Unlock the secret to a life of balance and progress as we explore the powerful concepts from "Switch" by Dan and Chip Heath.
This episode is your ticket to harmonizing these conflicting forces, setting you on a path to achieving your most ambitious food freedom, fitness, and life goals.
Together, we'll explore how simple shifts in our environment can nudge us towards better habits and steer us away from temptation.
Take a page from elite athletes' playbooks with real-life examples and personal stories that underscore the importance of process-focused growth.
Regardless of the size of change you're looking to make in your life, this conversation is full of practical and applicable steps you can take today.
Finally, we tap into the transformative potential of the growth mindset, discussing how small, consistent steps can lead to giant leaps in personal development.
This episode isn't just about reaching your destination—it's about loving the path that gets you there, step by step.
If you're ready to make long-term lasting changes in your life book a free call to take this content deeper and learn more about my non-diet approach to help you create faith fueled food freedom, fitness, and overall life transformation.
Unlock the secret to a life of balance and progress as we explore the powerful concepts from "Switch" by Dan and Chip Heath.
This episode is your ticket to harmonizing these conflicting forces, setting you on a path to achieving your most ambitious food freedom, fitness, and life goals.
Together, we'll explore how simple shifts in our environment can nudge us towards better habits and steer us away from temptation.
Take a page from elite athletes' playbooks with real-life examples and personal stories that underscore the importance of process-focused growth.
Regardless of the size of change you're looking to make in your life, this conversation is full of practical and applicable steps you can take today.
Finally, we tap into the transformative potential of the growth mindset, discussing how small, consistent steps can lead to giant leaps in personal development.
This episode isn't just about reaching your destination—it's about loving the path that gets you there, step by step.
If you're ready to make long-term lasting changes in your life book a free call to take this content deeper and learn more about my non-diet approach to help you create faith fueled food freedom, fitness, and overall life transformation.
Hey friend, welcome back to the Strong Her Way to Eat, Move and Live. Here we talk all things food, freedom, fitness and life transformation, helping you heal your relationship to food, exercise your body and yourself. It's so good to be here with you today and this week. I hope your day is going well so far. If it's not, I am certainly hoping that this episode will brighten your day just a bit. Before we dive into today's episode, I want to share with you. We've got the Strong Her Way app now live completely free in the App Store. You can download it for both Google as well as Apple. It's completely free to you and within the app you're going to find kind of that introductory course, the Mindful Eating Project, which is really just designed to help you start to navigate a more neutral approach to food, definitely more of a non-diet approach to food. If you have been kind of riding that diet hamster wheel and you're ready to get off, then download the app today completely free to you. Now let's go ahead and get into today's episode.
Speaker 1:So I wanted to just share with you some thoughts that I am learning and have really been mulling over as well as utilizing in my own coaching practice that have come from a book that I've been reading. The book is called Switch by Dan and Chip Heath, and it has been a phenomenal resource, not only for me to apply practically to my life and even kind of help me understand myself better, but it has been instrumental in also coaching my clients. So I've not done yet with the book as of this recording, but it's been so good. I've wanted to just share some of the highlights so far. So the first thing I want to really talk about in the book is the concept of the rider and the elephant. Now, these are two different parts of your brain and the rider is really more of like that rational, logical part of your brain. This is the part of your brain that likes the plans, that likes the to-do list, that likes the how. It wants to know how we're going to get to where we're going. This is also the part of your brain that really has the ability to delay gratification. It can see the vision, it can see the dream and the goal kind of out in the future and it is willing to make sacrifices in the short term to get there.
Speaker 1:The elephant is the emotional part of your brain. So even right there, like I get such a visual in my head of the rider being kind of this little tiny thing I don't know if it was in Dumbo or what, but it was like the little mouse was kind of the rider for Dumbo and then you have this huge elephant right. So just even imagining that the elephant is the emotional part of our brain. So this is the part of the brain that doesn't necessarily think long term, it doesn't think about delaying gratification, it's a little bit more about the feelings and how are we feeling right now? What do we feel like doing? What don't we feel like doing, remembering also that our brain is really always looking to avoid pain or painful emotions, to seek pleasure or to seek feeling good and to save as much energy as possible. So even right there, with that visual of the rider and the elephant the kind of logical part of your brain being maybe a little bit smaller trying to control at times, this elephant is really kind of a recipe for disaster. And then knowing about our brain that it really doesn't want to feel bad, it always wants to feel good and it wants to do that as easily as possible. Hopefully that right there you can just kind of sigh and relax a little bit because you have so much more understanding of now why At times it's maybe been so hard to make specific changes.
Speaker 1:So, like I said, that, elephant is the emotional part. It also tends to be for a lot of people what drives their daily decisions, behaviors and habits. The sweet spot is really when we can get the rider and the elephant working together, rather than the rider trying to control the elephant, which feels like willpower right where it's like okay, I just have to try harder. I just have to want this a little bit more. I just have to be a little bit stricter or work a little bit harder at this. That is completely exhausting, it's depleting and it really isn't a great strategy long term.
Speaker 1:Now, when the elephant is in the driver's seat, it's the thing where we're basically just making decisions all throughout the day based on our emotions. So if we don't feel like working out, then we're not going to work out. If we feel like eating, you know, a bag of chips or going through the drive-thru, then we're just going to go ahead and do that without necessarily like intentionally checking in and making the decision. Now I'm not saying that you can't or shouldn't ever not work out or skip a workout, or that you can't or shouldn't ever go through the drive-thru or eat some chips. But what I am saying is that when the elephant is in charge of making these decisions, it's almost like it's happening on autopilot or we're making it completely mindlessly, totally checked out. And this is a lot of times where I've heard clients say you know, I sat down with a bag of chips and by the time I realized what was happening, the bag was all the way gone, right.
Speaker 1:So we were making that decision potentially with the elephant in the driver's seat, rather than the rider and the elephant partnering together to make the decisions together. So I think the beautiful part is utilizing the rider to see the long term goal or vision that you have for yourself, to get the how to, to have a crystal clear path, because the brain, that writer, loves to have clarity. If it doesn't have clarity, if it feels confused, then it's just going to sit there and kind of spin out and it's not, you know, you're not going to be making progress, because it's like there's too many options, too many, too many decisions. So being super clear, having a very concrete path that we're taking, is going to put the elephant or put that writer at ease and kind of put it on task Now to get the elephant on board with the changes that we're wanting to make as well. We've got to find the feelings that are really going to motivate the elephant, and I think about this as like pulling the elephant toward the goal rather than trying to push it Right. It's like the elephant intentionally and willingly wanting to take the steps towards the goal because it can see you know what's out there, it can see kind of that long term. It feels compelled to kind of keep coming forward. Unfortunately, what I have seen a lot in the line of work that I do is that fear and shame tend to be two pretty big and somewhat heavy emotions that people use to try to make change. Now, having used those emotions in the past to reach goals, I can tell you it's pretty exhausting and it never will ever feel like you have finally reached the goal. So identifying, maybe for yourself, what feelings and emotions you've been using now or up to this point to try to motivate yourself to take action can be super helpful. But then also finding what kinds of emotions are going to really fuel that elephant and get the elephant excited and motivated and inspired to continue to take the daily action, switching gears a little bit.
Speaker 1:Another concept that the book talks about is finding the bright spots. So what are you doing right now that is already working? What skills do you have from maybe other areas of your life? What other goals have you already accomplished or other things have you already achieved, and how can we start to pull some of that into the specific goal that you're working on right now, instead of looking at and focusing on everything that's not working or all of your deficiencies? Are all the ways that you're failing and screwing up? Switching the brain to really look for what are all of the ways that I'm already winning, what are all of the things that I'm already doing that are maybe getting me one step closer to the goal, and then really looking at how can we multiply and double down on those bright spots.
Speaker 1:In the book it really talked about this idea, or they did kind of this experiment with punch cards to where you could get an empty. I think they split it into two groups. They gave one group an empty punch card and it was buy 10 car washes, get the 11th car wash free. And then another group. They gave them the same punch card but instead of it being emptied they had given them like two punches, so it looked like they were already 20% of the way at the goal. That group actually ended up getting more punches and more of those people ended up going on to earn the free car wash than the people that felt like they were starting from zero.
Speaker 1:So that again was just a huge or a super powerful illustration of how looking at how far we've already come and kind of closing the gap between where we're at and the goal can be wildly motivating to the elephant versus if it feels like we're starting from zero or we're starting from scratch and we have to get all the way there right. It's kind of like this was another analogy that just popped into my head and it came up a few weeks ago with a client where I think subconsciously and maybe this is because of how we were raised in the school system it always feels like we're kind of starting at 100% right, and so it's like every time we mess up or we don't do something or we don't do something perfectly, then in our brains we just kind of see that score going down versus, if we think about every day, we're kind of starting from zero, then it's like every little thing that I do is actually getting me closer, and so that was even just kind of a huge paradigm shift for that particular client to start to flip it, to look at, okay, what are the things that I am doing, what are the steps I'm taking, even if they are small, and focusing more of our attention and effort and energy on that, to essentially get that to magnify and multiply. This is also a lot like when you're thinking about adding things into your diet or into your eating protocol or plan, whatever you want to call it versus taking things away. So kind of that traditional method is well, I have to cut all of these things out, I can't have this, I can only eat this amount of calories versus if you shift to focusing on adding in more protein with each meal or adding in more vegetables, that for me, has been a huge shift of just like focusing on what can I add in versus what are all of the things that I have to cut out and take out.
Speaker 1:Another concept that they talked about that I wanted to share with you is what they consider shaping the path. So this is where we really just want to look at making our path as smooth as possible, removing as much friction as we can, as many of the barriers or the obstacles, and really looking at shaping our environment to support the goals that we have and the direction that we're moving. So, for example, if you know about yourself which this is where I used to be so definitely no shame or no judgment I could not keep chips in the house because as soon as I opened the bag or as soon as I started to have a little bit, I really had a hard time exercising any sort of self-control or discipline around it. So for a long time I found it much easier to just not have the chips in the house at all. So I was kind of making an obstacle, I was making it a little bit harder so that when my brain was like, hmm, chips sound really good, I had to really decide did I want to get in the car and drive to the store to go get the chips or not? So, shaping that path, making it as smooth as you can, removing the obstacles for the habits that you want to create or the behaviors that you want to do more of, and then putting obstacles in place to create some friction so that it's harder to engage in the activities or the behaviors that you don't want to do or that you want to do less of. So this is also kind of where we get to focus a little bit more on the parts of the goal rather than just the end game. So I think I've shared I know I've shared it on social media and maybe I've mentioned it here on the podcast too but a few months ago I watched the Netflix series quarterback and for me that was really helpful to think about how these professional athletes are going about their ultimate goal in a season of getting to the Super Bowl and then ultimately winning the Super Bowl.
Speaker 1:But within watching that show, one of the things that really stuck out to me was there are so many failed attempts at a touchdown or even gaining yardage in every single goal and you can always tell, like when the quarterbacks are in their heads or when they're letting those fails kind of get to them, because you can start to see that breakdown in their performance on the field. The quarterbacks, or the teams that really have more of that long term success, are the ones that just focus on the next play. They just focus on the thing that's right in front of them. They kind of shake off the you know if it was an interception or a fumble or whatever, and they just get right back up. That's the next play. And so in the book, one of the things they talked about was focusing on the parts of the goal rather than just the end result or the end of the game, and an example that they gave was that a football team doesn't practice every day comparing their performance that day to the ultimate goal of the Super Bowl win. So to say that in another way is that they're not taking the way that they performed in one practice and then comparing it to the goal of getting to the Super Bowl. Instead, they are just focusing on the smaller parts of the practice or of the game of football that are going to ultimately feed into the larger goal.
Speaker 1:I think so often we end up kind of using the end goal that we're working towards against ourselves, because every day we're kind of judging our activity or our behaviors against the bigger goal, you know, taking us back to where we're focusing on the gap versus focusing on. You know, what's the small action or behavior that I can take right now? What's the small little part of the goal that I can focus on and work on right now. So, again, that was super valuable. They also focus on honing their skills at each checkpoint or each practice, right? So this is thinking about the micro steps.
Speaker 1:Are there specific skills that maybe you need to learn or to develop? Some of the skills that I work on with my clients is the skill of being able to see an urge or see a craving come up and not freak out, not either try to completely resist it and push it away and pretend like it's not there, but also not to just automatically give into it. Right, it's like being able to allow the urges, allow the cravings to come in, but then to also be proactive in. Are there things that I can do to kind of help mitigate cravings? I know for me, if I'm super tired, I tend to crave a lot more sweets and kind of carby things. If I'm stressed out, then maybe that it's the same thing, right? So it's recognizing what are some of your own tendencies or patterns or habits.
Speaker 1:What skills do you need to grow in, or how do you need to maybe grow yourself a little bit in order to be able to withstand whatever is coming your way in the journey of the goal Right? So it's focusing on the microsteps. Your brain loves the baby steps because then it doesn't feel like such a scary thing that you're doing and it doesn't get overwhelmed quite as easily. Growing the person so this is you seeing your potential. This is you taking the steps to kind of grow yourself in the areas that you need to. This is going to require maybe a little bit of self-awareness and maybe a reflection so that you can really get to know where you're at, what you're struggling with and what you might need to learn or develop in order to get you from where you are now to where you want to be.
Speaker 1:Personally, I think that is one of the biggest benefits of working with a coach is that they get to help you do that every single week or every time that you meet, depending on who you coach with and what their program looks like. This is also where we look at growing your self-identity, or your self-concept, to match that of the person who has the life and the goals that you are working toward, right? So if I were to ask you like what would be, you know, the life that you want to be living if you could be anybody in your life, how would you be showing up? Right, it's like, okay, we can take that visual image, that dream version of yourself, and we can start to kind of reverse engineer it to where you're implementing more of those habits and the behaviors, but also the way of thinking and the way that that person just kind of maneuvers and navigates life. And it really is when we kind of bridge that gap and we grow our current version of our self into that future version that we start to create those results and those goals so much faster.
Speaker 1:I know that I talk about that concept of the self-identity or the self-concept a lot on the show, but it really is that important. If you want to create lasting change, you have to align the way that you view yourself and what you believe to be most true about you now with where you're headed, with the goals that you have for yourself. Otherwise you're going to run into that imposter syndrome. It's going to constantly feel like your budding heads with yourself or fighting with yourself, or you'll even find yourself sort of self-sabotaging. Okay, the last concept that I want to share with you for today anyway, from this book is the power of not yet.
Speaker 1:So this is really tapping into the growth mindset rather than believing certain things about you or your life or your life circumstances are fixed, right. So this might sound like that fixed mindset is like, well, that's just who I am, or I'm just not that type of person, or this is just the cards I was dealt, or whatever. That is, versus shifting into that growth mindset and really tapping into not yet is I haven't yet figured out how to blank, or I'm still learning on, I'm still learning how to do this or I'm still figuring out how to do this Right. So it's just shifting in, it's shifting out of something being a fixed character trait about you or something that is completely fixed and outside of your control. Taking it back to what is within my power, what is within my control, what skills do I need to learn, what do I need to practice, what do I need to try, and really being willing to kind of stick with it until you figure it out Right. So it's seeing the possibility that you can change as a person, you can grow, you can evolve, right, and really just kind of tapping into not yet right, or I'm still figuring it out, I'm still learning how to whatever. That, for me again has been huge, I would say I definitely used to kind of fall into that fixed mindset. I've seen it with my kids a little bit and have really been trying to be more intentional about focusing on effort rather than just achievements or results with them, but also with myself and then looking at it as okay, these are just maybe some skills that I need to develop or these are some things that I need to learn how to do. That's going to help me kind of get to that goal. And I just haven't figured it out yet, versus, I just haven't figured it out. Right, if we just haven't figured it out, then there's really nowhere else for us to go. But if we're saying we just haven't figured it out yet, then that still kind of gives us that possibility, it gives us that hope and it's going to help us kind of stay motivated to just keep trying things and keep working at it until we do figure it out.
Speaker 1:Another thing with the growth mindset is that we start embracing failure and seeing it as a necessary part of our journey rather than making a fail. That means that we are a failure ourselves. So using our fails as something that we can learn from rather than using our fails against us as evidence that we're never going to get it figured out. We're never going to get it figured out. This one can be a little bit deep, because so often I think we do hear that our failures become our identity. We wear those as a part of our identity. We then start to see ourselves as failures and it feels like if we're a failure again. This is where that shame comes in. This is where that fear comes in. Am I going to be lovable? Am I ever going to be enough? And so it's taking wearing your fails and not wearing those anymore, not having those be a part of your identity, but seeing the fails as a stepping stone on the way to the goal.
Speaker 1:So I hope that these insights from this book Switch have been helpful for you. Again, as I was recording this, I'm thinking okay, these are concepts that I talk about a lot, but maybe not in this way and certainly not all of them in one single episode. So, like I said, the book is Switch by Dan and Chip Heath. I have yet to finish it, so don't be surprised if you see another kind of book review coming your way as I get a little bit further into that book and maybe even with future books that I'm reading as well.
Speaker 1:Hopefully this was helpful and insightful, gives you a little bit of perspective and even hope to continue on your journey, your path, whether it's a fitness path, whether it is a weight loss goal, or maybe you just have an overarching goal to be living a different life, or a different lifestyle than what you're living now. If that is you and if you want to learn more about working with me in a one-to-one capacity and you're interested in checking out the non-diet approach, then I want to encourage you to email me, alisha at alishacarlsoncom, or you can head to alishacarlsoncom slash contact to fill out the form to schedule a completely free consult to you. Thank you again for spending your time with me this week. I look forward to hearing how this episode maybe sparked some things for you, how it inspired you, encouraged you and blessed you. So have a lovely rest of your day and amazing week and we'll be back with you again soon. Bye.