You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women podcast with Shannan Christiansen episode number 126. Welcome to Weight Loss for Successful Women, a podcast for women who are ready to break the diet cycle and end their struggle with weight for good. Here’s your host, fortune 100 executive, and certified life coach, Shannan Christiansen.

Hello love. So happy to be back with you. I have been thinking about this a lot. How we talk to ourselves. We know that we have some negative talk, but I’m not sure that we fully understand what an impact that it has on us, and how all of these thoughts that are guiding our behavior are living in our habit brain. Hmm. But first, can you believe we are almost in March? Do you feel like time is just going so fast? Oh, me too. I am getting super excited because we’re going to this beautiful, secluded cabin for the weekend, and I cannot wait to read, be by the fire and just relax with Paul. We have been going pretty hard this year and it’s always good to get away, especially with my love.

So in today’s show, I want to talk about how I lived in my habit brain, my automatic brain, for most of my life. We all do. It’s how we’re wired. Our brain likes to conserve energy, likes to make everything automatic. You don’t have to think about breathing, thinking. I mean, you don’t really have to think about a lot of things. It just seems to happen automatically. Even sometimes when we’re standing in pantry and we’re eating off our plan, like we’re like, Hey, how did that happen?

See our brain, our Lizzie, is always thinking about our survival and conserving energy. It’s a really important part of what our brain is supposed to do, right? Survival is its number one priority. Our brain is also always seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Our brain likes to be efficient and feel good, but that’s not the human experience. So this is where the rubber meets the road. And this is where we feel like we are in the river of misery, as one of my teachers likes to call it. We have this old thought or belief, like I can’t lose weight. It’s stored in our habit brain. And then, you know, we’re doing this work, we’re in Transform Boss, we’re taking the free course, and we start to practice new thoughts like I’m learning to lose weight.

Now this is where we’re using our thinking brain, our prefrontal cortex, but it feels hard to practice the new thought. It feels hard to believe something different, because we need more energy for our thinking brain. And we don’t fully believe it because of all the other thoughts in our habit brain. There is a technical term, cognitive dissonance, that’s really what that is. But I like one of my teacher’s terms, the river of misery. Our brain is so complex. So we have this subconscious, our habit automatic part of our brain, this part of our brain that has all our thoughts, memories, lots of data. It filters out information that it deems not useful.

This is important because we have these thoughts and beliefs that are sabotaging our success, but they could be hidden in our habit brain. It’s not that we can’t access them, it’s just they fly through so fast, we’re not even aware. You can walk past a mirror and a thought comes in. Maybe it’s something like, Ooh, you’re looking fat today. Oh, you might not even be aware of it, but the thought is there. This is important because we have this negative thinking and self-talk, and it’s affecting our feelings, the way we think about ourselves, and ultimately the things we do and the outcomes we have.

How we talk to ourselves, what we believe about ourselves causes our results, our outcomes. If we believe we will never lose weight, well that is the outcome we will have. And these thoughts are just sitting there on automatic repeat. I always think of this as like a jukebox and just old records that we just play over and over again. And so we think this thought, I can’t lose weight or weight loss is hard. And then we feel frustrated. And then when we feel frustrated or we feel disappointed or we feel confused or overwhelmed, we don’t take action that serves our best self. We disconnect, we eat off plan, we overeat. And then our outcome is we either stay at the same weight or we gain weight. And we do this over and over again.

So what are you to do? Here are four transformational questions and actions to take. Number one, start to come into awareness. The easiest way is to ask yourself a question like, what am I thinking right now? It is crazy how your brain will answer you. And you might be surprised about what it has to say. This is why I love coaching. Every time my coach asks me a question, I’m always surprised what my brain has to say. Sometimes I’m like whoa, I’m thinking that? So you can do a little self-coaching and bring yourself into awareness by asking yourself, what am I thinking right now?

Number two, decide on purpose what you want to think, what you want to believe. Then number three, practice that new thought throughout the day. You can put it on your phone as a reminder, put post-it notes, you know, it’s just allowing yourself to come into your thinking brain throughout the day and practice that new thought or belief. Now a tip, make sure that the belief is something that you can believe. This is not about believing rainbows and daisies. This is about practicing a thought that is one better than your old thought. So if your old thought was something around, I can’t lose weight, maybe a one better thought is just I’m learning the process of losing weight. And again, that I am and learning, it really is a thought that mostly you can believe. So if you can mostly believe it, it’s a really good thought to practice.

And number four, know that you will be in the river of misery. It does take more energy at first, but every time you practice the new thought, the new belief, you move one step closer to becoming part of your habit brain. You are creating a new belief system to get new outcomes.

And if you need help and want to take this work deeper then take my free course at freebosscourse.com. I will teach you how to get started with this work. So good. Bye for now.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Weight Loss for Successful Women. If you love what you heard today and want to learn more, come on over to bflycoaching.com. See you next week.