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Welcome to part 6 of ‘Silence Self Sabotage’ my 6 step system to create your best body gain mindset.

Now although it’s part 6 we’re still only at steps 3 and 4, back in show #300 I shared that the audio version of ‘Silence Self Sabotage’ is a bit of a beast. Yes, a BIG generous-friendly-type-of-beast however nonetheless perhaps a little daunting to be consumed in one go… So in this revised podcast format I’m locking in my commitment to 10 parts. Which means we’re at #6 of 10 parts.

If you’re in the mood for a little more light and entertaining – still motivating – though not quite so intensely action-stepping (!) well I recommend you check out some of my fav previous shows:

Perhaps #039: 6 Reasons To Not Be Scared Of The Weights Floor.

Maybe #055: What Would You do if You Had To Start Again?

Or even #060: How Do I Reignite My Ideal Fat Burning Day?

However, if you’re still with me – Thank You! – let’s power onwards with steps 3 and 4: ELIMINATE & EDUCATE.

Our mission here is to eradicate and eliminate the limiting beliefs and emotions that have been preventing you from attaining your ideal health and your ideal body. Although my primary focus will remain at the level of mindset I would like to acknowledge the massive role false advertising, conflicting advice, money grabbing schemes (more like scams!) plays and the resultant huge frustration and absolute confusion felt by so many people struggling to take control of their health.

Obviously the perfect training and nutrition program will get you exactly no where if what’s happening at an unconscious level is sabotaging your best efforts. A lesson I learnt early on as a personal trainer is that frustratingly it did not matter how good the training or advice was, the results would come flowing when the mindset was optimal and the results would be near non-existent when the mindset was limiting.

As I now say: If your Mind is stuck you’re wasting your time moving your body.

You see it’s actually really normal if the multi-billion dollar weight loss industry that is reliant on keeping people overweight has left you despondent and perhaps even considering giving up. If you’ve had even the faintest little voice telling you that perhaps this is as good as it gets for you …or if that internal voice has pretty much been screaming at you “Why bother?” –well it’s time to shut that little voice down. It’s time to back yourself and create the body you feel most confident and congruent in.

Ok, I’ll dismount my high-horse – as we progress through steps 3 & 4 today we’ll:

• Reveal the 3rd and 4th Success Strategies to Silence Self Sabotage.

Let’s jump straight into success strategy #3 as this one lays the foundations for all we will cover from here.

#3 That’s: You Must Take 100% Responsibility For All The Results You Get In Your Life. Now as we examine this strategy in light of success strategy #1 That’s: You Must Take Control Of How You Interpret Your World …we will come to the hugely empowering conclusion that if you have 100% responsibility that also equals 100% control.

If you’re not happy with your current results – that’s just fine – because knowing that your future results are entirely dependent on the action you take right now well my question to YOU: “When would now be a good time to make a change?!”

The ultimate freedom is the ability to assume 100% responsibility and chose how you respond to any given person or situation. This is the power to be at cause in your life rather than at effect of all that is happening around you. All of us have the complete right and control over one thing – and really one thing alone – our mind.

The facts: our THOUGHTS create our DECISIONS create our ACTIONS create our RESULTS.

I find a nice way to remember this is, the person at cause, who holds themselves to high standards practices: Ownership, Accountability and Responsibility. So if they’re in a boat they’ve got the OAR and they’ve in charge of the direction they’re heading!

Conversely the person who is at effect is stuck in BED full of: Blame, Excuses and Denial! It’s a no-brainer to know that living at cause is the more enjoyable place to reside. The challenge is in the ability to hold yourself accountable and step up when you do sink to the point of effect which we all at some time do. An important distinction I’d like to make at this point is that – there is no value in blame only in responsibility AND it is true that things horrific beyond imagining happen and they can happen to genuine, loving, caring people.

I’m not for an instant saying that these people ‘asked for it.‘ I’m not even saying that this concept of cause and effect is necessarily even right or true. I do know that taking responsibility for how you chose to respond will always bring you the best results so there is huge value in acting as if it’s true. Psychiatrist & 3 years Auschwitz survivor Victor Frankl said “Everything can be taken from man except one thing; the last human freedom – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to chose one’s own way.” 

I doubt it’s necessary to really bring home this key point further, however I’d like to share some examples and perhaps some of them you may be able to relate to – either from personal experience or someone you know. Have you noticed, as I have that the things you’re really good at – the things at which the results you achieve are exactly as you want them to be, are also the things at which you naturally assume ownership, accountability and responsibility?

For example the respected manager who has the ability to admit when they’ve made a mistake, the courage to make the tough decisions and the self-belief to follow their plans through the inevitable rocky and unpleasant times as well as the smooth sailing.

Or the dad with the amazing relationship with his kids who happily forgo’s sleep-in Saturday for soccer practice and although he chooses to work long hours to provide well for his family, he is always 100% present in the times he has set aside that are non-negotiable ‘family-time’

Contrast these with the 30-something professional who just can’t lose that last 5 kilos, who only needs a invitation to impromptu drinks with the girls to cancel an evening training session and has to eat pasta a couple of nights a week for dinner because it’s quickest and easiest after a long day and anyway her footy mad 90 kilo flatmate get’s away with it!

Anything you tell yourself as a reason for why you ‘can’t’ is your story and the time and energy you’re investing in your story is the time and energy you’re not investing in getting into your best shape.

Your story is your justification for not having the results you desire and sadly it’s a ball and chain that many people drag around for years. Your choice is to have reasons why you can’t OR experience results and my question to you is: “Is there anything in it for you to keep dragging that old belief around like a ball and chain?”

Actually, perhaps there is something in it and now we’ve gotten a taste for the freedom that taking 100% responsibility will provide, our ball and chain analogy is the perfect segue into success strategy #4 That’s: You Must Get Rid Of Secondary Gain.

Have you ever recognized that something you’re doing is harmful to you and continued right on doing it anyway? Hello self sabotage in the form of secondary gain! Perhaps it’s taking that first inconsequential hot chip that you know even as you reach for it will lead to an all-consuming need to consume at least half the bowl.

Or telling yourself as you pop onto that conveniently arriving bus that you’ll walk home from work instead of to work with full knowledge that the walk will be even less appealing after a full day and there’s a 99.7% chance it just won’t happen. Secondary gain is a pay-off or benefit that you get (either consciously or unconsciously) from continuing a course of action or non-action. Without exception everything we do works for us on some level.

Have a think about what you’re doing (or not doing!) in relation to your body gain goal. On some level it does something for you, gets you something you wouldn’t necessarily get or prevents you from having to deal with something that you would have had to deal with. Everything we do is a strategy. Yes, it may be a strategy that get’s you the result you don’t want but it is still a very effective strategy! There are no exceptions.

Sometimes you need to dig deep to see it. I trained a lady who was incredibly articulate about exactly what carrying the extra weight was costing her. She had a clear picture of the benefits and experiences she would enjoy when she attained her goal weight …however the training and eating inconsistency and yo-yo’ing weight loss’s and gains continued and then we discovered that if she were to reach her goal weight and remain single – what would it mean if she no longer had the “He’s not interested because I’m fat” explanation to fall back on?

The secondary gain of being a perfectionist – of having no standards (yes you heard me correctly) is that you don’t even have to try because the bars so high you could never possibly reach it. That’s NO standards, not high standards.

We can do this with the goals we set ourselves or even what we look for in a partner. If you create a must have list that’s an impossibility there’s no chance of ever getting close or ever getting hurt – I can speak from personal experience on that one!

But back to body gain – have you also seen someone set a goal in a timeframe so unachievable that they’ve given themselves an excuse to cop out at the very first obstacle or even before? It’s harder to see obstacles as opportunities if you have zero faith in your chance of hitting that goal anyway.

Identify what the way it is gives you. Very often the secondary gain (beyond the 30 second joy of the chocolate cake or pleasure of rolling back over in bed at ‘stupid-o’clock’ in the morning!) is a fear of going outside your comfort zone. You are embracing safety and avoiding something you may perceive you’ve failed at in the past.

It is important to appreciate that you will likely do more to avoid pain than you do to experience pleasure. You are strongly compelled to avoid any risk of failure, self doubt, judgement or lack of confidence and to give 100% effort to your body gain goal may lead to perceived failure, rejection or indeed all 3 of the universal human fears which are:

=> The fear of not being loved. 

=> The fear of not being enough.

=> The fear of not belonging.

As Wayne Gretzky say’s “100% of the shots you don’t take won’t go in.”

However we all do still fear the unknown. Of not knowing every step of the way ahead, the idea of having certainty of exactly how things will play out before you act is attractive, but would you really like to experience a life where you knew everything that was going to happen to you before it played out? I would suggest not – as it is only when we are challenged that we get to discover what we are truly capable of.

Humans have been created as learning machines – with vastly more potential than even the most powerful computers on earth will ever have. To create lasting change you need to associate massive pain to not changing now and massive pleasure to changing now. You have the ability to change your neural associations about what means pain and what means pleasure and to use both to your advantage. Most people who would ‘like to shed some fat’ fail to act because they focus on the pain of taking action rather than the pain of not taking action.

If you imagine the human brain like a large neural jungle with billions & billions of possible neural networks & connections, in fact we have more neural pathways in our brains than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of the world …but away from the beaches and back to the jungle, the first person to walk through the jungle will not know where to go and will have to battle through the undergrowth. The 2nd person will see a small trail. After 10 more people the small trail will become a clear flattened pathway, which is now used by everyone. In fact it’s a clear unquestioned choice.

No one will create a new path through the undergrowth and the thicket. Your beliefs, habits and actions function in the same way, eventually behaviour becomes automatic and this is what we are battling when we seek to create change. It is easiest to follow the existing pathway. Though it is also possible to step off that old pathway in just an instant. If you link both pain and pleasure to changing your brain will be confused by the mixed signals and it is likely nothing will change as you will not be utilising your full resources in the manner that you would be if every ounce of you were committed to the change.

If you’ve tried to lose fat many times without success this means the level of pain you associate with not changing is not intense enough. Use one of the strongest forces of human personality to your advantage: the desire to preserve the integrity of your own identity.

Have you ever made some real progress with your body gain goal and then hit a plateau? The going gets tougher, the dinner invitations get harder to turn down, the gym isn’t as exciting as it was the first few weeks. It’s darker and colder in the mornings and you start to tell yourself that really you’ve given it a fairly good shot and what’s so bad with carrying a few extra kilo’s at your age/with your work-load/family responsibilities.

You’ve just rationalized your lack of success made it OK to settle for those poor results you’ve always gotten and given up on your dream. We do this all the time – in many areas of our lives. Perhaps you’re aiming for a pay rise, or a set amount of savings and when you don’t get it in the time frame you set for yourself you justify it by saying “I’ll save when I’ve just had this holiday…” and rationalise yourself into mediocrity until the next cycle of pain hits and you have to act.

The worst thing about this strategy is that every time you do it you trade in self belief for settling and shave a little more off your self-esteem …and your self esteem is in essence your reputation with yourself – every thing you do or don’t do, builds up or pulls down your reputation with yourself. Pretty soon you’re dropping your standards so you won’t risk failure and be disappointed next time.

The moment you raise your standards and take radical action as a result of feeling only a small amount of pain (or feedback – think clothes feeling a bit tighter) you will begin to see much better, faster and more consistent results.

Back to secondary gain, if you have a strong grip on the need for safety I need to let you know the more uncertainty and variety you can stand in your life = the more success you’ll experience. This leads us to Success Strategy #5 That’s: You Must Be Willing To Explore & Embrace The Unfamiliar.

I’m going to leave Success Strategy #5 for Fridays #306 show… because right now it’s time to get a little actionable.

Of course there’s a whole heap of actionable goodness via the Action sheet #2 PDF however if you what to keep it super simple… all good, the action sheet will be there waiting for you if you choose to seek it out later.

For now how about we go with the OAR? That’s Ownership, Accountability and Responsibility. What is one aspect of achieving your body gain goal in which up until today you haven’t been using the OAR? Perhaps – when you’re honest you’ve really been spending too much time in BED full of: Blame, Excuses and Denial!

Your action step today is to embrace Ownership, Accountability and Responsibility. Ideally even get me on your accountability team by sharing your intention via those show notes.

That’s it for me today. I hope you’ll join me to continue the ‘Silence Self Sabotage’ journey with show #306 on Friday where we’ll cover The 5th Success Strategy. And also how to:

• Use Pleasure and Pain to your advantage.
• Model effective eating and exercise strategies.
• Discover your motivation strategy.

If you liked this you’ll also like: Smart Simple Fat Loss: Educate and Accelerate.

If you’re yet to share the Healthification love – just click here to zip over to iTunes and leave an honest rating and review. It’d help me out big time. With gratitude, Kate.