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Courtney Townley 0:00
Welcome to the Grace and 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.
Courtney Townley 0:28
Hello, my friends, and welcome to the Grace of Grit Podcast. This is your host, Courtney Townley. As always, I’m so grateful you’re here.
Courtney Townley 0:34
I have two announcements that I want to make from the start of this podcast today, because they are about things that are coming up in the next few weeks that I would hate for you to miss.
Courtney Townley 0:43
The first is that I cannot believe this. But we are just two episodes away from Episode 300 of the Grace & Grit Podcast. So this is no small thing. This has taken eight years of almost weekly production, I say weekly, almost weekly, because we definitely took a couple of breaks. But all in all, this has been a very consistent endeavor. And I am so proud of the content that we have put out the reframing that we have helped women do, and just ultimately making it this far, it feels awesome. So I want to celebrate, and I want you to help me celebrate. So starting next week, I am going to let you know what you can do to actually be eligible to win three free months inside of my Rumble & Rise community.
Courtney Townley 1:33
Rumble & Rise is my private community where I do a lot of deep work around behavior change. And I really help arm women with a lot of incredible skill sets for living in integrity with themselves. And I just cannot say enough good things about this community. It is such a joy to hold space for this community and to do the work in there that we do. So if you are someone who has been listening to this, but for whatever reason, you’ve been a little hesitant to make the investment. Stay tuned, because next week, I’m going to give you an opportunity to do something that will make you eligible to win a three month free membership.
Courtney Townley 2:09
The second thing I wanted to bring to your attention is that at the end of October 2022, some of you may not listen to this until 2025. But in October of 2022, more specifically, the 24th, I believe to the 28th of October, I am running The Consistency Code Crash Course, which is a five day course that I have run several years in a row. That basically helps give women a frame work for behavior change. So no matter what kind of change you want to make in your life, this sort of sequence of steps will help you to dig in and make progress in that area.
Courtney Townley 2:51
I’m really excited to run this crash course this year, it is going to be $29. But I also want you to know that after the crash course, if you decide that you want to join the Rumble & Rise community to keep up your practice, we will credit you the $29 towards your first month of membership. So pretty good deal. And honestly for what you are getting in those five days 29 bucks is a pretty awesome price, in my opinion. So if you want to know more about this, you can definitely be on my email list. You can register for my email list by going to my website. But you can also on October 5, you can register for The Consistency Code crash course, you can do that by going to graceandgrit.com/crashcourse. And again, registration does not open till October 5. But on October 5, you will be able to register.
Courtney Townley 3:47
In preparation for this crash course. I thought it would be really fun to use the next few episodes of this podcast to do kind of a pregame series in dedication to consistency. I know that consistency sounds so boring. And so like okay, Courtney, tell me, tell me something I haven’t done before. Tell me something I haven’t heard before. But consistency doesn’t have to be boring. In fact, quite honestly, I don’t think it should be boring. Because to be consistent. You have to enjoy what you’re doing. And over the next few episodes, I am going to give you a lot of tools and a lot of pivots in your thinking to help you get a lot more excited about the practice of consistency. So we’re gonna start this pregame series with this episode today, which I am titling the power promise.
Courtney Townley 4:41
Now I’ve spoken a lot about integrity on this show because I’m a big believer that deep health is about honoring, not just one part of who you are, but the wholeness of who you are. It’s not about separating out one piece of yourself, but really addressing the whole wholeness of the human. So you are not just a body. You are also someone who experiences a lot of thoughts and a lot of emotions and you’re in relationships and you live in an environment, there’s a lot of parts to you that need to be nurtured in order to optimize your health. And a lot of women come to work with me, because they are in what I have long called integrity, pain, integrity, pain is when you are showing up in your life in a way that is completely mismatched. From how you want to be showing up or what you want for your life. So integrity, pain is a very real kind of pain, it’s a very real kind of discomfort. And if we can solve integrity, pain, if we can lessen it, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, your health will improve.
Courtney Townley 5:50
Now, integrity, let’s just be clear about what that is. Integrity is the practice of being honest, trustworthy and reliable, and showing a consistent and uncompromising adherence to strong values. So just highlighting that last part, adherence to strong values. To live in integrity, you have to know what’s important to you, you have to know what lights you up. And I would argue that this is barrier number one for a lot of women, because we are so focused on pleasing other people living up to other people’s expectations, living our life for others, that we don’t spend time getting to know ourselves. And so definitely, that can certainly be a barrier. It’s just not knowing what our values are. And then the second part of that, that I wanted to highlight of that definition, is showing a consistent and uncompromising adherence. Consistency is required for integrity.
Courtney Townley 6:51
So what the heck does it really mean to be consistent? Well, I think unfortunately, we often think of consistency as doing the exact same thing over and over again, monotony, boredom. No thanks. But if you actually look up the definition, Merriam Webster says the consistency is actually harmony, regularity. A steady continuity. It’s the ability to be asserted together without contradiction. The ability to be asserted together without contradiction. I love that. How would your life feel different? How would your life be different? If you could organize it in a way that prevented contradiction? Or if you lived it in a way that didn’t promote contradiction? Well, I would assume that life would get a lot better. Because contradiction feels not so great. Contradiction definitely leads to integrity pain. So here’s what I want to invite you to consider to maintain harmony in your life, your behaviors will not always look the same. Your values might stay the same, but your behaviors will not always look the same.
Courtney Townley 8:29
And I would take that a step further and say that a rigid attachment to the idea that things are always supposed to look the same, is really unhealthy, it doesn’t lead to good things. Rigidity often robs us of our power. So let me give you a really concrete example here. I have a general sort of commitment of working out four days a week. And that working out is pretty intense strength training. But I’m sick. I woke up this morning with a head cold that my son so lovingly shared with me. And I took a minute this morning to check myself to check out how I had organized my day. And I know because I’ve learned this by doing it the wrong way that I could absolutely show up to push through that intense strength training session. But it is going to actually rob me of my power not helped me to protect my power. I’m actually going to further deplete myself and cause more stress in my body by working out at the same intensity today if I decided to do that.
Courtney Townley 9:44
So what if I expanded the promise of showing up and respecting my body through movement today? But if I let that promise, just shift from it has to look like intense strength training to they’ll be more flexible to what that approach might look like. Maybe on a day that I’m sick like today, that looks like getting on the floor, and just doing some gentle movement, some gentle stretching, exploring how my body wants to move, maybe it looks like doing a little self massage. My point is, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. It doesn’t have to be, I can honor my commitment to movement today by showing up for that intense strength training session, or I can’t do anything. But as I always say, the human brain loves all or nothing thinking. So what I really want you to hear in this is that self care does not always look the same.
Courtney Townley 10:47
But being dedicated to yourself care is always relevant. It’s always a powerful promise. So there is consistency in the promise of self care. And in order to maintain consistency with that promise, there has to be flexibility in exactly what that looks like each day. So the commitment to self care is something that I can be consistent with. But what it actually looks like every single day is not. You’ve longtime listeners, you’ve heard me say this so many times that health is multi dimensional, right? Yes, it’s physical. But it’s also a mental and emotional, environmental, and spiritual and relational. It’s a lot of things.
Courtney Townley 11:47
And ultimately, our health is improved by managing the total stress load of our life. Health is also dynamic, which means it’s always changing. Because the stressors of your life are always changing, your total stress load is always changing. So how do we build consistency in our practices, in a way that honors the dynamic nature of life? Well, this is where I’d like to introduce that power promise. Up Power promise, is a promise that you make, to uphold a value that you have, while simultaneously being flexible, in what that actually looks like each day in order to maintain your power. So I’m gonna repeat that one more time. A power promise is a promise that you make to uphold a value in your life, while simultaneously being flexible in what that actually looks like, in order to protect your power. So let me give you some really concrete examples. A regular or a common promise that you might make to yourself is something like, I’m going to eat six cups of vegetables every single day. The power promise sounds more like I will respect my body by eating foods that support my well being. Here’s why the difference matters.
Courtney Townley 13:34
A lot of days, eating six cups of vegetables might make tons of sense. And it might be consistent for a while. But there may come a point where you’re experiencing some digestive distress. This is actually a very real example that was just given on one of our group coaching calls inside of Rumble & Rise, someone came to the group coaching call and was talking about how the amount of vegetables they were eating, they were suspecting might be problematic in their digestion, so they were experiencing some digestive upset. And their intuition was telling them that hey, maybe it’s the amount of fiber that you’re consuming. So forcing her way to continue to eat that much vegetable is probably not beneficial. It’s not it’s going to rob her of her power. But does that mean that she can’t respect her body by eating foods that support her well being? Of course not. She can still do that.
Courtney Townley 14:34
But she has to be willing to let it look different. So we talked about alternatives we talked about maybe the way she was preparing her vegetables that sometimes if we’re eating a lot of raw vegetables, we need to cook them to help break them down before we digest them. We talked about using powders in her smoothies that have a lot of the nutrient value of vegetables minus the fiber we even talked about the possibility of just staying away from vegetables for a while to see what she learns. So if her power promise is I will respect my body by eating foods that support my well being, she’s going to be a lot more open to other options when her body is giving her indication that something’s not working. Another example would be of a regular promise is something like I will get eight hours of sleep every night, in an effort, right to sort of honor my recovery. But a power promise sounds like I will honor my body’s need for restoration, and adjust my life accordingly to what those needs are.
Courtney Townley 15:47
So do you hear the difference? Right, the regular promise is very rigid and very specific. And please do not hear that I am not a fan of specificity I am and we’ll talk about that here in just a second. But the reason, knowing your power promise, the bigger value that you are upholding is because often you are going to get yourself in trouble. If the specific commitment doesn’t work, to protect your power that day. So instead of I will get eight hours of sleep every night, I remind myself that my power promise is that I’m going to honor my body’s need for recovery. Because guess what, sometimes I need more than eight hours. Sometimes I get eight hours, and I still don’t feel recovered. So maybe I need to carve out some time in my day, to decompress to take a nap to do things that kind of tap me into that parasympathetic nervous system.
Courtney Townley 16:47
So again, I am not suggesting that the specificity of your daily commitments doesn’t matter it does. But what I am saying is that it is your responsibility, that the commitments you are making each day are actually serving the purpose that they intended to serve. So again, going back to my strength training, commitment, right, my overarching value, my power promise is that I honor my body through movement every day. But if I am so rigidly attached to the idea that that looks like heavy strength training on a day that I don’t feel well. It’s not actually promoting my well being, it’s costing me my well being. So something that looks really nourishing today might actually be depleting tomorrow.
Courtney Townley 17:51
Man, we hate this truth, right, because we just want to see one pathway, and that I can just decide on a behavior and that is forevermore going to nourish me, not the case. So again, this morning waking up with a head cold. I did not spend any time beating myself up or lamenting the fact that my body needed more rest. And that I needed to recalibrate my workout plans for the day. Because I knew, because again, I’ve been down this road many times that the quicker I honored what my body truly needed to get well, the sooner I will get well. So I brought my focus to my bigger promise, which is to actually do what needs to be done to be well. And today that does not look like heavy strength training. It looks like more recovery. It looks like gentle movement, lots of hydration, probably more than I usually do.
Courtney Townley 19:00
I want to simplify this by saying that power promises inform your daily commitments. And they allow you to stay the course. Even though your actions to do that to reach the goal will not always look the same. So think about this in terms of macro and micro. Let’s say macro is the power of promise. It is your strong value. It is making a promise based on a value that you want to uphold in your life. And that power promise that macro level of promise. informs the micro promises, the smaller promises that you want to make in the day So on a micro level, we’re talking about the daily choices that allow you to honor your values. What does keeping the promise of doing what needs to be done to be well looked like today, maybe it does look like heavy strength training, maybe it does look like eating six cups of vegetables. But maybe, if you’re being super honest, it looks like getting to bed by eight o’clock tonight, asking someone in your household to cook dinner. So you don’t have to do it.
Courtney Townley 20:45
Saying no to a work project that you can do. But you have so much on your plate, it’s just going to cause you more stress and upset. So what are some power promises that you might want to consider making? Well, I mean, literally, this could be anything, right. But I think it’s always useful to kind of start with things that help to support your wellness. Because I always think of wellness as base camp. If you’re not well, it’s really hard to move your life to higher ground and any other area. So some examples. And these again, these are what these are just a few of 1000s examples. So you could come up with I think of the power promise, at the most basic level as making a promise to the person, the version of myself, I want most most fully expressed in the world.
Courtney Townley 21:42
That might sound like I promised to be a person who stays self aware. I promise to be a person who stays awake to her life. That’s the macro level, right? That’s the power promise. In terms of daily actions, daily promises, that might look like doing some meditation today, it might look like collecting some data about how I’m showing up in an area that I’m struggling in. It might look like experimenting with organizing myself a little bit differently. So I’m not expending all of my resources in the first half of the day. So if I know that the power promise is something like, I promise to be a person who stays awake to her life, I then get to ask the question, well, what does that look like today? What does it look like? What does it look like to stay awake and self aware in my life today? Well, it looks like I need to create some alone time. I need to have some time for introspection, where’s that going to happen? And then once I carve out that space, what am I actually going to do with that space.
Courtney Townley 23:06
I hope you see how the macro helps to inform the micro. Here’s another example. I promise to be a person who honors her need for recovery. Because as a human being my friends, you all have a very strong need for recovery. Your nervous system is not designed to be in hyperdrive all the time. So if I promise to be a person who honors her need for recovery, that’s my power promise. What do I need to do today to honor that promise? Well, gosh, you know, I’ve been really cutting myself short on sleep, I need to make a concerted effort to get myself to bed earlier. Or, gosh, you know, I keep saying yes to all these projects and all these things that other people want me to do that I’m feeling burned out. I need to pull back I need to extract myself from some of these commitments. Which is yes going to be. It means making some hard decisions, letting some people down. Maybe honoring your need for recovery today just looks like finding carving out some windows of time for decompression. To just be out in nature. Take a few breaths. Read an article that’s been on your desk for five weeks.
Courtney Townley 24:29
Another example, I promised to show up as a person who supports my well being that’s the power promise. What does that look like for you today? What does it look like today? To support my well being? What does it look like today to nourish myself? Well sure that might look like putting more focus on choosing quality foods. It might look like feeding yourself a little more consistently throughout the day. It might look like drinking things other than coffee and soda.
Courtney Townley 25:10
But it also might look like taking time to connect with others. It might look like taking responsibility for what you are absorbing through your other senses. What are you exposing yourself to? What are you listening to? What are you reading? Because all of that is a form of nourishment of sorts? And is it nourishing you? Is it helping you to become a person who honors? Or supports her well being? Or is it in contradiction to that? I’m gonna give you one other example. I promise to be a person who treats herself with kindness and respect. What does that look like today? Well, maybe it means no matter what happens today, I’m not given the mean girl the microphone. Maybe it means no matter what I mess up today, I’m not going to spend time beating myself up and making myself feel terrible. Maybe it looks like taking some time to just acknowledge my own accomplishments. Because I’ve been so frustrated that no one else is validating that. So maybe that’s my opportunity to do that work myself. These are just ideas. But I do challenge you today to consider what your power promises might be.
Courtney Townley 26:46
And secondly, what are you doing each day to honor those promises. So don’t overwhelm yourself with power promises pick two or three. Right? So when we think about our strong values that we want to uphold, most people have like maybe three to five values. So consider what power promises you might want to make and dedication to your values. And use it as a filter for how you organize your day, and be willing to be flexible in what that looks like. So staying consistent, act actually demands that we stay open to the fact that the details of our daily life will not always look the same. And having grace with that it’s not a bad thing. It’s life.
Courtney Townley 27:48
We’re gonna be talking a lot more about this in The Consistency Code Crash Course if this kind of piqued your interest. If something landed again, that course it starts on October 24. registration opens on October 5, which is just in a few days. And you can find out all the details on October 5 and register by going to graceandgrit.com/crashcourse. I hope I’ll see you there. I definitely will see you next week. Take care.
Courtney Townley 28:26
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.
