You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women Podcast with Shannan Christensen, episode number 167. Welcome to Weight Loss for Successful Women, a podcast for women who are ready to break the diet cycle and end their struggle with Wait for good. Here’s your host, fortune 100 executive and certified life coach, Shannan Christensen. Woo, Ladies. Hello, love.

So happy back with you today. Today I wanna share what I’ve learned from a book that I have read called The Gap and the Gain. It’s written by Dr. Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan, and I loved it. You know, I love learning ladies, and I love to, sometimes even when I’m learning, it’s just reinforcement of things that I might know or were taught.

But this is why I love learning from different people and different authors and different business experts and life coaches and all the different things, because as I learn, you know, they always teach it in a little different way or give different examples, which I absolutely love. So I am getting excited. You know, it’s December, I know, I can’t even believe it,

ladies. We always say that, right? But here it is. Here we go. 2023 is almost here and getting ready for Christmas, and I’m 98% done with my Christmas planning and shopping. So I feel pretty excited. And this week my leadership team and I are having an in-person meeting here in Phoenix on Friday and Saturday. We’re just so excited for all of the amazing things that are going to happen in 2023 and transform Boss weight loss.

And you know, we really are gonna look at our member experience from the moment they become members through their journey and our client experience, and just really look to enhance what we’re already doing. You know, I love making things easier, simpler, and then also fun and exciting. I like to blow my lady’s minds. I do love to overdeliver. I for sure do.

So that is this weekend. I cannot wait. And on top of it, I’m going to Colorado. I know I’m leaving actually in a couple hours. The weather’s not too bad. I’m not even gonna complain. I mean, it will be cold, but nothing that I can handle, for sure. So let’s get into today’s show. I read this book and well,

I’m just gonna say we are gonna do it. We’re gonna do this book as a book club in Transform Boss next year. I love this book because over time I have watched myself, as I’ve learned, as I’ve had more success, become more focused on the gain, and it really has led to amazing success. When I get into my head and I start puddling around and I start focusing on my challenges,

my failures, then I mostly either do nothing, disconnect, or I start to sabotage and go backwards. So here are three lessons that I learned from the Gap in the game. So the first thing is this quote, I’m gonna read a quote from Dan Sullivan. The way to measure your progress is backward against where you started, not against your ideal.

See, we all have this goal that we’re trying to attain, but we keep moving the goal post. Think about that for a moment. Think about how many goals, whether it’s weight loss goals, financial goals, career goals, relationship goals. We set these goals, but we keep moving the goal post. We start to achieve it, and then we move the goal post.

We start to compare ourselves with other folks. We’re not thin enough, we’re not rich enough, we’re not educated enough. Our career is not enough. You know, we’re not good enough mothers or wives. We keep moving the goal post. We are focused on this external reference point that we measure our success with. I think about this with weight loss,

how many times I would lose weight, but it still was not good enough. I had this number, this number in my head that until I reached it, I was not good enough. Not only was the weight, but I then related it back to myself and how I felt about myself. Even though I was making progress, even though I was losing weight,

even though I was feeling good, I still had these sabotaging thoughts that it wasn’t good enough. I did not work out enough. I did not eat good enough. You know, I was not small enough. And really what it did was just keep me on the diet rollercoaster. I was not celebrating my progress, how far I had come. I wasn’t celebrating the new habits that I was creating.

I was just thinking that I needed to hit this goal, and I didn’t celebrate the journey along the way. And the second thing that I learned was all about the gap and how the gap impacted my success. Here’s another quote from Dan Sullivan. Your future growth and progress are now based in your understanding about the difference between the two ways you measure yourself against an ideal,

which puts you in what I call the gap and against your starting point, which puts you in your gain, appreciating all that you have accomplished. Ladies, the gap is consistently measuring yourself against this ideal. So until you reach it, it’s not good enough. Even though you’re making progress. This leads to frustration, overwhelm in weight loss. You don’t love the process.

You don’t do it in a way that you can always do it. You tell yourself things like, I can just restrict for six months. Then once I reach my goal, I’ll be normal. I’ll eat normal. But then you lose some weight, it comes and you’re still puddling. You’re still thought looping. You don’t enjoy the process. You’ve been restricting.

You haven’t learned how to lose weight in a way, eating, enjoying your favorite foods, living your life. And you have this thought it’s not good enough because you’re moving the goal post. And so you start gaining it back. But the gain is looking backwards to measure your success from where you started and appreciating the progress you have made. In the book,

Dr. Benjamin Hardy, he tells this story of a person who weighed over 400 pounds. She’s like an Instagram person, and she weighed over 400 pounds and she lost 240 pounds. But of course, you know, social media, she had haters. She had folks saying she was not thin enough, she had loose skin. And what she realized is that she had to focus on what success meant to her and look at the progress she made.

Because if she didn’t, then the 240 pounds that she had lost, that she had taken off her body would not have been good enough. I just want you to think about that for a moment. She lost over half of her body size, and it still would not have been good enough if she did not change the way that she thought. I mean,

crazy, right? When we compare ourselves to others, it will never be good enough. But when you focus on the process, not the external ideal, not just one data point, you start to find your success and then you compound it. Success is like compound interest over time. As you build on it and you focus on the successes that you have,

it starts compounding. And then you start feeling better. You start feeling happier. My love. What you focus on is what you will do. I want you to hear that. What you focus on is what you will do, what you think will become your results. So if you focus on the gap, what you have not accomplished, the challenges you’re having,

then that is what you’ll get. If you focus on the gain, what you have achieved, the success that you are having, what is working, then you will get more of that. And the third thing is that living in the gain can transform everything and always measure backwards. Here’s a quote from Dr. Benjamin Hardy. The gain is the antidote. The gain creates immediate happiness.

The gain connects you to yourself and your own progress. The gain transforms everything. The gain gives you power over the direction in your life. The gain gets you out of the gap. We live in a goal orientated society where tons of pressure to be perfect to live this perfect life that doesn’t exist. I love goals, but I really think of them really as just guidepost.

I teach ladies and transform boss how to set impossible goals, but it’s never about the goal. It’s on who they are becoming the next version of themselves. It’s about the process. It’s about focusing on their successes. It’s not about the goal. And in some arbitrary timeframe they set, we often overestimate what we can do in a short period of time and underestimate what we can do in a long period of time.

I learned this from one of my coaches, and it’s so true. We think in, you know, three months we can lose a hundred pounds, but we don’t think in five years what we can do. And what happens is we set unrealistic short-term goals, and then we expect to change everything overnight. When you measure yourself by how far you’ve come,

what successes you’re having, what parts of the process is working, you have more success. If you focus yourself on these short term unrealistic goals and just one data point, you have more challenges, more failures. One more piece of this is how we look at the past. For many of us, we’ve looked at the past as a way to beat ourselves up for challenges or mistakes that we’ve made.

But when you use the past to celebrate how far you’ve come, how you are such a boss, how you have gained wisdom, experience that you’ve overcome, pain, suffering, loss, and you’re still here doing the work, what if you focused on what you’re doing, right? What is working, what successes you are having? What if you lived in the game?

I love this book and there’s so much more. If you’re in Transform Boss, don’t worry. We’re gonna do this book club in the first half of next year. And if you wanna take this work deeper than take my free course, go to free boss course.com. Ooh, I can’t wait. And next week I’m gonna share three things that have helped me have success.

All right, my love. Bye for now. Thank you for listening to this episode of Weight Loss for Successful Women. If you love what you heard today and wanna learn more, come on over to bflycoaching.com. That’s BFLYcoaching.com. See you next week.