Ep #28: Leading Your Own Weight Loss and Wellness Journey

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When you have a growth mindset, you can accomplish anything. For instance, I can now say I’m a ‘master coach’ because I’ve just obtained my master weight and life coach certification from The Life Coach School. It wasn’t easy to become masterful at my craft and it was fraught with challenges, but thanks to my growth mindset I was victorious!

All leaders use a growth mindset to achieve their goals, from politicians (we hope) to billionaires to your local business owner. (Click HERE for more on mindset) Just like the summer garden we talked about in Ep #21: Getting Your Body Summer Ready, you’ve planted the seeds and have been nurturing your own growth mindset. Now you can put it all together to take the reigns of leadership in your journey to your right-sized body.

If you like what you heard today, please go to Apple Podcasts and leave a review. The more reviews we receive, the more women will learn about the podcast and learn from these lessons. If you know someone who is struggling with food, send them a link to the podcast and maybe they can find something here they haven’t heard before!

 

 

Listen to the Full Episode:

What You’ll Learn in this Episode:

  • Why leadership skills aren’t just for the office
  • The 8 qualities every leader possesses
  • How you can use those 8 qualities in your weight loss journey

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

Full Episode Transcript

With Your Host

Pat Beaupre Becker

You are listening to It's Never Too Late to Lose Weight, A podcast with Pat Beaupre Becker, Episode 28.

Welcome to It's Never Too Late to Lose Weight, a podcast for women approaching 60 who has been successful at everything but reaching their weight loss goals. Tune in each week for tools and strategies to help you lose weight, create a strong body, and support a healthy mind. Here's your host, certified weight and life coach, Pat Beaupre Becker.

Hello, my dears. I am so proud to say that I recently earned my master weight and life coach certification from The Life Coach School. I'll always wanted to be a master. Anyway, I am so grateful that my brain has this growth mindset because I kept at it, right? Despite difficulties and obstacles. Actually, those difficulties and getting over them, this is what actually gave me the skill to continue to share what I know, what I have discerned, right? Over the course of coaching you and teaching. Now, it means that I have passed through certain obstacles and now I am ready for the next one, so here we go. Woo hoo.

Now, the other day I had this thought pop into my head, "Who put me in charge of my life?" I mean, I basically realized that I was really in charge, not my mother, not my boss, not my daughter or my husband, not my country, right? I'm really the one in charge. My God. The next thought that I had was that I'm glad I didn't really think about this much when I was raising my daughter. I mean, I took that job very seriously and I even loved every minute of it, the good, the bad and the ugly, and there was some all of that in there. But, what a great responsibility we have bringing up kids, don't we? That sense, the weight of that responsibility ... I mean, I know I lived it, but boy am I glad I didn't really think about it.

But if we look at it objectively, if I looked at it objectively, I am the leader of my life. You are the leader in your life, and you can compartmentalize your role as a mother, a sister, a worker, a business owner, a citizen of the earth, or you see the big picture, right? I am a human being encompassing all of those. Any way we look at it, it's up to us. I think initially, the most important step that a leader can take is to actually say yes to the job. Yes, I accept responsibility. I won't need permission. I don't need permission. I don't need to fool or manipulate myself. I'm just going to say, "Yes, I want the job." I am the leader in charge. I'm the CFO, the CIO, the CTO, all of it just as I am.

But, do you think of your life that way? Do you like being in charge of yourself? I think it's both very cool and mind-blowing and terrifying all at the same time. So, I propose that you accept the job of being a leader in your life when it comes to your health, your feeding of your body, your mind, and your spirit.

You are the leader in chief, the decider in chief. You get to decide how much you want to weigh, what your health is like within the parameters of what we do have control over, and how we can manage our wellbeing.

Now, the first question you might find yourself asking is, "Whoa, wait a minute. Am I trained for this job?" But, I'm going to bet, if you've been dieting all your life, if you have been trying to lose weight or to give up that struggle with food, you have had some success and you have had some failure. But, I also want to tell you with the mindset tools that we now know because of the latest brain research and the topics that I have been teaching you in the course of this just 27 podcast episodes, you now have the bones, the structure of a new way to manage your weight and your health.

I know that I've taught you that you will create a comprehensive plan. You will get your hormones in order. You know about highly palatable, rewarding foods that are not really nutritious, and then there's nutritious whole foods. I've taught you about overhunger and overdesire. And most importantly, I've taught you the Model and how your thoughts create your feelings, which drive your action or inaction, and then give us the results that we can count on. I also talked about how to feel and allow your emotions. So, all of these tools will become skills the more you practice them.

Now I went on Amazon and there are over 60,000 books on leadership. It's crazy, right? So much information, and I know I have read at least 500 of them. But, I'm not going to refer to any of them in particular because if you have read many of them, you likely have your favorites and you've probably implemented them into your life.

Now, want to ask you, where have you been a leader in your life? Maybe you do work for or run a billion dollar company, or maybe you have a little home daycare business or a big daycare business. Maybe you're a stay-at-home mom and you managed to launch a bunch of kids. Now maybe you have a bunch of grandkids. I think we're used to expecting leadership as a quality to be used by the boss at work or, in a perfect world, by our elected politicians. But, what if we applied leadership and leadership skills to our personal world? What if you took conscious charges? As I'm suggesting, you are going to become the leader of your weight loss and wellness journey. You probably took some of those leadership skills that you have and you have overcome certain obstacles in your life. Maybe it was purchasing a home. Maybe it was nursing your partner or a child through health or death. Now I want you to apply them to this weight loss journey, or if you call it a weight loss struggle.

So, I'm going to focus on eight leadership qualities that I bet you have already applied to many other areas of your life, and they are, Number 1, lifelong learning. Number 2, recognizing your influence, not control. Number 3, desire and vision. Number 4, recognizing trade-offs. Number 5, overcoming obstacles. Number 6, getting the resources you need. Number 7, you stick to it until it's done. And Number 8, is celebrate and evaluate. So, how do you apply these qualities to weight loss and to wellness? Let's go through them.

No. 1. I believe that leaders understand that there will be learning and the best leaders are committed to the process of learning because nothing that has not been done before has not been created or achieved, has happened without a lot of learning.

No. 2. Successful leaders realize that they cannot control people, right? They can influence people. This is like leaders are not prison guards, where actually those jobs are controlling behaviors, but leaders understand that they can influence, they can educate and guide, but that each individual has their own willpower to do what it is whatever they want to do, and they will do what they want to do. So, what do you want to do, right? How can you influence and educate and guide yourself with the new skills that you are developing in terms of using your mind to change the way you think about food? You want to know that you can't control other people. You can influence your behavior. You can ask the right kinds of questions.

No. 3. Leaders have desire and vision. Well, if there's a goal to be achieved, the leader is going to have a great desire to see it accomplished. Let's say you have a desire to lose 15 or 20 pounds. Leaders see what's not there yet, and then they can create it from their minds, right? So, maybe you can imagine yourself at your goal weight wearing a certain clothing. You can look at your doctor's visit and coming back with some really good numbers. Maybe you want to run a race so you have some goal, some vision that you can see yourself achieving. The wonderful thing about desire is that we know it's an emotion, right? And emotion is what motivates us to action and it helps to guide us to our purpose.

Now on the other hand, you have some desires, right? That you will probably have to manage as well because we can't just give into all of our desires. When it comes to leadership, we have to learn that sometimes we need to redirect our desire in order to get other things accomplished. For instance, if you have a desire for junk food, you will have to look at that desire and work on that desire, but you can create a desire for healthy foods, and that's where you have the desire to lose the weight, the desire to be healthy. Then, you have the vision where you use your imagination, you see yourself there, and then you do the work to get there.

No. 4. Leaders accept the fact that there's going to be trade-offs. In order to achieve a goal, we know that we have to do certain things we don't want to do and certain things that are going to be fun. Generally, most goals require boring aspects to the work as well as fun aspects to the work. We also have to choose between goals, and we understand that there's going to be constraint. You're going to have to trade your junk food for healthy foods, right?

No.5. Leaders know there will be obstacles. I know that you've experienced obstacles. Once you get through those obstacles, when you're on the other side, you actually know that you're actually stronger or wiser. Probably there are some places in your life where you live for challenges, but when it comes to your health and your weight, maybe you don't consider that a category that's worthwhile or even a category where you can overcome those obstacles. So when you list the obstacles, you see what they are, many of them being your thoughts, your thoughts about food, your willingness to prepare, and to plan, and to create that plan. You're going to create in your plan all of the obstacles. You're going to expect those obstacles, but it doesn't mean stop. The obstacles actually means go.

No. 6. Leaders find the resources to get the job done. Now, a leader never expects that they're going to know how to do something without learning it or without any kind of support. They know they're going to need support and they seek it out. They figure that that's just part of it. So, you want to notice where your skill is lacking and you either learn it or hire it out. You want to know that getting the right resources for any project, but let's just say in terms of losing weight, you want to understand that you ... Maybe you need to learn how to cook. Maybe you want to hire a coach. Maybe what you want to do is get a food delivery system. So whatever it is ... help with the housework so you can do the cooking. Whatever it is, you're going to see that you're going to have obstacles and what are the resources that you will need that you can get in order to be successful.

No. 7. Leaders also stick to it until it's done. I think that grit is really required when you are trying to accomplish a big goal, especially a goal that you haven't accomplished before. With that being said, I bet you are not afraid of hard work. I bet your success that you've had in your life depended on your commitment and dedication and willingness to work. I bet you worked a lot of overtime in your job. Maybe there were projects that had to be done and redone. I bet when your kids turned 13 you didn't throw in the towel, say, "This is too hard, and I'm out of here," because most of us stick to it, right? We have the payoff. Maybe it's the smile of our child, maybe the thank you. But, I also know that sometimes we don't experience any positive feedback for years, especially raising a family. So, being a leader, especially when it comes to wellness, it means you're going to implement and stick to what maybe is boring, what maybe is hard, but you're going to do it anyway because you are the leader.

No. 8. Then finally, leaders celebrate and evaluate. Now, a good leader does not underestimate the value of celebrating their achievements, recognizing that a vision was created, something was created from nothing. It's amazing. Leaders review the process, right? How did it go? What worked? What didn't work? Because they know that all the learning that they are doing in the process of creating and reaching this goal, they're going to apply for the rest of their life.

So for you, you might have to learn to celebrate your goals, not with ice cream and cake, right? But with true respect, because you're going to become somebody different in the process of applying all these qualities to the task of weight loss and self-care. You're going to become a woman who no longer struggles and who knows how to take care of herself, a woman who takes herself seriously and knows her own power, a true leader in her life. I want you to accept that you are the leader of your life and take the job of weight loss and wellness to heart. Apply yourself with existing, but maybe renewed talents and wisdom and apply them to getting the job done. I know you can do it.

Now I want to go to My Favorite Things. Okay, zero gravity chair changed my life. Now, I have arthritis in my spine and some other problem diagnosis, and a friend of mine recently recommended I get a zero gravity chair. I have lots of trouble sitting down, and I have to sit a lot, so I'm quite often managing pain. But, I have this zero gravity chair and I have been learning how to work in it, bring the computer and just sit in it, and enjoy reading or watching TV. It's like a Barcalounger, I remember. Remember those where you just like sit back, lean back? Maybe you already have one, but the pressure was off my spine, and I feel so much better, more energy, and better able to get even to the gym and get stuff done. I want you to know that if you have back problems, get yourself a zero gravity chair and enjoy it.

So I want to thank you for listening to today's episode of It's Never Too Late to Lose Weight. If you know someone who's approaching 60 and struggling with weight or wellness, send them a link to listen to this podcast. And if you want to speak with me about your particular situation, send me an email and we'll find some time to talk, because I'd love to show you how I can help you succeed in what I see as the final frontier, which is your weight loss journey. Because as a listener, there's one thing you know for sure, it's never too late. I'll see you next week. Bye-bye.

If you liked what you heard and want more, head over to never2late, that's number two, .info/guide to download your quick-start guide, did jumpstart your weight loss plan and begin creating an amazing life you love.