting consistent daily effort to keep your mindset in a place that promotes grace and resilience and perseverance, if you don’t have practices for doing that, any goals that you achieve will be very short lived. Managing the mind is single handedly the most powerful thing a woman could do to improve her health. It also happens to be the thing that most women resist the most. And why? Why do we resist managing our brains? So many reasons. Number one, women are way too freaking busy. Right?
They’re trying to do all things for all people all the time. They’re not so great, always setting boundaries. And busyness is a barrier to managing our minds, because we don’t have time to get aware, to really consider the sentences that are running through our brains. I think another reason we don’t manage our thoughts is because a lot of people believe that thoughts are happening to them, they don’t feel like they have agency in their thoughts. Which is not true, you have so much control over your thoughts. So we don’t make time. We don’t necessarily believe that thoughts can be controlled. We are also brainwashed to believe that actions are everything. I think the weight loss industry is a really good example of this a glaring example that the weight loss industry really promotes if you just take these actions, drink this shake, do this exercise program, follow this nutrition protocol, even though you hate it, you will get a certain result. And you know, in black and white, that is usually the case, if you follow the protocol, you will create some kind of result. The bigger question is will you be able to sustain that result?
And of course, the diet industry has a horrific failure rate because the answer is largely No. And why is the answer no. Because people aren’t learning the real the real linchpins to behavior change, which one of those linchpins is thought management. Also, things that are easy to do, are also really easy not to do. And taking time to slow down and consider how you’re thinking. And if that way of thinking is useful to you. It’s not hard, it’s not complex. But because it’s easy to do, we can we also convince ourselves that we don’t need to do it today. And then we convince ourselves of that again, tomorrow, and the next day and the next day and the next day. And eventually we’re just compounded all this time, to keep us right where we are, because we’ve actually not taken any action.
I also think that we don’t manage our thoughts because we’re nervous about what we’ll find. I coach a lot of women through thought management, all my clients, it’s primarily what I do, coaching my clients through managing their brains. And inevitably, every woman moves through a part of her journey, where what she’s uncovering about her thought process is not all that awesome and I do think that some people would just rather keep that can of worms closed. But on the other side of opening that can of worms is so much power and such a fulfilling life and a level of authenticity with yourself that is would never be possible otherwise. So thought management is a really big deal.
And I want to share with you now six thoughts that are probably getting in the way to some degree of your own process. You may not identify with all these thoughts, but I guarantee you’re gonna identify with at least one of them. I’ve probably done individual Podcast episodes on every single one of these thoughts on their own. So if there’s a Podcast episode I can direct you to I will that you can kind of get more information from so the first thought I don’t have time. Yes you do. I don’t have time is not a true statement. I have time you have time everyone has time. But how you choose to spend your time you’re doing with your time? Well, that’s different.
I tell my students in my consistency Code program and the very first lesson that they do with me that I don’t have time is not a true statement. What is a true statement is I am not yet willing to make myself a priority. Because how you spend your time reflects your priorities. And I know a lot of you would argue that say, no, no, but my priorities aren’t that, well, if that’s how you’re spending your time, your calendar is very reflective of your priorities. Here’s the other truth about time I want you to consider if you have time to beat yourself up and feel bad about how you’re living your life. You do have time, you’re just spending it in a very unuseful way.
There’s a great author Nireyal, I think is how you I don’t know if that I probably totally butchered his name, and NIREYAL. But he’s written a couple great books. He wrote a book called indestructible. And he wrote another book that I haven’t checked out yet, but it’s called Hooked. But indestructible I did just recently read because I was doing a masterclass for my Rumble & Rise members on focus. And he has a great line in that book that says Time management is pain management. And what I read in that is that when you take ownership of your time, you don’t spend all of this extra time feeling bad about what you didn’t do, or living life out of alignment with what you said you wanted. So I talk a lot about the concept of integrity, pain, integrity, pain is when your actions aren’t in alignment with what you said you wanted. Time management is pain management, because it helps you to get out of integrity pain. You do have time, you just haven’t made yourself a priority yet.
So the next time you hear yourself saying I don’t have time, I want you to really reconsider that, especially when it’s in a lot when you were talking about your health commitments, right, your self care commitments. When you use that phrase, I don’t have time specifically in reference to self care, something you committed to but now you’re trying to negotiate your way out of I want you to try to call it what it really is. I do have time. I’m just choosing to not make myself a priority. Once you do that, once you do make yourself a priority. This I can promise you, you will find the time.
All right next thought that’s totally unusable. I hear a lot of women using improving health is hard. Well, the truer statement here is that using the wrong strategy to improve your health can make improving your health really freaking hard. It never ceases to amaze me. How many programs out there are still being sold, that ask women to overhaul their lives overnight, make all this radical change. Put in a tremendous amount of effort right out of the gate. That’s what makes your journey unnecessarily difficult is the strategies you choose. But the things that really improve your health over the long term are not hard.
Calculus is hard. Running a business is hard. Raising kids definitely can be hard. But doing things that improve and honor your health, not hard. Drinking water, not hard. eating whole foods not hard. Now, I do want to acknowledge that I know some it is hard to get access to Whole Foods for some people. Moving your body not hard. You don’t have to go anywhere to do it. Right, you could do it in the comfort of your own home. Planning your day, not hard. I just coached a woman earlier today who had this big storyline about how hard planning was. And so I broke it down for her. I walked her through it asked her some very pointed questions. And in five minutes, she had a super solid plan that was totally in alignment with her values for how she wanted to operate for the next 24 hours. Planning is not hard. At all these things are uncomfortable. But discomfort and hard are not the same thing. And it’s important that you recognize the difference
Are you willing to get a little bit uncomfortable? Hopefully that’s a yes. But don’t tell yourself storylines, that things have to be difficult. Because your brain doesn’t like difficult, it actually freaks your brain out. And when your brain is freaked out, it doesn’t want to do anything. Another thought, everything in moderation. hear this all the time. Everything in moderation is so healthy. Well, it sounds lovely. But I have to tell you that everything in moderation does not work for an awful lot of people, especially in the initial stages of the change process. So what I mean by that is I have clients who really want to stop craving sugar, but they want to keep eating it. Everything in moderation. So every time they eat sugar, they go down the slippery slope of wanting more sugar. I have clients who want to stop drinking so much, but they still want to drink on the weekends, everything in moderation. But then when they drink on the weekends, they think about alcohol all week long. And the amount of time and energy they put into resisting alcohol is tremendous. Humans are terrible at moderation.
Moderation consumes a tremendous amount of our mental and emotional bandwidth. Because we think about the substance, we think about not doing the substance, when we do engage with a substance, we feel guilty about it in the aftermath, and then we start the lovely cycle all over again. And the truth is, we live in a culture these days that is selling us concentrated pleasure at every turn. So what is concentrated pleasure, it’s, it’s, it’s anything that’s highly rewarding to the brain temporarily, but has the consequence of chemical disruption. So your brain ends up craving more of the thing. So sugar, alcohol, social media, shopping, porn, all of those things can be concentrated forms of pleasure. And the cost to you is that you end up thinking about the thing constantly. So the question I always encourage my clients to consider and I asked myself constantly is who is leading the dance here? Because if you’re telling yourself everything in moderation, but alcohol is leading the dance, because you can’t stop thinking about it. I would challenge you to reconsider that moderation thought.
If you’re saying to yourself, everything in moderation, but you obsess about sugar to the point that you’re binging on it every day, I would argue that’s not really working for you. And sugar is leading the dance. So are you leading the dance meaning? Can you easily allow an urge for something and not indulge? Can you easily kind of have an urge for something and not spend hours thinking about it obsessing about it? If you can’t, no shame, no guilt, no reason to feel bad. But be honest with yourself that you are not leading the dance. That substance has more control over you than you have over it. So maybe everything in moderation is not working for you. I have gone through so many periods in my life where I’ve had to get really straight with myself about caffeine, about alcohol, about sugar. Because there were places and spaces in my life where I was definitely not leading the dance.
Alright, next thought I am overwhelmed. Now just a few episodes, I did an entire episode on extinguishing overwhelmed. So if you are someone who is in the overwhelmed apartment often and much go back and find that episode. But overwhelmed doesn’t just sound like I’m overwhelmed. It also sounds like I’m just too busy. I have too much to do. I can’t handle it. I’m overwhelmed. It’s just too much. I’m too tired, I’m exhausted. I can’t possibly handle it all. There’s too much going on. I don’t have enough time. All of those phrases mimic overwhelm. But for a lot of women it does come out as I am overwhelmed. I hear those words a lot. And overwhelm is not a does not inspire action. In fact, I would say that overwhelm inspires inaction. When the brain perceives overwhelm, it interprets that as a threat Danger Zone, abort mission do not proceed. So you feel paralyzed to take any kind of action. And here’s the truth, overwhelm is not happening to you. It is something that you create in your mind. You have a thought, like I have so much to do, I can’t possibly do it all. Life is so overly full right now. Those thoughts generate overwhelm.
the feeling of overwhelm is not caused by all the things that are happening in your life. Even if you have a lot of things happening in your life. It is caused by the way you think about everything that is happening in your life. Another thought totally not useful for many women along their health journey. I don’t know what to do. Not only is I don’t know what to do. unhelpful, it’s also, when I coach women through this thought, it’s also largely untrue. I have spent my entire career reminding women that they do indeed know what to do. They just aren’t doing it. And there’s a big difference between not knowing what to do and just not doing it. And I think part of the I don’t know what to do comes from this belief that you have to know every step of your process before you take the first step. No, you don’t. You don’t need to see the entire staircase, you just need to take the next right step. And I promise you, you do know the next right step along your health journey. Maybe it’s having a healthy breakfast tomorrow morning, whatever that means to you. Maybe it’s calling up your girlfriend to go for a walk with you for 20 minutes at lunch tomorrow.
Maybe it’s giving yourself a bad time. Maybe it’s allowing an urge. Maybe it’s changing a thought that you know is really unusable to you. I know. So seemingly small and simple. But this is the way of it. We decide on that next right step. We manage our brain so we can follow through with it. And lo and behold, we start making progress. I think we mostly use the phrase I don’t know, as rationalization for not taking action. What if you had to know what if your kid or your best friend came to you? With the same problem you were facing? What would you tell them? Because we have all kinds of answers when we’re not the ones seeking the answers.
Another thought that will rob you of progress along your health journey is any rendition of my body sucks. My body hates me I hate my body, my body’s broken, anything along those lines. Your body is freaking awesome. I want you to consider hearing now. All the ways in which you have neglected and abused and judged and mistreated your body and it still shows up for you every single day. Without fail, you wouldn’t be here if it had so regardless of your treatment of your body, your body is a very loyal companion. And if you treated any other relationship in your life, the way you treat your body how do you think that would go? Like I said earlier health does not grow in negligent, hostile or toxic places. You cannot hate or abuse your way healthy, but man Do we try? Like somehow we got it mixed up in our brain that the worse we mentally treated ourselves the more disciplined we would become. Has that ever worked for you? And even if it does work for you, you’re not really creating deep health. You’re you’re sacrificing mental health in pursuit of physical health. And to me that’s not really health. So your body is awesome, I want you to start considering all the ways in which your body is showing up for you. All the things you are grateful for about your physiology all the ways you love being in your body, which I’ve said on Podcast before is not the same as thinking about your body. What does it feel like to be in your body?
For most women, that experience is very different than thinking about their body. hating on your body will get you nowhere. So I realized listening to these thoughts, that some of you you can, you can understand it in theory, it makes sense why these thoughts are not helpful to your health journey. And yet, you may also be struggling to pivot to thoughts that are more useful. And I just want you to know that that’s very normal. Pivoting to thoughts that are useful to you, feels really awkward at the beginning. Because you don’t have as much practice with them. So I want to offer you a few thoughts that you can borrow for your own journey that are going to feel a little awkward when you first try him on. But the more you practice them the more you practice being them it will get easier because that’s what practice is right practice is inherently messy. It always feels awkward at the beginning.
I think of just a few years ago taking my son to learn how to ice skate, right new skill on a slippery surface with really strange shoes on your feet. Super awkward, super uncomfortable. really struggled that first season. But every season, he’s gotten better. So it is a practice thought management is a practice. So here’s some thoughts I have for you. You can create anything you want. You are stronger than you give yourself credit for. You are not broken. You are not damaged goods. You are not just the way you are you can do hard things. You can also do graceful things. You deserve to be happy and rested and so deeply loved. You are loved. You have plenty of time. Everything is happening right on time. You are one of a kind, beautifully designed and you are you a very unique expression that will never exist again. You are needed. Now some of you are going to have to replay those thoughts. Many times. If you struggle to tell these things to yourself, let me tell them to you. So stay this Podcast play that on repeat if you need to. And start considering what else do I want to believe because you get to choose. You don’t have to believe anything just because you’ve been practicing certain thoughts for a really long time doesn’t mean you have to keep them and all belief is is a recycled thought it’s a thought you have thought so many times. It feels true. So let’s start practicing some new thoughts that you want to create estroux Alright, my friends, I don’t know who needed to hear that. I hope it landed for a lot of you.
Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of the grace and grit Podcast. I hope there was something in here that allows you to travel forward with a little bit more ease and grace. And again, if you’re looking for a higher level of support, I would really encourage you to check out our Rumble & Rise membership community once again, you can check out that community and all that it entails by heading on over to graceandgrit.com/readytorumble. Have a wonderful week and I hope I’ll see you again next time take care.
Thank you for listening to the Grace and Grit Podcast. It is time to mend the fabric of the female health story. And it starts with you taking radical responsibility for your own self care. You are worth the effort and with a little grace and grit anything is possible.
