Episode Transcript
When you look at the results that you currently have (or don’t
have), how do you feel? Are you satisfied with where you are at
this point in your life – physically, emotionally, financially,
relationship-wise, and career-wise?
On this week’s episode, we’re diving into what exactly creates
everything you currently have and experience in your life arms.
We’re covering how easy it can be to get into a pattern of turning
to screens or food (or other distractions) to feel better when you
look at your arms and life and you don’t like what you see.
Hi, everybody, and welcome to The Arm Coach podcast, episode
#16.
Before we get started I wanted to let you know that at the end of
the month I’m sending one of you a $100 dollar Visa gift card. It’s
going to someone who has written a review for the Arm Coach
podcast. So if you’re loving this podcast, be sure to leave a
review on whichever platform you’re listening.
So this is episode 16. I can’t believe it, really I’m kind of surprised.
I’ve surprised even myself. I started the podcast earlier this year,
and I will tell you that the moment I decided I was going to do
this, the moment that I made the decision to commit, my brain
went into overwhelm. I had all these thoughts about whether or
not I could figure out the technology, if I would have enough to
say each week, how I was going to promote the show, how I was
even going to find listeners, but needless to say, three weeks later
I launched and here I am, 20 episodes in.
So I’ll tell you this really got me thinking about the results I have
in my life and the results that everyone has in their own lives. In
the past, I would not have been this productive, really. I would
have umm-ed and ah-ed and worried and second guessed myself,
I would have just doubted and doubted and doubted on repeat,
and I bet that a lot of you out there can relate to that feeling, that
sense of what you are creating or not creating in your life is not
what you want.
I’ll tell you that everyone at some point will take a look at their life
and assess what they’ve done and what they haven’t done, and not
only that but when we make that assessment, start to try to
explain why we have the results we have in our life, or why we
don’t have the results that we want. So that’s what I’m going to be
talking about today. I’m going to break this down and really talk
about the results you have not only with your arms, but in your
life. But before I go any further, I want to be really clear on what I
mean when I say the results you have in your arms and your life.
So I want you to think about things like your physical health and
wellbeing, your career, your relationships and anything in this
world that you create or want to create. So in other words, your
results are any outcomes that you have in your life that were
influenced by the decisions you do or don’t make. Okay, you got
that? The decisions you do or don’t make, this is what contributes
to your results. Okay, so the weather is not a result, the political
climate is not a result, the passage of time is not a result; these are
not results in your life. That’s not what we’re talking about today.
We’re talking about things like your physical heath, your
wellbeing, your career, your relationships and anything that you
create with the decisions that you do or don’t make. Those are
your results in life.
Now, we’ve talked a lot about your thoughts and your feelings and
your actions and how to identify each of those, but we haven’t
talked a lot about how all three of these things, what you think,
what you feel and how you act work together to give you the
results that you have in your arms and life. So think about it this
way: whether or not you exercise and eat right and set aside time
to try to de-stress, that has to do with what you’re thinking, how
you’re feeling and how you’re acting toward yourself. Whatever
you’ve done in your career, whether you’ve applied for jobs, asked
for a raise, started a business, whatever you’ve done, all of that in
your career has to do once again, with what you’re thinking, how
you’re feeling and how you’re acting. And whether or not you have
the relationships you want with your partner and your family, I
know this one is really going to surprise people, but whether or
not you have the relationship you want has to do with what you’re
thinking, how you’re feeling and how you’re acting toward the
other person.
Now, I want you to pause and really let this sink in because this is
the exact opposite of what all of us have been conditioned to
believe. We have been conditioned to believe that everything we
have in our lives are results, in other words, are the product of
what’s happening to us. We’ve been taught to believe that the
world around us is the explanation for what we have and what we
don’t have. And because we’ve been conditioned to believe this,
when you think about why you have the things you do in your life,
why you have your particular health, your particular wellbeing,
your particular career, your particular relationships, you probably
attribute all of these results to external factors.
So you may give explanations like this: well, my arms are flabby
but it’s because I don’t have the time to eat right or to exercise, or
I’m unhappy in my career because I’m stuck in this job with this
terrible boss, or I want to have better relationships but my family
and my partner keep pushing my buttons so it’s impossible. So
this is totally normal. We all do this. We don’t attribute how we
feel or how we act to what we’re thinking, right? Instead, we
attribute it to everything that we see in our external world,
everything that we experience in our external world. So we’ll tell
ourselves, I act this way and I feel this way because of everything
that is happening in my life. But it’s never how it is, and thank
goodness, right? I’ve said this before but it’s so important that it’s
not this way because imagine how powerless that leaves us.
Imagine how powerless we end up being when we tell ourselves all
of our results and how we feel and how we act is up to what is
happening in the world around us.
So once you start to break it down, once you start to really pay
attention, you will see that your actions are always driven by how
you feel, and your feelings are in turn always created by your
thoughts, and these are the things that give you your results in
your arms and life. Your actions are what determine the decisions
that you make, what you decide to do or don’t do. It’s what
determines whether or not you go to the gym, lift weights,
whether or not you apply for that job, whether or not you act
lovingly towards your family, towards your partner.
But what happens is that we don’t understand that this is what is
happening. We don’t understand the role of our thoughts creating
our feelings and our feelings driving our actions, so we don’t
understand that we are the ones creating our own results, and
instead at some point we stop and we look around at our life and
we think about what we have and we think this isn’t what I want.
These are not the results that I was expecting or that I had hoped
for or that I dreamed for, it’s not the results that I want. And then
we start to look for the reason why. We start to look for an answer
and most of us will blame our results, we’ll blame how we feel,
we’ll blame our actions at being at the mercy of everything around
us.
I want to have a better relationship with my spouse but he keeps
pushing my buttons. I want to have a job I love but I hate my boss.
I want to get in shape and tone my arms but I just don’t have any
time. So we’re stuck in this place where we’re blaming everything
around us for the results that we have, and then we’re looking
around and we still don’t like what we see, and we want to feel
better, so what do we do?
First, what almost everyone does, is we try to control everyone
and everything in our life so that we can feel better. So we’ll put all
our attention focused on getting our family members, our boss,
our partners, our kids, our body, everything to behave differently.
But guess what? You don’t have a lot of control over that. Even if
you’re really, really good at getting people to do what you want
them to do, you still don’t have a lot of control over it. So when
this doesn’t work, when we try to control everything in our
external environment and we’re still not feeling good, we’re still
not liking what we see, we’re still not getting the results that we
want, then we really feel stuck.
Now we don’t know what to do. Now we really feel at the mercy of
life. So guess what? We still want a solution to feel better, and I’ve
said this time and time again on the podcast. There is no faster
way to fix how you feel than to grab something to eat. The only
problem is that it’s not a very sustainable solution. And now here’s
the thing: if you’re listening and you’ve never ate something to
feel better, I am sure that you have turned to something else in
your external environment to try to change or cover up how you
feel. Everyone does this. Every single person out there, and I
mean everyone has at some point turned to something in our
external environment to feel better about your stressful day, the
people who push your buttons, or just a general dissatisfaction
you have with your life.
When you look at your life and you look at the results that you
have and you don’t like what you see, all of us, to some degree or
another will turn to food, will turn to Netflix, will turn to
Facebook, will turn to shopping, will turn to accumulating or
chasing after your gold stars to feel better. Whatever it is, and a lot
of us, myself included, will turn to our phones or food so that we
can pretend that we’re happy when really we’re not.
Now I really want to be crystal clear with this, because there is
absolutely nothing wrong with using screens or food to feel better
and I mean that. The morality police have heaped enough right
and wrong on exercise and overeating over the last several
centuries, we do not need any more of that. As a society, we do not
need any more judgment on this issue. It is totally unhelpful, but
it is helpful to ask yourself, do you like the results you’re getting
from using screens and food to change how you feel?
That is such an important question to answer for yourself and it is
a question that only you can answer. Only you can answer that
question for yourself. But I do want you to think about how much
time are you spending scrolling or overeating to take the edge off
of how you feel? How much time are you spending scrolling or
overeating on the weekends or just as the normal thing that you
do to have fun?
And then I want you to think about how much time are you
spending recovering from procrastination or feeling behind the
next day or trying to get rid of all the empty calories that you
consumed the day before or beating yourself up for not getting
your arm workout done? How much time are you spending
dealing with the repercussions of using screens or food to feel
better? It’s really important to ask yourself in your attempt to feel
better by scrolling on your phone or having a snack, are you
actually wasting a lot of time feeling worse?
I want you to see and I want you to really understand how easy it
is to get stuck in this pattern of turning to screens or food but
really turning to anything in your external environment. TV or
shopping or eating or alcohol, whatever it is for you. Overworking,
that’s a big one for a lot of people. How easy it is to get stuck in
this pattern of turning to something when you look at the results
of your ams and life and you don’t like what you see. And the
reason that it’s easy to get stuck in this place is because most of us
do not understand why we have the results that we do. We think
we have the results we have in our life, we think that our wellbeing
and our career and our relationships and the things that we do or
don’t create are a product of what’s happening in our life, instead
of understanding how our thoughts and our feelings and our
actions, how these three things really drive and create the results
that we have.
You really need to understand this and you need to understand
how easy it is to get stuck in the pattern of turning to something
else to feel better, and then how easy it is to start creating a whole
new set of problems for yourself. So first you’re unhappy, sort of
looking around at the state of your arms, the state of your
wellbeing, the state of your career, the state of your relationships,
whatever it is, and you try to control everything in your external
environment and that didn’t work, and so then you try to turn to
things to feel better, to a drink, to food, to ice cream, to TV, to
Netflix, to Facebook, whatever it is to distract yourself from how
you feel, and now you have to deal with the repercussions.
You have to deal with having wasted all that time, having the
disturbed sleep, feeling bloated the next day, the example that
you’re setting for your kids, feeling embarrassed about your arms
and struggling to cover them up. Whatever it is, you have to then
deal with the repercussions of your attempt to feel better. This is
so common I cannot tell you and this is why I think this work is so
important, because really it’s not just about how much you eat
and exercise, right? If you stop overeating tomorrow, you just
stopped cold turkey, but you weren’t dealing with what is truly
creating the results in your life, you weren’t dealing with what is
truly creating how you feel and the reasons you act the way you
do, then guess what? You’re just going to turn to something else to
feel better. I promise you this, because I have watched so many
people do this and I’ve watched myself do this.
Take out overconsuming screens and overeating and it’s great, I
don’t have to deal with the excess flab on my arms, I don’t have to
deal with finding long sleeved tops, but guess what? I might feel
physically better, I might have more time, but I still don’t like my
life when I’m looking at it. I still don’t like the results that I have
and when I had no idea how to fix that, when I had no framework
for understanding what was creating my results in life, when I
believed that it was just my external world, guess what? I just
turned to other things. I turned to alcohol, I turned to working as
much as possible, so I never had a moment to be alone with my
thoughts. I turned to spending money, I turned to all these things,
I turned to watching TV. Before you know it you’ve watched six
episodes and just wasted the entire night away. I turned to all
these things to try to change how I felt.
So this week, I want you to really, really think about the results
you have in your arms and life. Are you happy with your physical
health and your wellbeing? Are you satisfied with your job? Do
you feel good about your relationships? Are you going after the
goals you feel passionate about? Whatever your dream is. Are you
making music? Are you painting? Are you writing? Are you being
creative in a way that calls to you? Are you accomplishing the
things you want to be doing?
Now here’s the thing, most of you are going to say no and that’s
okay. I always tell people it’s just good to know. It’s just good to
have that information, because once you know that you don’t like
something, well then you can decide to change it and the good
news is that I’m giving you the framework for how to go about it.
You don’t have to control everything in your external life. You
don’t have to find the perfect partner or the perfect boss or go
back and create the perfect family members. You don’t have to
have the perfect body, you don’t have to have the perfect bank
account. What you need is to understand how the think-feel-act
cycle creates how you feel, how it drives everything that you do or
don’t do in life and how it gives you the results that you have or
don’t have.
So once you’ve answered those questions, I want you to then ask
yourself, what are you regularly doing or turning to to feel better
about the results in your life? What are you turning to to change
how you feel? Are you looking at the external world and blaming it
for everything that you have? Are you looking at the external
world and expecting that it will fix how you feel on the inside? Or
are you looking at everything you have in your life, your arms, all
your results, everything that was created by how you think, how
you feel and how you act and taking responsibility for that and
knowing thank god that you have this framework so you can start
to change what isn’t working?
Understanding this was everything for me. For so long, I can’t tell
you, I just blamed how I felt on everything in my external world
and I spent so much time trying to feel more confident, more self-
assured, less lonely, less awkward, less insecure, trying to feel the
way I wanted to by covering up how I felt inside, by scrolling on
my phone, by eating food, by working so much that I didn’t have
time to pay attention to what was happening in my brain.
Anything I could do to cover up how I was really feeling and then I
had to deal with all the repercussions created from trying to fix
the results in my life and cover up how I was feeling.
I promise you this: not only was I not going after what I really
wanted for my body and to do in life, but I certainly was not
finding the time or the energy to record a podcast every week or to
do all the things I really wanted to do. So this is what I want you
to think about this week. I want you to think about what you have
in your life or what you don’t have that you want to have. I want
you to take a look at those results and ask yourself, what am I
attributing them to? What am I blaming them on? And then ask
yourself, when you feel stuck, when you don’t know how to fix it,
what are you turning to in order to feel better and are you
spending more time on the backend dealing with those
repercussions, the repercussions from over scrolling, overeating,
from overspending, from over Facebooking, then you are using
that time towards what you really want to do.
So, that’s it for today everyone. Let me know what you think or if
you have any questions. And remember to get entered to win a
100 dollar visa gift card by leaving the show a review.
Thanks for listening and I’ll talk to you all next week.
