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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.
0:28
Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the Grace & Grit Podcast. This is your host, Courtney Townley. As always, I’m so grateful you’re here. And I want to remind you that The Consistency Code Crash Course is now open for registration.
0:42
The Consistency Code is a four part framework that I’ve been teaching my students for years, to give them a pathway for leading themselves really powerfully in the health arena, but also well beyond. And if you’ve been a fan of the Podcast for a while, you probably understand that I am a big fan of this topic consistency. I’m also a big fan of the topic of self-leadership. And I believe that to go hand in hand.
1:11
So last year, I ran a crash course called The Consistency Code Crash Course, that was a version it was kind of a modified version of the full program. And I ran it over five days, it was really well received. And so I decided to do it again this year. So October 24, through October 28. Again, we’re talking 2022, which if you listen to the Podcast regularly, you will know that but a lot of people tend to listen to podcasts long after they’ve aired, which is why I feel the need to say that.
1:42
So my mission with this Podcast has long been to help break some myths around what it takes to really create behavior change, and ultimately help women show up for themselves with more consistency and a whole lot more ease. And that is never going to happen by teaching you another cookie cutter program that works for someone else’s life. So me telling you exactly what to eat because it worked for me or exactly how to move because it worked for me. I don’t think that’s the pathway to lasting change.
2:20
Your health story really improves absolutely through education. So I am not arguing that like learning through teachers and mentors and coaches, obviously can be immensely valuable. But ultimately, we really want to develop skill sets that allow us number one to stay super focused on what we really want. And we live in a big world of distraction. And it’s really easy to get yourself kind of thrown off your focus and your real intent. So we’re going to talk about that a little bit later here today.
2:56
But we also need to organize ourselves in a way that helps us to accomplish what we want in our life. And organization can get really messy really fast for a lot of different reasons. We also need to be able to follow through with the promises that we make to ourselves. So specifically, I’m referring to commitments if we make commitments, but we’re never showing up what the hell’s the point, right, like nothing magical is going to happen.
3:23
And so follow through is where I find myself doing the bulk of my coaching, I find it to be the most complex area of behavior change for an awful lot of people. Because it really comes down to our mindset, it comes down to our capacity to experience emotion and lean into discomfort. It has a lot to do, of course with our chemistry, and certainly the strategies that we’re using.
3:48
And then the final thing that I is a part of the framework that I’ll be teaching in this course, is the ability to realign ourselves quickly. Because again, life is very distracting, there’s going to be so much opportunity for you to get lost and going down roads you didn’t intend to go. And so what skill sets do you have for recognizing when that’s happening, and more importantly, realigning yourself swiftly.
4:18
And this is really precisely what The Consistency Code Crash Course will cover. So we’re going to talk about staying focused, we’re going to talk about organization, we are going to talk about follow through and absolutely the practice of realignment. And of course, it’s more than just talking about these things. It’s giving you real practices to start implementing to get traction with these things.
4:42
So if you enjoy this Podcast and you’ve considered working with me on any level, this really is the best gateway for getting a taste for how I teach and what it’s like to work with me and my other programs. So you can register and you can find out more details by going to graceandgrit.com/crashcourse. Once again, graceandgrit.com/crashcourse.
5:09
Alright, let’s move on to today’s topic. So I told you last week, because I’m gearing up to run this Crash Course, I wanted to have some Podcast episodes that were kind of pre gaming, the topic of consistency, that we’re kind of getting you excited for the types of things we will be learning inside of this crash course. So last week’s episode, Episode 298, was called The Power Promise. And I talked about how not all commitments or aka promises, carry equal weight.
5:46
And this week, I want to talk to you about when consistency is working against you. And it’s funny, isn’t it, because when we embark on any kind of behavior change, we often resist being consistent. And a lot of that is driven from the way we think about new practices. They’re too hard. They robbed me of my freedom. I hate being disciplined, I’m not a disciplined person. These are phrases I hear a lot when women are starting to commit to new practices, like within the first few weeks, these are the things that come up. And yet the same people who are saying those things are already being consistent.
6:37
The question is, are they being consistent with things that are working for them or against them, and obviously, because they hired me as a coach, it’s usually the ladder, they are being consistent with practices that are working against them. And this isn’t, through any fault of your own, necessarily, the human brain is really fascinating in that habits are literally an energy conserving mechanism. Your brain has an awful lot of work to do every day, making a lot of decisions for you.
7:13
And so what happens is, when you repeat certain behaviors over and over again, your brain creates pathways, very strong pathways. So you end up not even having to think about certain decisions, you just execute, you just react, that is what habits are. So they’re a beautiful thing. But they can also be a very destructive thing, if they aren’t working for you. And look, we are all engaging with habits all the time, that are partly some of them are working for us. And there’s usually a good chunk of our behavior that is working against us.
7:53
And I’ll just give you some really, you know, classic examples here. Of course, this is, by no way an exhaustive list. These are just a few things. Maybe you brush your teeth every day, I hope you do, I hope you extend yourself the courtesy and the courtesy to those around you to brush your teeth every day. And maybe the reason you do that is partly because you want to maintain the health of your teeth, right, you want to maintain gum health and keep those teeth in your mouth for as long as possible. And yet, every single night you come home from work, you pour a glass of alcohol or multiple glasses of alcohol with little or no regard for the health of your liver. So isn’t it interesting, right? Like on one hand, we’re using an argument for ourselves. And on the other hand, literally within the same 24 hours, we’re basically using the same argument to engage in behaviors that are actually harming us.
8:54
Another example is maybe you walk your dog every day. Again, I hope if you have a dog, you exercise it every day. And maybe the reason you do that is because you have an understanding that they need it. It is very helpful to the health of your pet to ensure that they’re getting enough exercise. And yet you skip your own workout every day or the promises that you make to yourself to move your own body because you just don’t have the time. So again, it’s the same reason, right? We both need it, the dog needs it, we need it. And yet we’re taking one of these circumstances and using it against ourselves. Right I don’t have time.
9:41
And then the last example that I wanted to just throw out here is that you know a lot of us are in the habit of taking out the trash when it’s full. Right we don’t want the house to stink. We don’t want the you know garbage to build up in our homes. And so we take the trash out and yet simultaneously every single day, we’re talking to ourselves like trash. We’re thinking like trash about our possibility, and sometimes even ourselves.
10:11
So today I want to talk about, obviously, there are habits that help us. But there are a lot of habits we’re engaging with that hurt us. And this is really alluding to the consistency that works against you. So more specifically, I want to share with you five of the most common habits I see my clients rumbling with, because I think you will see yourself in all of them. Because I certainly rumble with all these things. Every single client, I work with rumbles with these things. And I generally, at this stage of my career, just believe that humans rumble with these habits.
10:51
So the first one in modern culture is the habit of self neglect. What does this mean specifically? Well, it means that we are either that we’re unwilling, or we are basically neglecting to care for our own essential needs. So we do not make time in our schedule, for meeting our own needs, we’ll meet everyone’s needs around us. But we don’t make time for our own needs. In fact, the way I see this play out in a lot of lives is we keep telling ourselves well when I have time, or we put the self-care at the very end of the day, when we have the lowest resources. And it’s least likely that we’re actually going to follow through with that promise.
11:43
It also, of course, looks like not doing what needs to be done to honor your most basic biological needs. And the consequences of this are significant, obviously, I mean, it leads to every form of disease. Some of that disease is mental. Right. So I always talked about this concept of integrity pain, which is that emotional discomfort of feeling like you’re living your life out of alignment with what you truly want. So your actions and what you want are not lining up. That’s, that’s integrity, pain. It’s a form of a mental and a form of mental and emotional pain.
12:26
But then, of course, we also have diseases that show up as physical ailments. So we have aches and pains, we have sleep disturbances, we have hormonal challenges, we have some really big, literal diseases that we might rumble with as a byproduct of not meeting our basic biological needs. So the solution is really, of course, the opposite. Starting to meet your basic biological needs, which I always talk about in the scope of Five2Thrive.
12:59
So Five2Thrive is a program that I’ve run on and off for years. And it really just talks about the five elements that really helped to promote human health. And in case you’re new to this Five2Thrive concept and curriculum, there, I’ll just share with you what those five elements are.
13:17
So food, right, making sure we’re nourishing the human body, hydration, making sure we’re giving our body the source of water that it needs to do all of its magic, restoration, which absolutely comes in the form of sleep. But it’s also I would say broader than that. It’s decompression, it’s taking time off of work, it’s getting out in nature, we also have movement, the body has a very big need for movement, it’s meant to move, it’s how things flow through the body, we keep fluids moving, we keep lymph moving, but we also keep tendons and muscles and bones very healthy through movement. And then of course, we have connection, human beings have a very strong need for connection.
14:05
And so if you are neglecting any or all of these areas, of course, you are going to suffer a lot of consequences. And I always share and I’ve done lots of podcasts about this. And I believe that this level of care, this Five2Thrive camp is the entry to the rest of your life, like for whatever you want to create in your life. This level of self care is basecamp.
14:36
And you can go back and look I just recently did I can’t tell you what episode it was off the top of my head. But I did recently do an episode with it was literally called basecamp that was talking about starting to condition yourself in these ways. And I really start a lot of my work right here with clients. Because if you don’t have this basic level of self care, everything else is very challenging. Because we don’t have the energy, we don’t have the focus, we don’t have the drive to do the other work.
15:10
Alright, let’s move on to the second habit. So again, the first habit was the habit of self neglect. The second habit that a lot of us are in the pattern of is the habit of poor planning. What does this mean? Well, poor planning in my world looks like a lot of different things. It looks like being overly ambitious. So we set out to change something about our life. And we literally try to overhaul everything overnight. Which you know what that leads to, I always say that it leads to a face plant. Right, you might do well for a few days, maybe maybe even a few weeks if you’re lucky. But inevitably, you’re going to face plant, because you just committed to too much too fast.
15:56
Another way we pour plan is we have no plan, we just wing it, we just think that our intention to change behavior should be enough. But it’s not because of what I spoke to earlier, which is the brain is reacting very quickly, with patterns that you have repeated a lot over time. So in order for you to respond differently, you have to kind of have a plan in place in order to operate differently.
16:28
For example, if I have a habit of coming home every night, and turning on the TV as soon as I walk in the door, and I identify that as a problem, because it’s preventing me from doing other things in my evening, I sit in front of the TV for two to three hours. And then the next day I wake up so frustrated that I didn’t attend to things that I really wanted to do. And so in order for me to come home, and function differently, if that’s how I’ve been operating for years, I have to have a plan of what I am going to do differently. So the solution…
17:05
Oh, let me talk about consequences first, to what the no planning is, is we get very underwhelmed. So over planning creates overwhelm. Under planning, having no plan at all, for behavior change really creates underwhelm, because nothing in our life changes. We’re never challenged. And I’m a big believer that this leads to a lot of depression and stagnation.
17:31
Then we have another poor planning method, which is the start stop cycle. Which is we were kind of like raccoons were always a raccoons squirrels were always changing, right? Like everything is appealing to us. I always think of squirrels because of the movie with the old man and the kid and they up the movie Up Pixar, I think it was. But anyway, there was a dog that was constantly being distracted by squirrels, right. And so that’s what I mean by we kind of get squirrely, we everything is distracting us all the time, every new program that’s out there is something that we want to sign up for. And so we’re constantly starting and stopping our self-care, which, of course gets really frustrating because we don’t get anywhere.
18:19
And then the other element that I want to mention about poor planning is that we outsource our planning. We want to hand over all of our life decisions in a certain area to someone else who knows better. And you know, that may work for a while. And that might be really relevant at certain stages of your life. But is it a, a method of running your life forever? I would argue no, because you’re not going to be with these people the rest of your life. And, you know, it becomes problematic. So we have to learn how to start in sourcing our decisions, because it’s the only way we can really develop self trust.
18:59
So all this to say, I’m a big believer that you don’t need more information, you need more application of the things that you already know. So if you make a reasonable commitment, based on what you currently know about yourself, that’s how we start organizing ourselves in a much more powerful way. And we’re gonna go deep into that inside The Consistency Code Crash Course because I know a lot of people rumble with this whole planning piece and what that looks like in order to not overwhelm or underwhelmed the brain.
19:31
Alright, the third habit is the habit of bullying yourself. What does this mean? It means exactly what it sounds like. A lot of us in fact, I would argue all of us, to some degree, have the mean girl within us. And if we give her the microphone, a lot of negative self talk starts to happen. And essentially it’s emotional abuse towards yourself.
20:01
So think about like a bully in any other environment, we would characterize a bully as judgmental, disrespectful. Kind of shameful, like, they’re shaming you all the time. hateful, cruel, impulsive. And now I want you to just kind of put that through the filter of how you talk to yourself, when you’re in the throes of behavior change, like does any of that ring a bell? Because I know it does for an awful lot of people.
20:31
Where we commit to behavior change, we screw up, we don’t follow through, we make mistakes, which is all very normal. And then we start to do these things, we start to judge ourselves harshly, we start to disrespect ourselves in the way that we’re talking to ourselves, we’re really mean to ourselves, we create a ton of shame. And ultimately, what does that lead to? Well, it leads to a lot of things that leads to nervous system dysfunction, it leads to a huge deficit in our self confidence. And we start living life incredibly small. So we don’t go after the things we want. All because we are a lot we’re giving our microphone to the wrong voice.
21:17
So of course, the solution to this is we have to learn how to befriend ourselves, we have to learn how to treat ourselves in a way that promotes growth and perseverance.
21:30
The fourth habit, I see getting in the way of so many people wanting to improve their health and their life is the habit of escaping your life. What this means is a couple things. Number one, a lot of us have kind of grown up with this belief that we’re supposed to feel good all the time. Or life is somehow supposed to be easy all the time. Because someone else out there is making it look easy. And ultimately, what that does is we start seeking things that make us feel good all the time.
22:08
But the truth is, life isn’t about feeling good all the time, life is about experiencing the full spectrum of emotion. And if we’re, if we’re constantly reaching, for this utopia of feeling good all the time, we end up doing a lot of things that ultimately deplete our health. So we’re always eating things that tastes good, we’re drinking things to reduce our stress, right. And because we just like the buzz that it gives us after a hard day of work, we’re shopping, convincing ourselves that buying something that we don’t really need is going to make us feel better. So we kind of get in the habit of reaching for things outside of ourselves, that aren’t really serving the level of health or the level of life that we truly crave.
23:00
But the habit of escaping your life also looks like anytime we feel bad, we distract ourselves by doing something that feels better. And a lot of those same things come into play, right? The food, the alcohol, the shopping, the social media, the the, you know spending money, Netflix saying. And here’s what’s interesting is those things distract us in the moment. And they feel better in the moment. But ultimately, the initial problem is still there. And we’re feeling worse down the road because of that behavior that we engaged with to distract ourselves.
23:48
So a lot of you’ve heard me talk about this as buffering. And buffering is definitely a big conversation. We talk a lot about it inside the communities that I have created. And we will definitely be talking about it inside The Consistency Code Crash Course. And the consequence of escaping your life all the time is is big, you ultimately miss your life. You’re not really in your life, because you’re always looking for ways to escape your life. You also can’t improve your life, when you’re constantly trying to escape it. Right, we have to actually be able to face our life full on, build our capacity for feeling emotion, so we can move our life to higher ground.
24:34
The fifth and final habit that I just want to mention is the habit of distraction. And distraction comes in many, many forms. It comes in the form of living in a modern day culture that presents you with so much opportunity. There’s so much opportunity to get distracted. Right?
24:55
So we start down a pathway of behavior change, and then we read something or We see something and we convinced ourselves that we need something else. So we don’t stay the course with anything for very long, because we’re constantly bouncing around.
25:11
And I would say that this kind of goes back to that novelty concept to, of always feeling like we need something new and exciting to keep ourselves motivated. And that can get very distracting to the point that you’re never really making any kind of meaningful progress, then we have distraction in the form of curveballs, you make a commitment to change some kind of behavior in your life. And then something happens that kind of throws you off your game, you get sick, there’s a death in the family, you make a move, you start a new job, it looks like a lot of different things. But absolutely, curveballs can be a big distractor.
25:51
For a lot of people, we get distracted by other people’s opinions. We get distracted by comparing ourselves to other people’s lives. And of course, we get distracted by technology. Because again, modern day society, it’s everywhere. All the pings and dings and opportunity to be engaged in tech can really take time away from the things that we say matter most.
26:18
So consequences of always being distracted, which I’m a big believer that most of us are like this is this is something that we talked about repeatedly inside my community, because there’s just so much opportunity in life to get distracted from the things you said were important to you. And the consequences are, we never get anywhere, we again have a ton of integrity pain, which again, is that mental and emotional pain of not having your desires and your actions lining up. And we also start telling ourselves a lot of stories about ourselves, when we’re not getting anywhere. We tell ourselves like I suck, I’m just lazy. I’m just not a person who can whatever fill in the blank. And none of that’s true. It’s simply that you’re always getting distracted, so you aren’t staying consistent.
27:14
All of that can be solved. So the solution to always being distracted, is developing practices to recommit and refocus daily, which I find are missing from the lives of a lot of the clients that I work with. So we are going to cover all of this inside The Consistency Code Crash Course.
27:32
Again, just to kind of repeat like these five habits that we talked about today, we talked about the habit of self neglect, the habit of poor planning, the habit of bullying yourself, the habit of escaping your life, and the habit of distraction, these things, if we can resolve these habits, life gets really big and really incredible.
27:57
So The Consistency Code Crash Course starts on Monday, October 24, every day at 8:30am, I will be teaching a new piece of The Consistency Code framework and giving you very clear action steps for how to start applying it. And if you can’t be there, no worries, we’ve created a really special course page for people who don’t necessarily want to participate inside of a Facebook community.
28:22
And I just want to remind you that this really is the most it’s a great beginner spot. And it’s also the most inexpensive way to experience working with me, we’re charging 29 bucks for five days of training. So I promise you a big over deliver and you will feel like you definitely get your money’s worth. And most importantly, the framework that I teach you will be a really remarkable tool that you can apply for the rest of your freakin life to help you stay in alignment with the things that you say are important to you. So again, you can register by going to graceandgrit.com/crashcourse.
29:05
And next week we are airing episode 300 the Podcast so we are approaching our 300th episode we have some special things in store. So I hope I will see you again next week and I also hope I’ll see you in The Consistency Code Crash Course.
29:19
Alright my friends take care.
29:27
Thank you for listening to the Grace & 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.
