Hi, and welcome to the Mindful Shape Podcast. This is Paula Parker, and I'm a life and weight loss coach. So as I'm recording this, it's the day before my birthday, and if you're like me, When it comes to your birthday? Well, for me, it's not really a big deal. I don't, I'm not somebody who likes to celebrate in a big way or have a big party or have all of that attention on me or anything like that.

And if you are, that's great. I love it when somebody's like, this is my birthday month, , and they just embrace it and go with it. I think that's awesome. It's just not really me. It's not how I think about my birthday, but I think for anyone, No matter how big you make your birthday, it is a time of self-reflection and it's a time when you really take stock of your life and where you're at.

And so I thought it might be a good time to do this podcast about choosing your standards. And the reason I was kind of thinking about this was I had a client not too long ago who when we were discussing her success, I'm always asking, What created that success, right? We wanna take a look at how you create your current success.

And one of the things that she said really spoke to her was, That she was thinking about increasing her standards. So that really resonated with her. If she thought, you know, this is kind of below my standard. That really helped give her the motivation to follow through on what she wanted to do with food.

So I was giving this some more thought and. What I've also noticed is that for many of us, I think we can tend to have pretty unconscious standards, and I think a lot are really common, and that can be just survival, especially if we're younger and like we're broke. . That's kind of what we're focused on, right?

Survival, safety, security. Our standards is just getting by and then maybe we start a family. Working full-time and it's really busy. And then our standard is just keeping up with work and family life and we tend to want to seek pleasure at our own expense. So we get stressed out, we turn to food, we turn to high fat, high sugar, high flour, all of that to get pleasure.

But of course, It has a net negative on our life. It's not what we want. We do things because that's the way that we've always done them, or that's just who we think we are. We think we've never been able to lose the weight. So we've tried all the exercise, we've tried all the diets, and it's never worked, so it's not gonna work in the future either.

And so we come into our weight loss journey with that. Another kind of set of standards is just around avoiding any kind of discomfort, which I know I've talked a lot about on this podcast already, but that tends to be our default, which totally makes sense because our brain is really wired to survive and how it's done that is to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and to exert the least amount of energy as possible, right?

And so that is kind of what's running the show unconsciously, unless we intentionally think about how we wanna. And then create those standards. So I'm gonna give you an example of just some brainstorming that I was doing in my own work about what I want my standards to be. And how I've done this is I've really decided that I'm not gonna look to my past.

I'm not even gonna look to who I am now or my life right now. I'm really gonna look to the future. My goals and who I wanna become and who I'm growing into to decide now what my standards are. So I'm gonna go through them just as an example, but I really encourage you to, as always, put pen to paper.

Decide for yourself what your standards are. So some of them that I share with you will resonate. Feel free to copy and others are not gonna resonate or land with you at. Totally fine. Okay. So the first one for me is to seek growth. So I have always, I mean, since high school I was reading Kar Tole and watching Oprah, right?

All the self health stuff. And so I've always been about seeking growth and I continue to do that and I like that about myself, both on my personal journey and in all aspects of my. I find it very rewarding to grow and learn. Okay, so that's the first one. The second one, which I'm really leaning into is embracing discomfort.

So of course our initial reaction is typically to turn away, but as I've heard other people say is that, you know, discomfort is the currency of your dreams. So if there's something that you want most likely, There's gonna be some discomfort that you have to go through to get there. So I think that if I could embrace that discomfort and not try to bat it away, or try to avoid it, then it's gonna make it much easier for me to achieve what I want.

The third one is pleasure without it being at my expense. And what I mean by that is it has a net positive on my life. So, for example, if we're thinking about food, which is of course pleasurable, I wanna choose foods and I wanna choose them in quantities that are gonna have a net positive on my life rather than not feeling in charge around food And.

Choosing foods in quantities that make me feel uncomfortable, which I have done previously, or choosing foods that just don't sit right in my body. Right? So I do want pleasure, but I want it to not be at my own expense. I want it to be something that is just pleasurable and then I feel good. Okay. The fourth one for me, it might be a little different for you.

This is pretty personal, but it's that creativity is a priority. I love creating things. I think of myself as a creative person and I think oftentimes we think, well, you have to be artistic to be creative. And that's what I thought for many years. And I do have some artistic ability actually. Like I have some graphic design training and all of that.

But what I'm really talking about here is like, Innovation and ideas and creating things. So I love creating, like I created my website and I create the self-coaching PDFs for you. I love creating that kind of stuff. So I just wanna build things and bring things into the world and use my imagination to do that.

That's what I'm talking about there. And I wanna embrace that. Think of it as a priority in my life. The next one is practice tenderness and honesty with my brain. So when I work with my clients, one of the steps in the process is reflection and strategy. And that's gonna require you to really take a look at what you've been doing and then manage your mind around that.

And when you're managing your. It doesn't mean controlling your thoughts, it doesn't mean not having negative thoughts or controlling what you think about those thoughts, right? It's more about having a relationship that's really intentional and that creates safety with yourself. When I am doing my thought work, when I'm doing any kind of reflection or strategizing about weight loss or.

I've decided that I really wanna do that with a feeling of tenderness and a feeling of, of honesty, right, of being really transparent with myself. And you can use this in your own life when you're looking at what protocol you've chosen or what meal plan. If you use a food journal or anything like that, you can really take a look at, okay.

Where's the progress? What am I doing really well? And then what do I wanna continue working at? Right? What is something that maybe I'm not allowing enough hunger, I'm not allowing my body to tap into my fat stores and be really honest about that, but also not beat yourself up. We often have a tendency to do that.

Like, oh, here I go again. I overate, right? I overate on the weekend. How can you approach that with some curiosity perhaps, but also some tenderness and honesty. Those are my words. That's what resonates with me. But you might wanna think about. When you do your own work or when you are relating to your weight loss journey in any way, engaging with it in any way, whether that's like food prep, journaling any kind of thing that you're doing on your weight loss journey, how do you wanna work with your brain?

How do you wanna feel? Okay. The next one is a life of inquiry and action, as I said. I think I started this inquiry journey really early on, right? Of like what's going on in my brain. Part of my degree was in psychology, and so I've always been really fascinated, but I think oftentimes we might tend to overanalyze or stay in that inquiry, and so I added the action piece because of course, action is what creates our result.

So it's one thing to do your thought work and taking content and learn and grow and, and all of that. And then the next part is to really take action. And that's in my life. Where I am right now is my focus, right? It's equal parts inquiry and equal parts taking action. So important. The next one is what I call emotional sophistication.

So for many, many years I. I would say very sophisticated when it came to my emotions, so I had a harder time identifying them. I didn't wanna feel any kind of negative emotion. I just didn't really understand emotions in general. So that has been a lifelong journey of mine to, first of all, understand that emotions are part of the natural human experience, and there's no emotion that.

Bad or wrong, or that you shouldn't have, right? It's totally natural and being open to that and being able to identify your emotions. So this isn't necessary, I don't think, but it is often very helpful when you're trying to process emotion so that you can say, oh, this is pain. This is pain. I'm experiencing pain, or This is embarrassment.

So it's not you. You are not embarrassment. You are having a physical experience in your. Based on your thoughts from your brain, but you are feeling and you are having a physical experience. It is not you as a person. And just even having that separation can be really helpful in, I don't wanna say speed up the process, but it does help to identify it as an experience that you're having and it's not you.

The next one that I have is positive self. So for many of us, , I don't know if you're like me, but spent I would say a majority of my life in self-loathing. So not feeling good enough, always wanting to change, always wanting to be better, right. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but it came from a real place of inadequacy.

It came from so much loathing. I'm done with that , so I invite you to say, okay, enough. I've done enough self-loathing for one lifetime, and now it's really time to have positive self regard regardless of any perceived inadequacies that you have. Or any goals that you're still trying to achieve that you haven't achieved, right?

Just as you are right now, that you have unconditional positive regard. I think that's actually a psychology term, but the idea is that it's really self-love for yourself, right? How you think about yourself, how you feel when you think about yourself. That's the relationship you have with yourself and.

If you spent many years self-loathing especially about feeling guilt or shame about your body, or about weight and about food, then I really encourage you to imagine what it would be like to where your standard was. It didn't matter. What your weight was. It didn't matter what you ate, even if you ate a whole cake by yourself, right?

It didn't, wouldn't really matter that you would continue to have positive self regard, even when it's hard to do that, that you would still strive for that, cuz that's your standard. The next one is to have an abundant mindset. I don't know, that seems a little bit generic or overused, but I do love the idea of abundance.

It feels so. When you can appreciate what you have and when you feel like you're attracting more. And you can also be generous with the people in your life. Like nothing feels better than feeling like you have something to offer other people and that you are so abundant that you can give to others. So love that.

Love The abundant mindset doesn't have to necessarily have to do with money, but it may for you and I think that's great. But yeah, that's what I'm kind of working on. Okay. Two more. I know this is just kind of a list with no storytelling, so a little bit of off the cuff episode, but I hope you like it anyways.

The second one, or the second to last one is feeling scared and acting courageous. So I feel scared and nervous and anxious a lot of the time, actually,  and so, so I thought I would incorporate this because I think as I achieve more of my goals there, that's gonna continue and as. Take chances and risks and become, I just have a bigger life in general.

Then I'm gonna continue to feel scared and that's okay. And I wanna act courageous. So I wanna feel it's like that old cliche feel, the fear and, oh no, I can't even remember it. , feel the fear and act. Anyways, that's courage. Something like that. You probably have heard it, you probably understand it better than me, but that's on my list as one of my standards.

And then the last one, Very boring , but very, I would say powerful and that is making decision. And owning your decision. Okay, so your life is comprised of decisions big and small. And so it's really important to make decisions because by not making them intentionally, you are making decisions, but it's just more unconscious.

So it's really important to make decisions. And then the other part of that is, Owning your own decision. This is something I'm definitely working at. That's why I have it as a standard. I would say I'm living into it. I've put it down here as a standard, but I definitely am working on making a decision and then owning it because I don't know about you, but I have a tendency to make a decision and then second guess myself.

So I am leaning into the thought creation of what it really takes. Own that decision and not kind of flip flop, because that is creates real suffering, right? The decision is made. Now it's time to own it and make it the best decision. Take a look at your reasons and decide. Either you make a different decision or you touch base with your reasons and you know that those reasons really matter.

Those are my conscious standards that I've created. I hope that that demonstrated what I mean by creating standards so they don't have to be super specific, although I think just do what works for you. But those are mine and. I just want to invite you to maybe in your journal this week, or you could use this as a birthday exercise, especially if your birthday is coming up.

What are your standards and why? So don't look into your past or your current life, even look into the future, into possibility. Just imagine if there were no obstacles. How would you choose to live? What would you want people to say about you? Don't just consider this as a concept. Really think about it, think about it for you, some of the ones that I said might resonate, and then you might have your own that are totally different.

So think about it, write it down. What do you want your life to be? It will be created by your standards. So don't let them just be common standards that are really unconscious. I really encourage you to set them as an example, and you could even do this on your birthday as a little birthday gift to yourself.

Okay, I'll talk to you next time.