108. Weight Loss and Butterfly Walking

Do you feel like no matter what you try, how many books you’ve read, podcasts you’ve listened to, thought downloads, you never really change? Well, I get it, and today I’m going to share with you a podcast that I listened to three and a half years ago that totally changed my life, and I’m hoping that it might help you also. I’m Dara Tomasson, and this is Love Yourself Thin, Weight Loss and butterfly walking and having courage. Okay, so back in March, right before the pandemic, I would say it was the end of February, beginning of March because it was finals for my son in basketball. My dad actually flew out, which was just so awesome. And I remember having this conversation with my dad about the idea of me becoming a life coach and I was toying with the idea of going to the Life Coach school, and it was a huge expense. It felt really out of my grasp of being able to afford to do something like that. And I listened to this podcast and it’s episode 288, if you would like to check it out by Brooke Castillo at the Life Coach School. And it’s called Butterfly Walking and I’m gonna just give you a summary of what she was talking about. And as I’m summarizing this podcast for you, I want you to think about what thought triggers are going on in your brain. So I find myself getting lots of thought triggers, i, I’ll be sitting in church or I’ll be listening to a podcast or I’ll be watching a movie and my brain it’s just like all over the place. It’s like, ooh, there’s an idea. And then that idea, I have three, four things off of that idea and I just go for it. So, let your brain just be open to listening, and I I’m super curious of what thoughts come to you as I’m describing my version of this podcast. But before I do that, I do wanna share a win from one of my clients and this win, it’s a very simple one, but it’s such a powerful thing that happens when you do this work. So this client of mine has done exceptionally well. She’s taken off 70 pounds, been very stable in keeping it off. But finds herself being very self-critical and we were doing some coaching and I asked her about why she just keeps bringing up these excuses and it was very interesting that she actually admitted that they were an excuse. And she even said, I feel really sheepish and I feel really icky, and I feel really gross admitting it, but you’re right, I’m using this as an excuse. And the fact that she could do that has made such a difference. And it was, there’s no coincidence that this week as she’s been going through her excuses she’s lost four pounds this week because she’s finally letting herself see what’s going on. So such a good win. Okay, so this podcast was from Brooke Castillo. She was taking her dogs for a walk and she saw this absolutely gorgeous butterfly walking on the road and she couldn’t understand why it would walk when it had these incredible wings and could fly anywhere. She kind of joked about how she thought like, we need to stop all traffic and we wanna protect this butterfly, which of course, she was able to, but then she proceeded to say that butterflies, they don’t walk very well, and they’re not supposed to walk very well. They’re supposed to use their wings and they’re supposed to learn how to fly. But the problem is, a butterfly isn’t just a caterpillar that adds wings to it. In fact, the metamorphosis, the change of a caterpillar, to a butterfly is it actually liquefies and then re- forms itself. So you don’t just like add wings and then you’re good. You actually dissolve and become a whole new structure. And so the problem with that is the first version of being a caterpillar, it doesn’t actually help you to become a butterfly because the skills that you need to be a good caterpillar are very different for the skills you need to be a good butterfly. A caterpillar, you know, climbs and moves and eats a lot of leaves. Whereas a butterfly pollinates. And so you actually have to give up who you are now and who you’ve been if you’re going to become the person who you really want to be. And this is really challenging because, and I, it’s funny how I write down all these ideas that I have ’cause I carry this bank around of podcast. And for the month of August, I’m really focusing on our identity and becoming someone different because, you know, I think about preparing you all for September. And September traditionally is back to school. Let’s go. And August hopefully we’re able to have some more relaxing time. I know ever since I was a kid, we went on vacation, in my memory in August. And traditionally in my family, my kids, we pretty much always take the last two weeks off in August and just kind of a reset before we go back to school and get back into the routine of school. This podcast is to help you to become that next version of yourself because the problem is when you keep turning to food to try to feel better, you actually never get better. The food isn’t the thing that makes you feel better. So you’ve peaked yourself out of this attempt to change. And then the other part of it is when you have lost weight, 99.9% of you, the way that you lost the weight was hustle, willpower, and so you don’t ever actually learn the skill of losing weight. And so now you’re constantly living in fear of putting it back on. And so what this episode for you is I want you to learn how to have some courage to change. So just like the win that I shared with my client who was finally able to say, yeah this is an excuse and it feels terrible, but I’m willing to look at it and I’m willing to see that I’m actually holding myself back and I don’t wanna do this anymore. So it’s having to give up who you are now so you can become the person you wanna be. Now I’m gonna give you some like common excuses that I hear. And not only do I hear them, but some of them I have myself. So a lot of members in my program, a lot of their excuses are, my mom took me to a doctor when I was young and she shouldn’t have done that. That was wrong. Or my mom made comments about my body or my teacher, or my different family members. And so they have this resentment, they have this frustration and they hold onto it. And the problem is, should the mom have done that? Probably not. Was that super awesome? Nope. Did it hurt your feelings a lot? Absolutely. I had a recent conversation with a new client and when she was growing up, her mom or her aunt would make her back to school clothes and one of them had mentioned, oh, we need to give a little bit more room here in your rear, because you’re just like more fully developed there. And that really stuck with her and it kind of made her feel awkward and uncomfortable about her rear and become really self-conscious of it since she was like 10 years old. So we hold onto these things and then it’s so interesting when they look back at pictures of themselves and thinking, why did I make such a big deal? I really wasn’t that big. But we hold onto these hurt feelings and it’s almost like a security blanket. And we kinda hold onto it and think, well, this was really hurtful and I’m gonna have this person, you know, they’re gonna pay the price. I’m gonna keep it up. So we all become butterflies, we all change, right? We all become adults. We all have different desires. Even like when I was a kid, all I wanted to do was be a mom and a school teacher, and I got to do that. I got to be a school teacher, which was awesome. I taught for almost 10 years. I loved it. And then I became a mom, which was so awesome, and I love being a mom. And I wanted to be an author and I did that. And now I’m a life coach and I love doing that. And so evolution metamorphosis. It’s all part of who we are. We can’t just stay the same. And we talk about our higher brain wants us to always be evolving and changing. That’s why humans have done so well. So Brooke talks about some indicators of, if we are struggling with this, these are indicators for us. So the first one is, are you struggling with not being able to transition into the future version of you who you want to be? You know this if you’re struggling and trying to hustle into that. So using a lot of willpower or only focusing on your past or immediate life. so what that means is you’re not allowing yourself to recognize, hey, I can have some discomfort now, it’s gonna pay off for my future. So I wanna go downstairs and get some chocolate chips out of the pantry. I wanna do some baking, but I don’t actually want the result of that. I don’t wanna have the consequence of that, and my future self is gonna really thank me. And then number three, do you have a false identity? So what means do you have an image of yourself that’s not accurate? So where are you in that? And then do you justify why you haven’t had success? So that’s this client of mine who finally admitted, I keep having these excuses like keep blaming my mom or keep blaming menopause or whatever those are. So like I said, you have become your best Caterpillar. You’ve peaked out. You are ready for transformation, but you have to let go of what you were, and you have to be able to learn to become that next version of yourself. And in a recent episode, I talked about the big leap of Gay Hendricks, So he talks about we have these upper limit problems. It is difficult to be bad at something again, once you’ve done really well. I see this a lot in quilting. I see this a lot with free motion quilting, especially because with piecing there seems to be a lot more accuracy. It’s a lot more logical. But if you want to do free motion quilting and you want to have more of an expression and more of a design. You are the artist. You are the one who’s creating that, and at the beginning it feels so horrible and awful, but the only way you can get good at it is by being bad at it at the beginning. You also see this a lot in when you’re learning a new language. So when I learned French and I moved to France, it was really hard because I was trying to connect with people. I was trying to talk to them, but my French wasn’t very good and so I felt so awkward because I couldn’t express myself in the same way. I didn’t have the words, I didn’t have the knowledge, I didn’t have that ease and the language, so I wasn’t able to really connect with them in the same way that I would had I been able to express myself in English. So, the reason I also wanted to share this episode is people get really excited when they join my program. They get really excited when they listen to this podcast or they hear me on someone else’s podcast and they think this makes so much sense. This was the missing piece. This was, I know I need to have the mindset. I need to have tools to help my brain. I need all of this, but actually doing it is really hard. You have to have the courage to change. You have to have the courage to be bad in order to be good. And the problem is when the butterfly is walking, it’s this beautiful butterfly, but their legs aren’t meant to really be walking. The butterfly is actually now meant to fly. And when it flies it’s a whole new skill set and it has to learn how to do that. And it has to be willing to be vulnerable. It has to learn about the wind and the air foils and cars moving and all of these different animals and different plants. It has this whole new thing that it has to learn, but once it learns it, and once it’s starting to learn, As it’s learning, the only way it can master it is if it just continues to learn, to fail, to evolve, change, learn from that, learn from the failure, and keep moving forward. So I want to invite you to just ponder what’s coming up for you in this episode. What does it mean to have to give up who you are to become who you want to be? So it can look like I don’t bake anymore to feel better. I just spend time with my own brain. I do a thought download, I work a model. I apply the 50 50 rule, or I look at my perfectionism book and I go to the recovery step four, and I work through all of that. That’s what it means. It means you have to change the way you do things. It means you have to go outside and maybe move your body. It means you might have to pick up some weights and help build your muscle so that your muscle tone will be better, so then you can burn more calories. It means you need to balance your hormones. It means you need to think about your thinking and let yourself feel the feelings instead of going and grabbing that ice cream. ’cause you just can’t deal with it. It means having those difficult conversations. It’s doing things that feel awkward, but just like the butterfly who practices how to fly, the more they practice, the more amazing they are at flying and they really become limitless as they learn to fly. And that’s what I want for all of you. And that is what the tools do for each one of the ladies who learn these tools, they start becoming totally limitless in what they wanna create. I am so glad I did not give up on myself. As I look back over the last five years of knowing these tools it is unbelievable as I think about how far I’ve come, and I’m so thrilled about that, and I want that for you. So if you’re interested in coming to talk to me, I would love to meet with you and help you on this journey. All right, take care everyone. Bye-bye.