Ep #57: What If I Fail Again?

You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women podcast with Shannan Christiansen, episode number 57.

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. I’m excited about today’s show. I love today’s topic and I can’t wait to dive deep in it with you. But first, I want to give a listener shout-out. This is where, every week, I read a review of the podcast and this week’s listener shout-out is to Dolan Lisa.

She wrote, “I have been on the diet roller coaster for pretty much my entire life. Shannan teaches so much more than weight loss. She teaches you that weight loss isn’t about dieting. It’s about changing your mindset. Her teachings are life-changing. Shannan is real and she cares about each one of her students. I know this journey will be for the rest of my life. I only wish I would have found her sooner. Take this journey with her. You will never forget it.”

Thank you so much Lisa. Lisa is one of my Transform ladies and I just love her. And I love these reviews. I love that you ladies are listening. Also subscribe to the show so every Wednesday the show is just waiting for you wherever you listen to podcasts.

We also have this amazing contest going on. If you rate and review the show, you will be entered in to win a $150 gift card. And I’m going to give away two of them. So rate and review on iTunes or Apple Podcasts, and then email me at support@bflycoaching.com with the title of your review and you are in. I’m going to give away the very first $150 gift card on episode number 60. So you know ladies, get your reviews in so you can be entered in.

So love, oh my goodness, this last weekend was amazing. The Transform Boss 2020 virtual event happened on Saturday. And I have to say, my team and I did so much preparation and it was worth every second of it. We had almost 70% of my Transform ladies show up, which is an amazing percentage of ladies.

And they showed up and they turned their video cameras on, and they were engaged, and they were there to really end self-sabotage. And I’m just so proud of them. I mean, so proud of them. And it was just a really amazing life-changing event and I’m just beyond proud of it.

But most importantly, I’m just beyond proud of my team. My team is amazing. And my ladies. My ladies just keep showing up and I’m watching them just transform and I’m watching them lose weight. But really love, more importantly, I’m just watching them live their best lives and really show up for themselves and challenge themselves and start to believe that it’s possible to live in a body that they love.

And it is so beautiful to watch. And we also had lots of fun, lots of laughter. There were some tears too, ladies, for sure. My son came on and he is so cute ladies. I can’t even deal with it. I’ve actually watched the replay of my son and my part. I don’t know, four or five times.

Because I love him so much. And he was so handsome and so confident and just, I mean, he was very nervous, but you would never have known. And then my husband and I did a segment, and it was super cool. And my husband was super sexy and sweet and all the things. And so it was just super fun.

And then at the very end, my daughter-in-law came on with all my grandbabies and my husband and my whole team and Jen, our project manager and mentor, she flew in from Utah. And so she was here too. And it was just one of those days that it went by way too fast and it was just a really great day.

So for all of my Transform bosses who are listening, I’m really proud of you and I know some ladies had to miss it and they’re asking for the replay. And the replay is going to be up very shortly. And then it’ll just stay as a bonus in the Transform membership site.

So any lady who comes in to Transform will always be able to watch it. So again, a really amazing event. The ladies are learning all about how to end self-sabotage and then also how to plan for the holidays. So the holidays are here. They are here. We have Halloween and then we go right into Thanksgiving, and before you know it, we’re going to be in full holiday Christmas, and then New Years.

That’s just how fast this year is going. So let’s get into this show, my love. I want to share a story of when I found this process that I now teach. But to be honest, ladies, I was not fully sold yet because I had been on the diet roller coaster for so long, and being on the diet roller coaster, I was always searching for the next diet, the next food plan, the next gimmick.

And I was learning about coaching, I was learning about changing my mindset, but it was scary. And I did love coaching, I’ve coached in my day job for 25 years, and at that time, 20. And I did love coaching, but you know ladies, I was scared.

I was scared that I would fail. And this whole mind shift change sounded like a lot of work, and honestly, I was just scared I would not be able to do it. Because when you’re on the diet roller coaster, we’ve learned, I’ve learned, I had learned that the solution was outside of me, that it was in a diet plan that was all about the food.

And so learning to change my thoughts and beliefs seemed like a really foreign concept. So here I was, my mother had just passed, I had gained a lot of weight during the nine months before she passed, and then the couple months after she had passed.

And I had already been kind of doing this work for a couple years, I would say. Dabbling, just learning about it. But I put it all on the back burner when my mother and mother-in-law became ill. And so here I was and once again, I decided I was going to find something that would work.

And so I decided that sugar and cheese, they were my problem. And so I started Googling, I started seeing all the different diets and all the different things out there. And something popped up for a hypnotist.

And I just thought, wow, I’ve never tried one. This is it. This is it. I’ve never tried this. So I found this really sweet lady and I went to a hypnotist because I wanted to stop eating cheese and sugar, and I thought they were my problem. Ladies, I just want to clue you in. They were not the problem. It was my mind.

But I thought cheese and sugar were my problem. So I go to this lovely woman and do the whole hypnotist thing and I kind of convinced myself – I remember actually leaving her house because she worked out of her house, and I remember leaving her house and going to the grocery store like, yes, I don’t want cheese, I don’t want sugar.

I mean, when I think about it now, I was just kind of not telling the truth to myself. And so I went back to her a few more times and at the end of it, I would say I still wanted cheese and sugar. And though the sessions with her – I mean, it was like meditation, so they were very relaxing.

And actually, she worked with me on some other things that I really enjoyed. But it didn’t solve my problem. And it wasn’t the solution. And why I tell you all of this ladies is because we look for these solutions outside of ourselves and then we try them, we get excited, and then when they don’t work, we think we’ve failed.

And then we go into the process of beating ourselves up, telling ourselves that we’re never going to be able to do it and that we’re failing again. And we do this over and over and over and over. It’s the definition of the diet roller coaster.

We go back to the same things that we’ve tried because maybe one time or two times they worked. I remember Weight Watchers, there were some times where I would lose some weight. But I always ended up gaining it back.

And so what would happen after doing this roller coaster ride for so many years, I thought it was me. I really believed that I was a failure and that I was broken. And what happens over time, and this really happened with me was I just didn’t even want to try anymore.

I was so scared of failing, and when I think about this fear of failure and how I used to view failure, I used to be so scared of it. I used to make failure mean that I wasn’t good enough or I wasn’t smart enough or I wasn’t capable.

So what I found was I wasn’t even showing up. I wasn’t even trying. And I see this with ladies who have been on the diet roller coaster and maybe it’s you that I’m talking to. And you’ve been on the diet roller coaster for so long that the thought of trying something different really scares you.

Because you’re scared that what if I invest myself in this and what if I fail? And you know love, this is what I know. I really believe that the way to lose weight in a way that feels like love for good is by changing our mindset and changing our thoughts and beliefs and throw a few brain hacks in there.

And one of the things – because I see this when I have new ladies who join Transform. A lot of times they’ve failed before so many times that they’re scared they’re going to fail again. And so I see this with my students. And so they start to kind of shut down. They start to stop showing up.

And we pull them back in and we have these amazing mentors that help. And what I teach my students is that failure is something that we should love, and failing is actually the way to our dreams and goals.

And you know, I’m not sure why I remember the saying failure is not an option being told to me, but I completely believe the opposite. I think we were taught that failing, making mistakes, having challenges, that it’s a really negative thing.

But ladies, what if failure was really the magic? What if the only way to your dreams, your weight loss goal is through failure? I teach my ladies this all the time and I talk to them a lot about it. I teach them a process on how to fail and how to have a strategy and how to disrupt the perfectionistic mind.

And you know, we are going to fail, and we are going to make mistakes, and I think it’s what keeps us on the diet roller coaster. Because when we fear failure, then we either don’t want to show up or we quit. And so here are 3 things, my love, that you can do.

Number one, fail on purpose. Write down all the ways that you could fail. Actually plan ways you will, like eat off plan, not make your realistic plan. Run through the drive-through when you had already planned on cooking dinner. Whatever it is. Maybe you’ve set some movement goals and a couple days a week you miss your movement goals.

And then number two, take the next best action. So whenever you make a mistake, whenever you have a challenge, whenever you don’t keep a commitment to yourself, whenever you “fail,” don’t let that one mistake turn into a week of it. Just stop and take the next best action.

So an example of this would be you make your realistic plan, you say this is what I’m going to eat, and then someone brings cookies into the office, and so you eat off plan. You eat the cookies.

And instead of letting that one overeat, that one going off plan, letting it turn into a week off plan, you just take the next best action. You get right back on the plan that you had made for yourself, and then you make another one for tomorrow.

Because this is what happens. When you eat off plan or you overeat, if you beat yourself up or you give yourself the excuse, “Well, I ate these cookies so I might as well screw it and eat everything,” if you do that, it just keeps you stuck.

But if you look, okay, I ate off plan, I ate the cookies, so for dinner, I’m going to eat what’s on plan. It’s such a small minor shift in the way that you think, but taking the next best action is just one step forward to getting you off the diet roller coaster.

And then number three is show up. Love, I tell my ladies all the time, just show up. Whatever that looks like for you. Maybe it’s once a week, maybe it’s once a month. But show up. And when you don’t want to show up for yourself, that is when you need to dig deep, my love, and show up.

Starting to create the habit of showing up for yourself. I know that when ladies start showing up for themselves, honestly, they think they don’t have time. I’ve told myself this lie too. I need to show up for everyone else, I need to do for everyone else.

But what happens is you become resentful. You become mentally exhausted because you’ve never recharged your own battery. And so what I see is when my Transform bosses start showing up for themselves, they become better wives and partners and mothers and friends.

Their capacity to love themselves grows and then their capacity to love other grows too. And it is just one of the most beautiful things. So I just challenge you to show up and show up for yourself. And when you tell yourself that you’re too busy, you don’t have the time, it’s too hard, just know that those are just lies that you’re telling yourself and that is what’s keeping you stuck. Not anything outside of you.

The only thing between you and all of your dreams and your goals are your thoughts, my love. So today’s transformational questions are number one, what have you not done because you’re afraid to fail? I want you to think about this in your whole life. What have you not done in your career, in your relationships, with your weight loss because you’re afraid that you might fail?

And then number two, what are you going to challenge yourself to do in the next 24 hours to take the next best action? My love, so good. So I want to tell you ladies because this is going to release on the 28th, Transform closes on October 30th and it’s closing until 2021. So I just invite you to check it out.

And next week, I’m going to talk about keeping it simple and why it’s so important in weight loss. Alright my love, bye for now.

If you loved listening to this podcast, I would love to have you come check out Transform weight loss program. It is my monthly coaching program where we take this work to a whole new level. And ladies learn how to lose weight for good in a way that they can always do. Join me over at bflycoaching.com/join. I’d love to have you join me in Transform weight loss program.

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!