You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women Podcast with Shannan Christiansen, episode number 194. 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. Hello. So happy to back with you.

I just have to say this, we’re opening June 20th. I know, and we have a challenge. You can go to bflycoaching.com/me, it’ll pop up there for you , so bflycoaching.com/me and join the free challenge. But we’re opening, if you want to get into Transform Boss, you’re ready to get off the diet rollercoaster. You wanna do the work of changing your weight,

your body, like just really learning how to show up for yourself with a community of support and all kinds of fun things, and you want me to be your coach, come and join us. Put it on your calendar. You can go to bflycoaching.com or jointransformboss.com on June 20th. I know, I can’t wait. So ladies, we are approaching the 200th episode.

You know, I feel really proud of this podcast. You know, I know how many people in my community and Transform Boss found me this way and how it’s been so helpful. But we help women all over the world. Women that I, I don’t even get to meet who are taking this and changing their lives and weight, and I’m just so proud of it.

And so for our 200th episode, we number 1 99 and 200, the coaches, we’re gonna have Coach Edition, they’re gonna come join me, and we’re just gonna have a blast. And we’re gonna talk about support and give you success tips and just journey stories. And it’s just gonna be packed full of goodness. So you wanna come to that. And we’re also gonna give away a couple prize packages.

Really, it’s just a gift for rating or reviewing the show. And so you’ll be put into a drawing. So all you have to do is rate or review on iTunes, the show, and then just email support, support@bfly coaching.com. And the deadline to rate or review it is July 4th. I know I made it a really easy date. July 4th, independence Day.

So email support with just the name of your review so that we can find it so we can, you know, put you in the drawing. How fun. Right? So today’s episode, I love, I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I’ve been reading a book. You know, I read a lot of books. I don’t know, I,

I do read a lot of books. I’m reading about three of them right now, and I like to go in between them and take notes and see what actions I can take from them. I think I like to have a critical mind when I’m reading books, and I’ve been reading this book, and I’ve heard this a lot actually, about, you know,

you’re the average of the people you surround yourself with or the sum of the people you surround yourself with. And I don’t know, I don’t totally buy it, to be honest. And I’ll tell you why. I have all sorts of people I’m around from all different walks of life, income levels, cultures, all the things. And you know,

I don’t know, am I the average of them? I’m not sure. I don’t know exactly what that even means, right? But this is where I think it matters. It’s really starting to develop your own beliefs and thoughts about what you like. It’s not maybe taking on the other’s opinions or ideas, and it’s really having your own and you’re like,

Shannan, how does this like relate to weight loss? But I really think it does because you know, we’re surrounded in the information age. There’s information all the time. We have our family friends, we have people who we look up to, our friends family that are important to us, who we love. And you know, they might have opinions or ideas and those are theirs.

But there can be times where we start to take this on, like, oh, we should be doing something different. And we start to kind of compare ourselves. And so let’s just say you have a friend and this friend is doing 75 hard or keto, right? The new quick fixes, and maybe she’s having some success. So then what you do is you internalize it.

You start to take on her beliefs, her thinking, and you start to put pressure on yourself to do it that way, to do what she’s doing, even though maybe you’re doing something different or you’re doing this work of starting to change your beliefs and your mindset, and you’re learning how to do it in a way that you can always do it and you’re feeling successful,

but you start to feel this pressure because maybe it’s coming faster for her. Or maybe you just have old diet mentality and you think, oh, I should do it this way. But let me just tell you weight loss, the industry has 1% success rate. I mean, really, we just have to keep reminding ourselves of that. When I think of other people and that thought,

you’re the sum of it. I don’t think that you’re the sum of the people that you’re around, but I do think that you can be influenced by the people that you’re around. I mean, right? I mean, if you’ve ever raised kids, you’re like, maybe you don’t wanna hang around that person because you’re scared of their influence, right? But as adults,

we can be influenced too. We can be influenced by people that we’re around. This is why I love our community and Transform because you get to be around women who are learning and doing the same work that you’re doing, so you don’t feel so alone. I think about this too, on the other end of the spectrum, where maybe you have a friend,

a spouse, or a partner or a coworker, and they’re really like just overeating and they’re in a really, really hard spot in their life, and they’re kind of playing in the puddle, and they maybe have a lot of negative chatter going on. You just kinda find that when you’re around this person, like you’re like thinking that way too, and you start to have negative thoughts.

It’s very easy to do. I think, when it comes to other humans and their ideas and their beliefs, or maybe even what they’re going through, I think as a friend, as another human who loves all the humans, I think having my own beliefs and really deciding for myself what I want to think, what I want to feel and what I want to do,

it is really the only thing I have control over. If someone that I know maybe is going through a hard time, or I have a friend or a family member who’s really struggling, I know what I want for myself, and it’s not an or statement, and I can have compassion and empathy and love for them. I can be an ear that can listen or you know,

I can hug them without taking on the negative chatter. I think about this too, you know, like when someone’s complaining about, you know, someone else, or having negative chatter maybe about the world, you know, all the things, I just don’t like to get into the puddle of all that. I don’t control any of it. And so when,

even if someone’s complaining about someone else or whatever, I really try hard to listen to them. You know, I’ll listen to whatever you have to say, but I don’t have to take on those thoughts. I don’t have to take on those beliefs, and I don’t have to compare myself to think I should believe something different. I think as we get older,

we start really coming. I think it’s one of the beautiful things about aging, although I think all of it is to be honest, but is that we get to decide what we wanna think and what we wanna believe, and we get to decide what kind of human we want to be. I think about working on my brain and my mindset, and I like talking to people who are doing this work too.

This is why, you know, I say community is so important. I’ve done several episodes about community, but I wanted to give a different spin today because I think we can be influenced by other humans, by social media, by all of the information that we take in to believe that we’re less, to believe that we should do a quick fix. We start to feel time pressure of I need to get this weight off.

Or maybe even if it’s your doctor or someone, and again, listen to your doctors. I’m not telling you not to do that, but I’m just saying you, even when my doctor tells me something, I get to decide what to do and what to believe and what to think. And again, I’m not telling you not to listen to your doctors.

I just, I need to make that very clear. But I do love having my own mind, doing my own research and really deciding to believe what I want to believe and looking at others who inspire me, who I want to be influenced by. I have lots of people who inspire me in my Transform Boss community. There are ladies who inspire me every day who I am just like,

whoa. Like, I love how you’re learning, or how you’re doing, or how you’re showing up. I love how they’re so vulnerable and they share their challenges and their successes and all the things. And I love talking to people about this work. I think having a community and deciding what you want to believe and think, I tell my members this,

take what you can from me and then decide what you want to think. I don’t know everything either. I’m just learning myself through all the many years of my experience. I keep learning and growing and trying things. And so I think it’s just so important, so important to become the boss of your own life. To sit in that driver’s seat and just decide what you want to believe,

what you want to think. For a long time, I had this picture of this body that I thought I needed. I needed to look a certain way. I needed my body to be a certain way, a certain size, and all it kept me was gaining weight and being on the diet rollercoaster when I started to have more love and decided to like myself when I was 250 pounds,

when I was 220 pounds, when I was 200 pounds, when I started to decide to really enjoy myself, you know, as I was losing the weight, as I was deciding what weight worked for me, what body I liked, you know, ladies, lots of people could say lots of things about me, and I just don’t wanna take on those influences.

I want to decide which influences I wanna take on. I wanna decide which communities I wanna be a part of. Which influences and stuff do I wanna put in my brain, because I really like thinking differently. I like challenging myself to come with love. You know, I do a lot of work on myself, and I’ve been doing a lot of work around love,

and how can I love harder? How can I be a better boss, be a better wife, be a better mother, be a better teacher? Again, this comes with me deciding how I want to show up, who I want to be. And this does so much relate to weight loss, because who do you want to be in your weight loss journey?

Do you want to be the person who’s just quick fix after quick fix, feeling frustrated, or do you want to release the pressure and focus on the process and focus on one small change at a time, celebrating your wins, celebrating your successes? You get to decide, and I’m not saying, I mean, sometimes we all go to the negative chatter.

I mean, it’s part of our brains. It’s wired in there, but I like to then redirect my brain and say, oh, but this is what we believe now. This is what we think. Now. This is the thing. Working on your brain and your mindset. I think it’s everything I do. I think it’s like the best work.

I have a coach, a one-on-one coach, and I love her. I can see she does this work on her brain too, and I love doing this work with people who are doing this work because it helps me become the best version of myself. I love being in a community with all these beautiful ladies, Transform, Boss, ugh. I just love the ladies.

I wanna squeeze all of them and love them up. This is just too where I get ideas and also I get reminded of what I want to dream, what I want to think about, and I get to be inspired. So my take on finding friends is find community. Find a community of people who can inspire you, people who can talk about things that make you feel challenged,

maybe a little, but also are like, oh, yes, yes, this is what I wanna think. This is what I wanna believe. And then notice, decide what you wanna believe and think. You are boss. You get to decide. No one gets to decide what I believe. No one except me. And I tell you, for so long I had beliefs and thoughts of other humans,

and when I started to change what I wanted to think and what I wanted to believe and also what I wanted to believe about myself, I had lots of implanted views of what other people had told me, who I was, and all the things I get to decide what I want to believe and think. And number three, don’t buy into short term success.

Decide that you want whatever it is for yourself. You wanna lose weight, you want to have a different career, you want to Transform your life, relationships, whatever it is for you, be in it and know and lose the time pressure, which reminds me next week I’m gonna talk all about the pressure of time and how losing this one thing that I’m gonna teach you next week can really help you release the weight.

I know. So good. Alright, so if you wanna take this work deeper, June 20th, we open and I hope you come and join us. I can’t wait to be your coach. You can go to bflycoaching.com or jointransformboss.com, bflycoaching.com. You can go there, get into the challenge. The challenge also starts on June 20th.

We’re gonna have a blast in it. Come join us again, Transform Boss is based on coaching and community and coursework and a whole bunch of different things, so that whatever you need, it’s available to you. I know. So good. Alright my love. I’ll see you next week. 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.