I had this client named Ashley.
I told Ashley that her troubles with her weight and self-esteem were a result of thoughts she was believing and certain choices she was not making.
“I get what you’re saying intellectually,” she said. “But I don’t really get it down here yet…in my heart.”
“I disagree with you,” I said. “I think you don’t get it intellectually, otherwise if you really got it, you’d have it and you’d never lose it. So let’s keep talking about it.”
She couldn’t yet see where she was automatically believing her negative victim thoughts without challenging them at all, without even holding them up to the light like a $100 bill to see if they were counterfeit.
Ashley thought people were unfair to her. They didn’t listen to her. Other people disappointed her and let her down. A few very close people even “betrayed” her. She’d personally missed a lot of opportunities in life, because of her weight, she said. She didn’t have many of the advantages that her peers enjoyed because people viewed her as an alien. She wasn’t treated well in the few relationships she managed to cultivate with the “pigs” disguised as men.
You can see that inside Ashley’s mind, this was a hard knock life filled with disappointment. She certainly felt like a victim, and given what she was believing, I couldn’t blame her for feeling that way. We always feel what we think. No way out of that!
For Ashley, being “healthy” or “fit” or “skinny” was a fixed trait that people were either born with or not. They either “have it,” or it’s “in their genes,” or they have some inborn unshakable “willpower,” all of which Ashley did and could not possess – which, ultimately, is why she could not have the life she wanted.
Ashley never thought to challenge any of her negative thoughts. She believed that the test of whether a thought (no matter how frightening or negative) was true was whether she herself was thinking that thought. If she was thinking it, the thought was true. If she was not thinking it, the thought wasn’t true.
I work at a share-space office in Santa Monica, Los Angeles. It’s a really big, open loft where a bunch of startups, entrepreneurs and creatives work from. A CEO of a tech company once told me, “Every system is perfect.”
“Okay, and…?” I was thinking.
I had been talking about my client acquisition strategy. I didn’t really know what he meant.
“Every system is perfect for the result it gets. If you want a different result, put in a different system.”
That was a big moment. I needed a new system.
Do you want a different result? Yes? Would it work to keep doing what you’re doing and just dream bigger? No.
It’s simple. You need a new system. A system that would be perfect for producing the results you want. A system you can walk into and benefit from every day, because it’s not out there, stranded in your future, it’s right inside your mind.
The way you think about dieting and “living healthily” is fundamentally broken. Which means your relationship with food is broken, and it’s why you’ve “failed” in the past.
Don’t worry, I’m going to help you build it back up.
