The Power of Quitting: How Letting Go Can Unlock Bold Growth in 2025

Are you excited about 2025 or do you already feel daunted and stressed out? Well, guess what? Either way. I’m so glad you’re here. My name is Dara Thomason and this is episode 180 the power of quitting the quilters coach podcast. What? She’s talking about quitting at the beginning of a year. Oh my goodness.

You are going to love this episode because I’m going to blow your mind a little on being that non traditional person. So I would say I’m fairly, so I’m a mom of five kids. I was a school teacher. I’m 51 years old. I’ve just entered menopause. Um, and, uh, I have built a coaching business for quilters. So in some ways I am very traditional.

I, but in other ways I am completely. unique and different. And I love it. I love being different. I love being six feet tall. I love being, um, non traditional.

I love bucking trends. Even when I was a school teacher, my classroom was unique and different. And I, in fact, when I first started teaching, I had three grades in one classroom and this is in a public school. And, um, so that is my natural intuition is to be unique and different. I like that, but I also, and all of us have the same similarity, we all have similarities because we’re all wired to belong.

So this podcast is going to go against the grain in so many ways. But I’m going to show you that this is actually true, so this concept that I’m teaching you is actually showing you how our society has been able to evolve and grow in so many incredible ways. And I don’t know about you, but some of you have been thinking, what is going to be my, what is my word for 2025?

I know in the quilting world, we’ve been doing that for years and years. Everyone. So I was like, this is my word, simplify or, um, creative or whatever it is. And this year I’ve combined bold. and simple, bold and simplify it at the same time. And I know that the reason I haven’t grown my membership as big and as bold as I want to, it’s because I have been, I haven’t allowed myself to be as bold.

I haven’t allowed myself to be as bold as I, as I really want to be, because the truth is I teach weight loss. backwards. Pretty much all my approaches to weight loss are so different than anybody else. And I have to be honest. Sometimes I get a little bit nervous because I don’t want to have all these experts breathing down my neck telling me I’m doing it wrong.

But guess what? The reason I hadn’t lost weight was because I was always telling myself I was doing it wrong because I never gave myself permission to do it how works best for me. So today’s episode is going to be teaching you a skill Uh, called quitting and hear me out because I even have a hashtag that always says quilters not quitters, but I’m going to teach you to quit in the most productive, amazing way possible.

So if you’re in on that, then let’s go for it. And I’m all about fucking the trends and I want you to be able to do the same thing. And I also want you to start trusting that your way is always going to be the best way. And of course, get coaching. Of course, get help in learning to see your own pitfalls.

I just got this morning by Jodi Moore. How exciting. I love being able to get coached by her. And I even brought her, I said, these are the things that I’m concerned with. Tell me, what am I, what am I missing? And she was able to help me see some of my thought errors and able to help me get back on the path that works best for me, and she even said it, she goes, you got to do it the Dara way.

And I’m like, yes, amen. And so this year, 2025, and this focus of my podcast is really helping you do it in your specific way. And when I share the wins, cause I always share the wins of my members, I’m going to show you the wins of how they created a result. In their own unique way. It wasn’t because they said, Dara, help me.

Tell me what I need to do Uhuh. They said, this is my problem. And I show them what they’re, what they’re thinking, and then they get to get to work and figure it out. So one of the wins that I love so much is I have a client who joined the membership. She actually doesn’t have physical weight loss to lose.

She feels. She’s very confident in that area, but she struggles with her relationships with her, um, with just with everyone, friends, family, um, and just, there’s a lot of background of not feeling heard as a child and not feeling confident to really say what she wanted to say and then years and years of feeling resentful and then feeling bad about all of that.

And so it sometimes would feel better and easier just to ignore that. Which is actually not true. And um, she had this huge win the other day about how she really wanted to create this wonderful Christmas experience. And she had shared with her husband a desire that she had. To, um, to go and see these special lights at Christmas time.

And, um, she didn’t want to control him or feel like he was feeling being controlled, but she was able to express what she wanted and then step back. And it was a huge surprise. He planned, not only did he plan to go to the lights, but he called and organized friends of theirs to join them and then to go to a restaurant that she really likes and they are in their late sixties, early seventies.

And they, their marriage, has just evolved so much because she quit picking, like, like always focusing on the negative. She quit giving up on him and avoiding conversations. She quit on all of these old habits and she created new ones. And that’s what’s created this new shift because now he can be him and she can be her.

And because she’s quit on all of those things. He has so much more freedom and she’s also not, it’s like she doesn’t have the leash anymore telling him what to do, when to do it and how to do it. And so it just makes such a difference. And I see this in my own marriage. I see this in the marriages and the relationships of the ladies in the program.

So if that’s something you want, let’s dive into this episode and hear a little bit more about what I’m talking about when I say we need to learn to quit certain things. Okay. So, aren’t you glad that we quit on always having candles and fueling our house with coal and with hand washing our clothing?

Aren’t you glad we quit on fax machines or on, um, when my mom was little, they had their, the telephone was a community phone. So you could like to listen in on other people’s conversations. There’s lots of gossiping going on, but aren’t you glad that we said enough is enough. We are not going to be always having candles.

We are not always going to be burning coal. We see the problems with it. We’re not going to be spending all this time washing clothing by hand. And so those people, uh, running water, all of that, they said, enough is enough clean water. We are going to create a system. We are going to create a way that’s going to help us so that we can have more time to do things that aren’t so menial and so hard on our backs and so difficult.

And so I love that. I love that these people decided we’re going to quit this because this is not working. And so I want to ask you, what are some of your behaviors that you need to quit? And this is really tricky. I get it because it means that you have to change. And in fact, um, in October of 2024, I joined this, this challenge.

So I’m in this challenge and he talked about, he was interviewing, um, This world leader who goes in and helps countries, developing countries to become more developed and be more competitive in the, the bigger world stage. And what he said was really fascinating. He said that the biggest difference between these developed countries or developing countries is the level of accountability.

That’s really interesting. So in my own, um, uh, leadership, in my own business, my own company, I took that and I applied it to my, my team and I said, I want higher accountability. Like, how long did that thing take you? How long was this and that? And it was interesting because there was fight back, there was pushback.

They didn’t actually want to have that level of accountability. Now, the other thing that’s interesting is what do we talk about for diets? We talk about this, the general dieting consensus is that we have to be highly accountable for every single calorie, every single bite, every single step, and we have to be trading it.

But when I did that, I was rebellious and I was frustrated and I felt really disempowered. And so in fact, I, I don’t teach, um, necessarily intuitive eating, but I do teach a, I guess, I guess a variation of that. I knew, I hadn’t even actually thought of it as intuitive eating, but I had an accountability to actually me.

I was accountable to my feelings, to the food that I was eating. And then I went on the scale every day, which I still do. And I am now accountable to me. So I have this high level of accountability and I’ve created that system for me. And so when my team said, we don’t actually want to be as accountable as she’s asking, then they actually self selected basically and said, I don’t think this is a good fit.

I wish I could quit on saying no more. I wish I could quit on not having to start fresh all the time. Like January, this is January 2nd, 2025. Like how many of us put pressure on ourselves to do really, really great. And there’s so much pressure. Let’s, what would it be like to just quit? What would it be like to just say, I don’t actually have to lose weight?

I have a client back at the end of October. Um, and I said, by the way, did you know that you don’t have to lose weight? She looked at me and she’s like, what are you talking about? I said, you’re, you look great. You’re a beautiful woman. You’re really well put together. You always have nice outfits and she has like the cutest quilting t-shirts ever.

And, um, she’s about, I don’t know to the, when you look at the recommended weight, she’s, I would say like 50 pounds overweight, maybe 60. But really I’m like, I was 50 pounds overweight for a long time and you know, I was able to do a lot of things like you don’t have to lose weight. And a week later she came to me and she said, that has completely changed my life because I no longer have to be a jerk to myself.

I don’t have to make myself. Like you gave me permission not to lose weight. And I was like, yeah, you don’t have to lose weight. I mean, if you’re 500 pounds and you’re going to die soon, and if you want to live longer, yeah. Or if you want to go on like a certain roller coaster, or if you want to go kayaking, they have weight restrictions.

If you want to be able to go grocery shopping by yourself, you can’t be 500 pounds and go grocery shopping by yourself. Right? So I want to just really emphasize this point that we need to learn when to say no more. That’s enough. I’m done with this. We need to learn when to say I’m ready to quit and then be specific about it.

So now you might be saying to me, well, Dara, like I bought all this fabric or I’ve invested. I mean, currently as I’m recording this, I have no kitchen and I’m recording this on December 19th and of course Christmas is around the corner. Correction. I have Ikea boxes and kitchen materials. They’re just not assembled.

Sorry. How nice they look. She said, yeah, because they actually fit me. And chances are she’ll, if she keeps like doing that thing and feeling like embracing that, those pants are going to start being pretty baggy soon because she’s no longer needing to be such a jerk to herself. So, um, my challenge is to really look at the way you’re thinking, the way you’re talking to yourself, and then start disrupting that.

Just saying, you know, maybe I just need to quit this. This is not helpful. This is not going to get me where I want to go and talk

and seriously consider what being in my membership would look like because I truly teach weight loss backwards. I teach you, I teach you how to be, to be, to embrace how you really are your weight. Sorry, I would teach you to embrace your current weight and treat yourself kindly and compassionately and and all the things that we’ve been told we shouldn’t.

And the more you do that, the more the weight loss is going to be easier, simpler, and actually inevitable. So if you want that for 2025 and the rest of your life, permanent weight loss, these life coaching tools truly do make this change. And I am here to help you all along the way. So the doors are open for the membership.

And I invite you if you’re ready to go, let’s do it. Um, if you want to have a conversation with me, ask any questions, you can book a 20 minute free coaching call and we can talk about, I can give you some free help and then we can talk about the program and if it’s a good fit or if there’s other, maybe you, maybe you need to go to trauma therapy.

Maybe you need something else, but I definitely can point you in the right direction. So I love that we’re having these conversations and this podcast. It’s such a pleasure for me to be able to do this for you. I am so grateful to those who have put podcasts out before, um, that I just, I, it was like I got a whole new life from listening to what they shared.

So that is my, that is my hope for my podcast is to really help you to create the kind of life that you really want to have. Because I know 100 percent is totally possible. And when you learn these tools and you finally quit on the things that aren’t going to get you to where you want to be, that’s when you get that progress.

All right. Take care, everyone. Bye.