Ep #41: What If You Were Curious?

You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women podcast with Shannan Christiansen, episode number 41.

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. So excited to spend some time with you today. Today, we’re going to talk about curiosity and how it can help you in your weight loss transformation. But as always, before we get into the show, I want to give a listener shout-out to Amy.

She wrote, “Thank you so much for sharing your story about the things that have happened to your son because he is black. I am trying at this time to listen and to examine my own thinking, and your honesty and emotion truly touched me. You, through your blog, have been teaching me how to feel my feelings. All the feelings. And it has made me realize the degree to which I have pushed down anxiety my whole life.

Your explicit instructions for how to let the emotion and the energy flow through my body and to pay attention to how that feels and to what thoughts I’m having has changed my health. I am down to only one migraine a month from many, and I truly believe it is because I’m taking the time to stop and let my feelings flow.

When you said that an emotion lasts 90 seconds, I felt like I could handle anything for 90 seconds. Like you, I’m a mama. My oldest has suffered in the past two years, due to both epilepsy and mental health struggles, manifesting out of nowhere. Your sincere, loving words encourage me. Thank you for all that you are doing.”

Thank you so much, Amy. That was from a Facebook Live that’s on the podcast and it’s such a thoughtful review. It really means so much to me that you took the time to write those beautiful words. And to all the ladies out there who have taken the time to leave a review, I just really appreciate it and I’m so grateful for you.

So ladies, I have to tell you about my little Jaxy. So Jackson is my three-year-old granddaughter and she is just pure joy and so stinking cute. So she’s had a little bit of a lazy eye. So my daughter-in-law and son took her in to the eye doctor.

And it turned out actually that she needed glasses. Like, bifocals. Her vision was pretty impaired. You would have never known. I mean, she never complained. Jaxy is always pointing out my earrings, what I’m wearing. I always thought she saw the tiniest of details.

She would look at my earrings and say, “Mimi, you have the most beautiful earrings,” or I sometimes get flowers painted on my fingernails and she would look at the flowers. She loves all of the flowers and the earrings and the jewelry.

And so I never would have even thought that she couldn’t see. So she just got her glasses and when she put them on, oh my goodness ladies, she said, “Daddy, I can see clear.” And she just kept looking at her hands the whole way home.

She did not know that she could not see. She didn’t know what clear was until she did. She did not know what she did not know. We were having a team meeting that night and she came on the video with her glasses on. I mean seriously, the cutest thing.

We often don’t know what we don’t know. We believe we know the things. I mean, so many times I think I know the things until I learn something that I never knew before. We’ve dieted for so long and we think we know most everything about it.

We still believe, I see so many ladies still believe that a food plan or an exercise plan is the way. If we just find the magical food plan, the magical pill, then everything will be okay.

I see my ladies in The Society though, I see them in The Transform Society put on their glasses for the first time. I see them realize that it’s all been within them, that they can lose weight and that it’s possible.

One of the things I teach in the Society is how to be curious. For so many of my ladies, they stopped asking questions. They believed all the things that they were taught from diet culture. They look at their past and then they believe that it’s their future.

I teach them to ask why. What if? How could I? These questions are so life-changing. So let me give you a scenario I see a lot. You see the number on the scale, and you did not lose any weight. Maybe you’ve gained some weight. And then you just start in the whole beatdown.

You start telling yourself that you’re a failure, that you’re not good enough, that you’re always going to be overweight, and you just beat yourself up. And then you feel frustrated. You feel disappointed. You feel sad. And then my love, you overeat.

But what if you could change that cycle? What if you could be curious instead of judging yourself? I teach my ladies that the number is just data. They can look at it and then decide if they need to tweak something or if they just need to keep doing what they’re doing.

By being curious, asking questions instead of judging, so asking questions like why, looking at the data, it changes the conversation that they’re having with themselves. It puts them back in charge. No beatdown.

My ladies learn how to look at their own data and then be curious about it. Again, with no judgment. Our brains are wired for confirmation bias. We look for evidence to support our own beliefs. So when we look at the scale and have gained weight, or we eat off plan, or we don’t even make a plan, our brain starts serving up thoughts like, “You’re never going to do this. See? This is too hard. You’re a failure.”

But love, when we are curious, it helps us from looking for evidence of what we used to believe. It keeps us open to what we could believe. It gets us asking questions and using the creative part of our brain. We start looking for solutions instead of judgment and beatdowns.

So ladies, if you’re in The Transform Society and you’re listening, we are going to continue to go deep into this in our module, Data versus Drama. And if you’re new to me and you’re just beginning, or you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, the best step you can take is when you get on the scale or you overeat or you don’t make your realistic plan, you can simply ask yourself these transformational questions.

So here they are. Number one, why? Why is one of the best questions you can ask yourself. Number two, how could I? How could I eat on plan? How could I tweak what I’m doing? How could I make one small step? And number three, what if? What if weight loss was easy? What if I could learn from my failures? What if I could eat on plan? What if I could lose weight?

So good, my love. I hope you all have an amazing week.

The Transform Society is opening in July. If you’re wanting to take this work deeper, you want a community to help and support you and love, you’re ready to get off the diet rollercoaster, then sign up for the waitlist. You will get all of the information of when it opens, the free trainings, and I will mail you a brochure right to your home with all of the information. You can get it at bflycoaching.com/waitlist. Bye for now, love.

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!