You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women Podcast with Shannan Christensen, episode number 198. 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 back with you.

Oh my goodness, we are in the middle of July. What is happening? I know it’s right. I hope all of you are having a beautiful summer. I know many areas of the country are so beautiful, so I hope you’re just having a fabulous, fabulous summer. You know, this episode today really was sparked because I’ve been reading Dan Sullivan.

He writes business books, and so I’ve been reading kind of all of his books. He has a lot of books, and one of them is about being bothered. And I just love this book because I think about our lives and we have this human experience. And I remember growing up and just thinking like we were supposed to be happy and joyful all the time.

You know, those people. And then I realized for me, a lot of times, that’s not how my life was. I felt a lot of stress or frustration or just the things that happen in life. Relationship, loss, financial stress, pressure, career stress, career pressure, right? Taking care of folks, right? Taking care of our moms when they passed.

Our lives are just full with, you know, transition. And for me, if I can just look at my whole life, I was socialized to believe that the purpose of life was to be happy. And I think it just had really kept me thinking that I was broken, that something was wrong with me. Hey, Shannan, your life is a mess.

I remember saying that to myself. No, my life was just a human life. You know? We think like everything has to be perfect. You know, my relationship, no, I mean, even today with Paul and I, we have an amazing relationship. We have worked, but there are still times where I’m sure he’s frustrated with me. I’m sure about it.

And there are times where I’m frustrated with him. That’s just life, right? And so, again, I say this because I do not believe the purpose of life is to be happy and to be joyful and positive all the time. No, I just, I want you to just sit with that for a bit, because when you think that you have to have this joyful,

happy life all the time, it can really keep you feeling like something is wrong with your life. But more importantly, you start to think something’s wrong with you. And I just wanna say that this is life. We have a lot of bothers. The world is ever changing as you get older, you know, our brain is really scared of change.

I find even as I get older and there’s change, I’m like, Ooh, you know, I’m probably less adaptive than I was when I was younger, right? I’m like, Ooh, this change, ugh, shoot, the world’s falling. You know, all the things, because there is so much going on. And when we have stress, when we have bothers,

when we have frustrations, what happens is we put ourselves last, we go into our automatic brain. So there’s the amygdala, which is our primitive brain. It’s the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn part of our brain. When there’s change a lot, you know, we start to feel a lot of like, whoa, frustration, a lot of fear.

That part of our brain goes into action. And then we go into our automatic brain, and our automatic is just all our old beliefs, thoughts, habits, all of those. And so when we have a lot of stress, you’re like, Shannan, I don’t know, I, I hear this from my clients sometimes. They’re like, Shannan, I’m just eating everything.

I was doing so good, right? And you’ve had some transition, you’ve had some stress, you got some bad news, you’re dealing with health problems, you’re dealing with family members, health, all that stress goes back into automatic mode. This is the thing, this is just life. We recently have been dealing with something with my husband and his health,

and the first week, cuz we had some things with doctor, it was just kind of, it felt messy, it felt overwhelming, it felt scary, it felt all the things. And my brain was like, wanted to just shut down. This is a very normal response. And that week, I probably ate a little more than I normally do.

I just didn’t make it mean that I was wrong or that I had done anything wrong. Once I started to realize like, oh, okay, Shannan, just take a deep breath. You can take care of yourself in this space because this thought really helped me. I want to share this with all of you because this thought really helped me. I thought to myself,

how can I care for myself during this so that I can show up and support him? I wanna be in my best mental, physical, you know, I wanna feel good so that I can help him. And it just really helped me start to stop when I had had enough start to really feel all the emotions, feel my feelings of it, because I wanted to also care for myself.

This is for any of you who have other things going on where you have to care for people or support people, and you have all of this transition maybe going on, I tell you, when you can come back to yourself and ask yourself, how can I care for myself? Because when I am caring for myself, when I am in my physical,

mental, emotional space is good, then I can show up better, not only for myself, but for the other humans. Again, if you’re anything like me for so long, I wanted things to be calm and perfect before I allowed myself to show up for myself. I know if this is you, I’m talking to you. If you keep putting yourself off because you’re like,

when things are perfect, when things calm down, when things, no, they’re never going to, I just, I hate to break the news to you. This is life. It’s full of ups and downs and all over. And it can be, you know, good things too that throw us off kilter because we start to get busy or we have a lot of plans,

or we have vacations. It can be good things too. This is any time where we tell ourselves that we’ll get to us later. I’m gonna get to me later. Because what happens is when you start creating the habit of pushing yourself off, you can do that for your life actually really many, many, many, many years. You can just keep kicking the can down the road.

Investing time, money, energy, work, effort into yourself pays the greatest dividends of your life. When you invest in your yourself and you then feel better and you can show up better. It’s amazing. It is amazing. And so when you start to have these thoughts that bothers and frustrations and stress, and I just want you to ground yourself in,

how can I care for myself today? How can I show up for myself today? One thing, when you start to migrate into this one thing, it’s amazing. I know I’ve shared this with my bosses. I can’t remember if I’ve shared this on the podcast, but I’ve been really thinking about how many hours we have in the week. I’ve always thought of that,

but I’ve been putting it in minutes. And so we have 168 hours in a week, 10,080 minutes. And so 1% of that is a hundred minutes. Are you worth 1% of your time? You’re like, Shannan, I know. 1%, 100 minutes a week. Just for you, working on your brain, working on simple things, right? I think about this,

all my Transform bosses, I’m talking to you. This is just like doing the work, focusing on one of the parts of the process. Maybe it’s coming to a coaching call, listening to a podcast episode, doing some of the coursework. 1% of your time, 1% is a hundred minutes. I love to remind myself of that so that when my brain is like,

this is too stressful of a time, too much is going on and you want to shut down, I tell myself, am I worth 1% of my time? And the answer is always yes, 1% of your time. So here’s my take about all the stress and all the bothers and all the things we have going on in this human life. Number one,

that is a human life. It is full. The purpose of a human life is not, in my opinion, to be happier, joyful. It is to live the human experience fully learning and growing and failing, and just living the human experience. Two, no matter what you have going on, ask yourself this simple question, how can I care for me today?

And number three, invest 1% of your time, your work, and your money in yourself. I know. So good. Ladies, next week we’re doing coach edition two part series. All the coaches I know, the Transform, Boss, weight loss coaches are coming on. They’re gonna share how to have success in weight loss, what they see with their clients.

They’re gonna give tips and share their stories on how to live your best life in a body that you love. Ooh, I think two part, I don’t know, maybe even three part cuz they’re so amazing. Ah, I know. So good. So I’m so excited. We’re coming up to the 200th episode of the podcast. So fun. So if you wanna take this work deeper,

check out Transform Boss. It’s my monthly membership program. This is where you learn how to lose weight and get off the diet rollercoaster for good based on coaching community and coursework, and learn more about it on jointransformboss.com and next week. Again, coaches, you don’t wanna miss those two episodes. These ladies are fabulous. Their stories, just even how they continue to grow.

Most of them have been on maybe even before they were coaches, but I tell you like the things that they just keep blowing their own minds. Oh my gosh. You know, like just upleveling their results. It’s amazing to watch and they’re gonna share how they do it and share some tips with you. I know it’s gonna be good. All right,

my loves. 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.