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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 and Grit Podcast. This is your host, Courtney Townley. Now if you have ever spent an ounce of time researching topics like how to change your habits, you have likely bumped up against the book Atomic Habits by James clear. And I’m really excited to tell you that Grace & Grit is hosting its very first book club called Study It w/ Grace and Grit and Atomic Habits is going to be the very first book that we study. Now Claire Schulz Bergman, an avid athlete, wellness professional and therapist will be facilitating this amazing book club. So I’ve invited her here today onto the Grace & Grit show, to have a conversation about her personal journey with behavior change, what inspired her to kind of spearhead this book club, and we’re even going to talk about some of the key principles from the book that she will be diving into with book club participants.
Courtney Townley 1:22
Now regardless, if you’re interested in the book club or not, this Podcast is one you’re not going to want to miss. Because there are going to be so many great reminders and insights in here. So stay tuned. And if you are interested in the book club, all you have to do to get registered is head on over to graceandgrit.com/bookclub. Once again, graceandgrit.com/bookclub. So Claire, thanks for joining me today.
Claire Schulz Bergman 1:50
Hi, Courtney.
Courtney Townley 1:51
Hi. Yeah, so this is exciting. I’m so I’m so happy that you kind of threw this idea towards me. And it just completely resonated. And I think it’s such a great first book to study. But before we get into the book, and before we even get into why you are interested in hosting this club. Let’s talk a little bit about you.
Courtney Townley 2:11
And I do want to tell listeners, this is not the first time you’ve been here. You had been on the Grace and Grit Podcast before we did an episode it was episode 304. And it was titled A Woman of Grace & Grit: Claire Schulz Bergman and we talked a lot about your experience as a client and inside of the Rumble & Rise community. But there’s a lot of new listeners, no doubt. So let’s just give them the lowdown on who you are and what you’re up to in the world right now.
Claire Schulz Bergman 2:36
All right, so I am a member of the Rumble & Rise community. I love this community. I think that it is one of the things that has absolutely gone right for me in 2022 when I found you. So that said that’s the first thing about me as being a member. I am a therapist, I’ve been in the mental health field for 20 plus years, I’ve been in the fitness industry doing group exercise classes, yoga, pilates, cycling, everything, Kickboxing.Everything.
Courtney Townley 3:12
You’ve worn a lot of hats.
Claire Schulz Bergman 3:13
For the last 20 something years. I’m an avid reader, and I like to connect with people. So that’s kind of what got me thinking about this idea.
Courtney Townley 3:23
I love it. It’s so good. And so you joined Rumble & Rise, why? Let’s just remind listeners why you joined in the first place.
Claire Schulz Bergman 3:30
So I had finished so I’m, as you said in the very beginning, I’m a I’m an endurance athlete, and I had just finished shortly before I found you. I had finished to Wisconsin Ironman, and I was looking for something else. Like what’s next? I hit my goal. And I was looking for what’s next? Yeah. And so tell me what the question was, again, knowing
Courtney Townley 3:55
Why you joined Rumble & Rise in the first place. Like what brought you into the community?
Claire Schulz Bergman 3:58
Yeah. So um, so I think it’s just came through you through personal coaching. Yeah. But then I also really started to get a lot out of connecting with the women on the coaching calls. And I like to show up to as many calls as I can because it’s, I learned something new, and I feel connected with women from all over all over the place. Yeah. So
Courtney Townley 4:21
yeah. And let me just say to listeners who may not be aware of what Rumble & Rise even is it’s our private community. It’s Grace and Grit’s private community, where we lean into behavior change, but we do it in a way that is very counter to what traditional culture is pushing in that we really promote self-leadership So you are the one deciding what behavior change you’re leaning into. And then I offer a lot of education and support to help you move in that direction with more grace and ease. So just in case anybody was hearing that that sort of phrase and had no idea what we were speaking to. There you have it. So atomic habits Why did you decide that this might be a great first book to offer? Grace? & Grit, the Grace & Grit community? Why start here?
Claire Schulz Bergman 5:09
Yeah. Well, I mean, I think there’s a few different reasons. One being that this whole community helps us think about who we want to be and how we want to show up in this world. And that’s the sort of underlying premise of this book is, how do you want to identify? Who do you want to show up as? Yeah, and then what behaviors allow? What behaviors would a person like this do? What habits would they do? And so it feels like a building block for showing up as the person that you want to be in your life? Yeah. And it feels really aligned with this community. Because it’s just, I mean, even right now, with the whole power, power vision message, that is, when I when I am standing in my power, when I feel the best, who am I? And so this book allows us and I think this book club is gonna allow us to consider who who that is and what that is. Yeah. And then what behaviors lead us to that best version of ourselves.
Courtney Townley 6:18
I love it. Yeah. And so I think it’s such an important point, because a lot of people move through their life thinking that identity is a very immobile thing, right? It’s just the way we are, it’s the way we came into the world. And that’s not true. It’s what we have practiced in our lifetime, that becomes our identity, from our thoughts, to our emotions, to our behaviors, and all of that can be changed. And so I think there’s such a message of hope in this book, that it really does offer us this opportunity to really decide maybe for the first time ever, who we really want to be in the world, and then start shifting some behavior, some habits in order to make that possible.
Claire Schulz Bergman 7:03
Right. And I work with this happened with me as well, you asked previously, what brought me to you and to Rumble & Rise, and I had been, I had been doing my life, step by step. First thing, second thing, third thing, not really paying attention to what I was doing. But a lot of great things came out of that. And when I came to you, I was sort of in this place of I need to be more awake in my life, and I need to be a little bit more intentional about how I’m living. I was also sort of struggling with some health issues, ultimately diagnosed with ALS. And so now really having to change my identity into not being the endurance athlete who can make her body do whatever I really felt like doing with the training. But like the person who wants to show up to be as healthy as I can be. And I see this with women all the time is just overwhelm and moving forward and not really next thing, you know, their kids are out of the house, and they’re empty nesters. And then they’re like, well, now what, and this is, this is just more of a way to be really intentional.
Courtney Townley 8:13
Yeah, and I think you touched on something so important there because identity throughout our lifetime is shifting, it’s not a static thing. And yet we treat it like it’s static. And that I think can really harm our well being and so many ways. And so life presents us with a lot of unpredictable things like your diagnosis. And also we just may decide that along the way that there are certain things that no longer fit us. And there are certain identities that just no longer I always I always equate it to sort of wearing a sweater that you just want to take off because it it’s just so bad. It just no longer feels congruent with who you are. And I think the sooner we can respect that, and learn ways of actually shifting our identity with grace and ease. It just makes life so much more enjoyable. And so much more healthy. Really. Yeah. So let’s talk about a few ways that we get behavior change wrong, because there’s a lot of ways that we have really kind of screwed this up. And it’s honestly, I always say it’s it’s no fault of any of ours in that we’ve grown up in a culture that has pushed these really radical strategies and the certain mindsets around behavior change that have caused a lot of unnecessary suffering. So let’s just explore what some of these behavior change errors have been.
Claire Schulz Bergman 9:34
To me if the first thing I think of is January 1 in the gym, so I always so I’ve been a fitness instructor forever. And if anybody belongs to a gym or goes to a place, you know that in January, it’s packed. There’s nowhere to park in the parking lot. It’s packed by February. There’s more spaces in the parking lot. People aren’t showing up as much. And so I think I’m It’s one of the big things that is, maybe not the best way to start is to have a goal that you’re aiming toward, and it being too big. So it needs to be more like we just were talking about identity driven, and also starting smaller. And it’s something that is more able to follow through on your worst day, then be able to maintain on the days that you have the most energy and you know, can do 100 pushups as your goal for the new year, every day, maybe on the day that you don’t feel so great, you do one, and then you showed up for yourself. And then you can do more on the days that you have more energy,
Courtney Townley 10:39
yeah, compound over time. And I don’t even think like having a big goal is a bad idea. It where we get ourselves in trouble is when we don’t consider the smaller steps that we need to take to ease our way into it. Because what you so often see in the new year is taking a lot of people taking great big measures, you know, they haven’t been exercising, maybe years, and then they start a bootcamp six days a week, like and it overwhelms the brain, it really puts the body in a lot of unnecessary suffering. And when we don’t feel good, and when we are overwhelmed, we’re not going to sustain the behavior. Right? So absolutely, I think that, you know, the January 1, and also thinking that there’s a right time, that there’s a right time to start making a small step towards the direction that you want to go. I think that’s also a mistake that we make, what else? What else comes to mind?
Claire Schulz Bergman 11:31
What I’m thinking of right now, the thing that is coming to my brain is having that goal, because I agree with what you said is it’s it’s good to have a goal. But if we have the direction that we want to go in, and the system that we want to take to get to that direction, the little habits that we want to put together and to take to get there, the goals are going to take care of themselves. Yeah. So it’s so focusing on the race or the
Courtney Townley 12:00
or weight loss. That’s a big one. Right? Where Yeah,
Claire Schulz Bergman 12:03
yeah, yeah. That’s, once we have the system in place, that’ll take care of itself, we will get to where we want to go. As long as we’re doing things small, we make it so that it’s easy to show up for yourself and follow through.
Courtney Townley 12:20
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I use weight loss is it really like always a glaring example because I was actually having a conversation with someone about this earlier today, where she has spent decades of her life focusing on her body fat percentage, right? Like that has been sort of the, the gold standard of success for her. And she’s really trying to get out of that mentality, because she knows it isn’t serving her. And so we were talking about her vision for the future for herself, and what might that vision look like? And I did initially say, what does it look like and quickly corrected myself? Because I knew with her, it was more like, you know, what does it feel like? Let’s get out of the number on the scale and the level of leanness and really consider how do you want to feel in your body? And she was able to answer that question really easily. She wanted to feel powerful and resilient. And like she wasn’t limited by pain, that she could keep up with the activities. She wanted to be doing all of these things.
Courtney Townley 13:22
And once she was able to identify how she wanted to feel, we got really clear on Okay, well, what do you need to do in order to feel that way? And you and I both know that most women out there know a lot of things they could be doing. But the bigger truth is, they’re just not doing them with any degree of consistency. Right? And so she got clear on the steps she would need to take to feel that way in her body. And at the end, I was asking her, like, if you did these things on a regular basis, what do you think would happen to your body, and she’s like, my body would be in its happy place, like I would easily probably lose weight and maintain muscle mass by paying this level of respect. Right? So again, it just kind of circles back to this whole concept of being identity focused versus outcome focused, which I think you’ve really well illustrated so far.
Claire Schulz Bergman 14:15
And I also think that the what we have in our brain as far as this number on the scale, or this clothing size, or whatever it is, if we start to feel the way that she described feeling, yes, that doesn’t even it’s not even going to necessarily matter if she hits that number. If you absolutely,
Courtney Townley 14:35
it’s about how you feel. Yeah. Yeah, it’s so often we’re looking sort of on the outside when really all the magic happens on the inside and where we got that so reversed. I’m not really sure. But absolutely, focusing on how we want to feel is so powerful. So there’s really four laws that James clear introduces in this book, and you are going to dive into each one of these laws. As in the book club, and it’s my understanding that you’re going to give the participants some direction on how to actually apply these things to their own life. So in my mind, this isn’t really just a book club experience, it’s also you’re committing to sort of a process of behavior change by studying this book alongside of us. Right? So let’s just quickly like talk about what those four laws are.
Claire Schulz Bergman 15:23
Sure. So the first law is to make it obvious. So we want to know what we’re doing. We want to have a have our, it’d be obvious in our environment, and we need to be aware of what we’re doing and what we’re trying to move toward, in order to create the change that we want to have happen. Yes, the second is to make it attractive. So we want to be able to make it something that we actually want to do. So we’re gonna figure out ways to do that as we work our way through this book. The third is to make it easy. And that goes to speaks to the breaking it down into small little changes. We will talk about
Courtney Townley 16:07
that. Yeah, there’s fierce resistance to that, don’t they like breaking things down? Like give yourself permission to start small? It really is the key to success.
Claire Schulz Bergman 16:17
Yeah, yeah. And, and goes back to, you know, the the grand ideas that we want to have with new year’s resolution, right, and how why those don’t work. So make it small. And then the last one is make it satisfying. So we want to, we want to find something that we we feel like we can do, and it gives us some sort of a reward that we can celebrate after
Courtney Townley 16:39
love it. Yeah, but I think they’re really not the differential there is that the attractive is like, attaching behaviors that you don’t really consider to be fun or enjoyable with things that are right. And then the satisfying is really celebrating your wins, like acknowledge what you’re doing well, and I have done so many Podcast episodes on this because man, we are not good at celebrating our wins. It’s like we we want to change something and then we just want to move on to focusing on the things that still aren’t right in our life. And that just leaves us in a state of not feeling so great. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay.
Courtney Townley 17:13
So just to be clear, the Four Laws are, make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy and make it satisfying. And these are not sort of normal components of the behavior change process for a lot of people. And I think it’s why this book became so popular is because there is a level of knowing that people have when they read this book, like a level of knowing and a level of relief, a level of knowing that this is truth. It’s like a truth bomb through and through. It’s all the unsexy stuff about behavior change, but it’s the stuff that works. Right, right. And then relief, because there’s nothing wrong with you. I always tell women, there’s nothing wrong with you that you have struggled to make change in your life, but likely where there is something wrong is in the strategy that you’ve been using to try to create change in your life.
Claire Schulz Bergman 18:07
Right. Yeah. Yeah. James clear says it’s not the goal that we’re going for. It’s the systems that we’re going absolutely. Oh, that. I think that’s like, when are we taught that? Yep. And then we read this book, and we see this four step laws of how it goes. And we go, yeah, right. Yeah, that’s how it is. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Courtney Townley 18:29
Definitely. So
Claire Schulz Bergman 18:31
yeah, so the book club will spend four weeks breaking down those different laws. And then we’ll take our ideas and talk to each other talk to hear a little bit more about thinking about it in a different way, and then putting it into our life. Yeah, so one of my things that I was thinking at the beginning is, let’s think of one thing that maybe we want to work toward, definitely whatever that is, and start with that and use that throughout the whole four week process, and then hopefully be in a better place with it at the end.
Courtney Townley 19:02
Yeah. Well, I love this so much. Because I feel like the whole premise of a book club is to hold yourself accountable to actually reading the book and thinking about it like that is the premise. And this book club is just taking it a step further, because specifically of the subject of the book, which is habit change, which is what we’re all about here at Grace & Grit. And so not only are you holding yourself accountable to reading a book about habit change, but you’re actually committing to implementing a process of changing something you want to change in your life over this four week period. Right. So I just think it’s such an awesome gateway. I think it’s such a reasonable price point. We’re charging $49 for four weeks, which is really inexpensive for getting number one a community but also a level of accountability and support to take you through these Four Laws and sort of this system that you can use over and over again in your life. Is there anything else you want? people to know about the book club.
Claire Schulz Bergman 20:02
Yeah, one, one thing that I’ve, I’ve been mentioning that I had this idea to some people that I know and they have people love this book, people love this book, people have read this book. So if you’re out there listening to this, and you have read this book, you can read it again, you can join us, you can read it again with this group, because there’s that bit of accountability, because there’s that, incorporating it into your life instead of just reading the book and putting it on the shelf, doing the things that gather us information, but don’t really change us.
Courtney Townley 20:38
Yeah, and we talk a lot about that here, don’t we? Yeah, the difference between sort of this passive action of just reading a book, versus massive action, which is taking what you learn in the book, and really putting rubber to the road, really implementing those strategies into your life. And I think that’s really what differentiates this book club from a lot of other clubs out there. And I love what you just said, because I don’t know how many times I’ve read atomic habits, like I probably should have a lot of it memorized by now. But I always learned something new, like you cannot revisit that content enough times, because you’re always gonna see it in a new way, depending on where you are in your life. And you’re always going to take something different away from it. So it’s such a good point. Yeah, yeah.
Courtney Townley 21:19
All right, my friend. Well, I am super excited about this for listeners. Once again, if you’d like to join the book club, the first meeting is on April 12. So you don’t have a ton of time to register. But you can head up, head on over to graceandgrit.com/bookclub. And you once you register, you will get an email from us that gives you all the details on what to look for in your inbox when the first meeting is the link to the first meeting and all the goods so yeah, so I’m so glad you propose this idea. I know it’s gonna be awesome. And thanks for being here today, Claire,
Claire Schulz Bergman 21:53
Of course. Thanks, Courtney.
Courtney Townley 22:01
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.
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