Ep #32: Accepting the Mess

You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women podcast with Shannan Christiansen, episode number 32.

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, loves. Welcome back to the show today. I am super-excited for today’s show. I can’t believe we’re on episode number 32. I am so proud of this show. I’m so grateful to all of you ladies who inspire me. And, of course, for Pavel and Angela, who produce the show.

So, in today’s show, I want to talk about this one thought. And the thought is, “Things should be different.” And how it keeps us stuck. But, of course, before we get into the show, I want to give a listener shoutout to Diane M.

She wrote, “I have been looking for the word of how I’ve been feeling. You nailed it; heavy. I’ve had a heavy heart and mind. Thank you so much for this podcast. It’s just what I needed. Thank you, Shannan…” with a little heart.

Well, thank you so much, Diane. I love these reviews. I love that you ladies take the time to leave a review. So, if you haven’t, please do so and maybe you’ll hear your name on the show.

Oh, my ladies, I am going to share a story. So, I was on a video conference with my team. And in the middle of the meeting, I smelled bacon. And I told my team, “I think I smell bacon.” And it’s so weird and strange because I don’t have bacon in my house. And I knew my husband was still sleeping.

And then, a few minutes later, I started to hear a popping sound. I was trying to have this meeting but I kept smelling bacon and now there was this popping sound. So, I told my team, “Hold on.” And then, loves, I walked into the kitchen. Oh, my goodness, I walked into a mess.

So, let me back up. About 40 minutes earlier, I had a few minutes in between conference calls and I decided to boil some eggs. So, I put the eggs in the pan, turned it on a high heat, and went back into my office. And, loves, I forgot.

So, when I walked into my kitchen, the eggs had exploded, like little egg bombs all over my kitchen, all over my cabinets, my walls, my gas stove, my hood, the floor. There were little pieces of eggs and shells and burnt little pieces all over the place.

And then, as I walked in the kitchen, the fire alarm started going off. It was a little crazy. And the fire alarms did stop and my husband and I, we cleaned up the mess.

As I was cleaning up the mess, I was thinking about how, lately, I have felt kind of messy. Like, my feelings are all over the place. I go between, “Everything is okay, everything’s going to be okay,” to, “What if nothing will feel normal again.”

As humans, we ebb and flow between feeling messy to feeling good. And, loves, we resist the mess. We resist the negative emotion. We believe that something is wrong with us, something is wrong with the mess. We think things should be different; that our weight should be different, that our current situation should be different, that we should feel differently, that we should be happy, that what is happening in our country with the virus, that it should be different, that our husbands should be different, that our relationships should be different.

I could go on and on and on. We don’t want to deal with the mess, our negative feelings, and we for sure do not want to accept the mess.

When we resist what is, what is happening right now, we get stuck. We resist emotion. We push it down. And then, my loves, we eat. We carry extra weight on our bodies because we keep trying to push down the mess, also known as negative emotion.

When I walked in and I saw egg literally all over my kitchen, I had a moment of shock, a moment of, OMG. And then, I felt irritated as the fire alarms were going off. But I decided to feel the irritation all the way through, and then, I changed the thought to, “I guess I’m not going to have tuna salad today.”

And then I laughed. I literally laughed out loud. I accepted what had happened and I went into solution mode, opening all our doors, cleaning the mess, and next time, I’m going to set a timer.

I know that it is such a simple, a little bit exaggerated example. But I wanted to show you that we can process emotion. We can accept the mess and then move on.

If I would have been beating myself up for forgetting, I would have resisted the mess. I would have wasted time and energy resisting what was. There was nothing I could have done to change what had happened. It happened.

So, I just decided to feel the emotion and move on. We spend so much time looking backwards, beating ourselves up because we thought things should have been different. It sabotages our success and it keeps us stuck. It keeps us from losing weight.

The thought that things should be different, it shows up in many different forms, from weight, to relationships, to money, to children, to what’s happening in our country. We spend so much mind energy spinning on how it should be different without accepting how it is right now.

When I decided to stop dieting, I had to learn that nothing should be different. It just is. That I could accept the mess was always going to be there, that negative emotion was just part of this beautiful human experience.

When I accept where I am, when I take full ownership and accountability, when I’m in the moment, I choose better things for myself. I find that I’m not expecting that everything is perfect, rainbows, and daisies. I welcome the mess.

We are humans. We are messy, beautiful, amazing humans. So, what if we didn’t resist the mess? What if we knew that it was just part of it? What if the mess was the whole point; the reason? What if the mess was there to teach us, to guide us, to help us grow?

I now know, loves, that I need to set a timer when I boil eggs. Lesson number 2022. When we resist the mess, we stay stuck. We think things should be different than they are. “How do I know it was supposed to happen this way? Because it did.” It’s a quote from one of my favorites; Byron Katie.

So, here are some transformational questions. What thoughts or beliefs do you have around something being different than how it is? How is this thought keeping you stuck? What mess, AKA negative emotions, have you been resisting lately? And how is the thought that, “Things should be different,” keeping you from losing weight?

So good, my loves. Okay, loves, bye for now and tune in next week. Make sure that you subscribe so I’m just right in wherever you listen to podcasts every Wednesday morning. Alright, bye for now, loves.

If you love this work and you want to go deeper, take my free course. You can learn more about it at bflycoaching.com/free-course. Bye for now, loves.

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 over to bflycoaching.com. That’s B – F – L – Y coaching dot com. See you next week!