You are listening to the Weight Loss or Successful Women podcast with Shannan Christiansen episode number 128. 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. Today, we’re going to go into the past and how we can move forward from it. Ooh, I love this episode. But first I want to give a listener shout out, and this is to Jenn C Taylor. She wrote Shannan, I must thank you for not only the coursework that you’ve poured your heart and knowledge into, but also this incredible community of women. There’s freedom in being surrounded by a group of women that you know aren’t judging you, but instead welcome you with open arms, love, and want to see you succeed. It is true freedom to combine the work you teach along with this beautiful community of women. Thank you. Jenn, thank you so much.

I know, I love Transform Boss. It is just the best community of women. We have so many beautiful ladies and they’re so supportive and non-judgmental. Weight loss can be hard. We have a lot of diet trauma and doing it alone, it’s just the worst. I did it for so many years. I know my love, the community is amazing. So thank you so much Jenn, and all the ladies who take the time to write a review. I appreciate it so much. If you would take a few minutes and rate and review the show, I would so appreciate it.

So ladies, it’s been a little bit since I’ve recorded. I had batched a few episodes because we had a launch and challenge and I knew it was going to be a really busy time. And you know, we welcomed in a whole group of new Transform Bosses and it was amazing. I love the free challenges. They are so fun. We saw so many ladies come in and just experience this work for the first time.

I’ll never forget when I started to learn this work and realize that these old records, these old thoughts, these old beliefs, that is what was keeping me overweight. All the diet plans, all the food plans, none of that was ever going to solve it. And I tell you my love, it was really so eye opening for me. And so I love watching women come in and experience that too. You know, we’ve just been told over and over again, you know, follow this, calorie count, remove carbs, you know, all of these things. And then when we have a bad day, we don’t know what to do, or, you know, we feel like the food is calling our name in the pantry and we’re like, I don’t know, you know, and you overeat and then you keep overeating and then you beat yourself up.

And this work is really to lose weight for the last time is about allowing all of those old thoughts and beliefs without the resistance of them. And then learning to believe something different. Learning to believe that you can do it. And a few other brain hacks in there too. It was so fun. And this new group of Transform Bosses, they are amazing. We are having the best time. When you join Transform Boss Weight Loss, you come in and you go into kind of a three-week challenge and it just really brings you in and, you know, helps you start the course and get used to the community and lots of different things.

And I am just watching today. I was reading one of the challenge posts and it was about success, like post your success. And I cannot, these ladies are having so much success and I’m just so proud of them. So to all my new #newbosses, ladies, I’m so proud of you. I love all my bosses. They’re so amazing.

So the last few weeks have been full for sure, and after launch and you know, the challenge, Paul and I, we went up north to Sedona to a cabin. I have to tell you ladies, it was a little different than what I thought it was going to be. It was super cold. It actually had snowed the day before we got there. I knew up in Flagstaff, we get snow in Arizona, believe it or not, but in Sedona, I didn’t know that we would get that much snow. And there was a good amount of snow and it was very cold, and we were in a cabin and we had a fireplace and a small heater, but it was so cold.

And, you know, I love to hike and get out in nature. And we did a little bit of that, but again, it was just so cold. So we ended up actually coming home a day early because it was beautiful here down in the valley. And I really just wanted to spend some time in the sun and the warmth. And even though we had a great time up in Sedona and the cabin was beautiful and the people were great, I was okay to come home a day early and get back down here in the sun. So for all my ladies who are in the cold, I am wishing spring for all of you very, very, very soon.

 Today I am recording from my heart because I had another episode, I had planned for another episode, but I had really been struggling with this the last couple of days myself. And so I thought, oh, let’s talk about it on the podcast. I found myself, and my love, you have to really think if this ever happens to you, but wishing that I had done something different, and it was related to my business and this one thing I wish I had done differently.

I then started going down the path, you know the path, the path of if I would have done this different, if I would’ve done that different, you know, all of the mistakes I’ve made, I started just really what I like to call past puddling. I felt so much regret and shame. And I had this thought like, oh, you know, what am I doing? Who am I to do this business and be an entrepreneur? And I’m telling you, it was like, you know, a couple hours where I would just go in and out of these thoughts. I remember this when I was on my weight loss journey, having these similar thoughts about weight loss. I would go into my past and think about all the times I had failed and how it had always been my struggle.

And you know, just really what I like to call past puddling. I would just, you know, go into all of these old memories and beat myself up, again, thinking about if I had been smaller, if I was thin my life would’ve been different. And would it have been? I’m not sure, right? It, maybe some of the fabric of my life would have been a little different, but I wouldn’t change anything. Every part of my journey has really made me who I am today. So thinking about this and past puddling, it just really keeps us stuck because one, we can’t change anything about the past. Two, we don’t really know if anything would have been different or if it would have been a better different. You know, I always believe that life is 50/50.

Whether you know, like now my life is 50/50, when I was 250 pounds my life was 50/50. 50/50 is just part of the human experience. So I don’t think that my life would have been any different, meaning any happier. If I would have never had this struggle, I wouldn’t be here today. I wouldn’t get the honor and the privilege of helping women discover this process of losing weight for the last time. Discovering self-love.

I wouldn’t have done that for myself. I love this quote by Byron Katie. “When I argue with reality, I lose but only a hundred percent of the time.” The fact is my past, whether it’s in weight loss or in my business, it is reality. It’s what happened. I can’t change any of it. I can just learn from it. I can grow from it. I can decide now what I want to think about it. See, the past only lives in our minds, and my love, we are made up of a million experiences, beliefs, habits, thoughts. Not one thing, one event, one trauma, one painful experience, one mistake. Not one thing made us who we are.

We’re not our past mistakes or failures. They’re just part of our experience. We are a million things, good and bad. Coaching is about learning how to become aware of your old thoughts and beliefs and deciding what you want to think of them today. You can keep thinking whatever you want, but I like to decide what I think and believe. I found myself today doing a lot of reflection work, a lot of work around these old thoughts, past puddling thoughts that were coming. Because I wanted to allow the feeling, allow the feeling of shame, allow the feeling of regret, because I knew if I could allow myself to feel it, to cry, to release it, then I could move forward.

I could’ve kept thinking that I would never lose weight, that it would always be my struggle. I could’ve kept telling myself that it was never going to happen for me. I could have always gone back to my past to find evidence that I was never going to lose weight for the last time, and I could have done that. But what you think is what you become. So if I kept thinking that weight loss was always going to be my struggle and that I was never going to figure out, then that is what would have become. I would have still been 250 pounds, maybe even more.

But I decided that I wanted to believe something different. That it didn’t matter what I had done in the past. When I started on this weight loss journey to lose weight for the last time I had to one, meet myself where I was at. Two, I had to learn how to fail. I had to learn how to accept where I was, the reality of where I was. And then I had to learn how to take the next best action. When I made a mistake, when I had a failure, I just took the next best action. I didn’t make it mean anything had gone wrong.

You know, my loves, we just can’t change the past, only what we think of it. We can suffer. We can keep going through the pain of our past. Or we can decide what story we want to tell, what we can learn from it, so we can move forward. So we can decide that the past doesn’t define who we are today. It’s just the story. It’s the story that lives in our mind. It’s the million experiences who make us who we are today. My love, you are stronger than you believe. You are wiser than you know. You are more worthy than you can imagine, because you are everything. All of it. When you can allow the past to be there, decide what you’re going to think about it today, then you can move forward. When my mind wants to fill with all the puddling, with the doubt, the regret, the shame, I just allow it. I allow myself to feel bad, to cry and release the emotion. Then I move on to the next thought. I don’t have to argue with myself or make myself wrong. I just allow it and then move forward.

So here are the steps to start to decide what you want to think about your past so that it can serve you. First allow yourself to think about it, to feel the emotion of it. Feel the pain or the shame or regret, and just allow it to be in your body. Breathe through it. Then name how it feels in your body. Start asking yourself questions. How does shame feel in my body? How does my shoulders feel? How does my neck feel? Right? Go into your body and breathe through it. And then number three, decide what you want to believe about it now. Did you learn something from it? Did it help you grow? Are you just proud that you made it through to the other side? Decide on purpose what you want to think about it, the story that you want to tell in your own mind.

Your past is your past. You can’t change it. Only what you want to think about it now. You can choose to suffer. You can be the victim of it. You can past puddle. Or you can take your power back and decide what you want to believe about it.

So, the transformational questions are one, what do you past puddle in? Number two, how is it keeping you stuck today? And number three, what do you want to believe about it? Ooh, so good my love. And if you need help and you 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, how to start to change your thoughts and your feelings and those old past beliefs that are puddling around in your brain so that you can start your journey to lose weight for the very last time. All right, 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.