Ep #25: Gratitude

Are you convinced your life won’t ever be what you want it to be because you haven’t gotten on the boat, learning how powerful gratitude is? Well, keep listening to this episode where you will learn it’s never too late to use gratitude to create the life you want.

I am Dara Tomasson, and this is Weight Loss for Quilters episode 25: Gratitude. Did you know you could lose weight and keep it off for good? After 25 years of hiding behind my quilts, I have finally cracked the code for permanent weight loss, and I’ve lost 50 pounds without exercise or counting calories. I’m Dara Tomasson, professional quilter turned weight and life coach, where I help quilters just like you create a life they love by losing weight and keeping it off for good. Let’s jump into today’s episode.

Alright, happy 2022. Can you believe it? It’s already come. How are you doing with your goals? Did you even make goals this year? Alright, so today’s episode is going to really shift some of the thinking that has really kept you from first of all making goals and trying to work through them. And so I’m going to share this episode with you in a different way than what you would expect for the beginning of a year podcast, especially a weight loss podcast.

But I hear you, January 5^th, so many of you had really high goals and aspirations, and new year a fresh start, all of that. And by day three, four, maybe even today, I don’t know, how are you doing with those goals? So I know for myself I as a recovering perfectionist, that all or nothing thinking, I used to feel really glum and down by January 5^th because I felt like I just was constantly failing and that there was just no hope. And so I would mostly just give up. And it’s not just me. There is a lot of my clients and a lot of ladies that feel the same way.

And so today’s episode is one of great love and compassion. And remember, compassion is active love. And I’m going to be sharing with you some really powerful thoughts about gratitude and where you can take that in creating the life that you want. I’m also going to be sharing a tool with gratitude that I’ve never really heard of until I went to The Life Coach School and became a certified life coach.

So I’m going to be talking about that. And it’s a way of looking at gratitude that will really surprise you. But not only will it surprise you, but it will help you get really amazing results in your life. So how does that sound for fun? And then I’m going to share with you a way that you too can create whatever result you want in your life as you approach the year of 2022.

Okay, so in today’s episode we are going to learn about gratitude in general. Then we are going to learn a new way of looking at gratitude that’s going to help increase your confidence in yourself. And then we are going to look at a way to create results in 2022 that you probably never thought about how you can look at getting your own results before. Doesn’t that sound fun? I know, I love making these episodes.

And I love that these episodes will truly change your life as I know that these principles in action do truly change the kind of life that we can have as I’ve seen it in the lives of so many of my clients and my own personal life.

But before I do that I do love sharing results for amazing women in my program. So today I want to shout out all the ladies who have bought my Love Yourself Thin membership already, lifetime access, three calls a week. You get your very own tracking site on the membership. And they’re getting their bonus content as they’re patiently waiting for the doors to officially open.

And one of my clients, I want to shout her out, she was the first one to buy the lifetime membership and she bought it for her 67^th birthday. So that was super fun. And I love how she’s just going through all the bonus content and really enjoying all of that. So such a fun thing for her. And she’s already been working with me and she’s down, I think, 42 pounds in the last year.

So just not only has she lost so much weight, but she has just changed the way that she has approached her marriage, approached the way that she functions every day, how much less money she spends on fabric and how much more money she spends actually making all the beautiful things that she wants to make, so really fun.

Alright, so I’m going to share some thoughts about gratitude. And I’ve been recently listening to a book written by Dan Sullivan. And Dan Sullivan does a lot of coaching with high executives and entrepreneurs. And I really like the way that he looks at our lives and helping us understand the true impact of how being grateful keeps us in a place where we can create so much change in our lives. And what I like that I said was, “If you create a life for yourself that you love you just want to keep going on, and on, and on.”

And so as you know, my weight loss program is called Love Yourself Thin. So when I was reading this it really triggered something in me because the way that we can truly learn to lose weight and keep it off is we’ve got to learn to love ourselves totally which means we need to love ourselves the parts that we don’t even love about ourselves. And it’s just embracing it. And I would like to say, so when we think about love, it’s unconditionally love.

So it’s not like with your grandkids, they come over and they, as soon as they say something wrong or if they spill something you’re like, “Yeah, that’s it, you’re out of here. I don’t love you after all. Take a hike.” No, you unconditionally love them. So they can spill things. They can put their greasy hands on your window. They can put too much flour in the baking that you’re doing together, and you can still love them.

And that, when I talk about loving yourself thin, that’s the kind of love I’m talking about, it’s called really unconditionally loving yourself which also looks a lot like just accepting yourself exactly how you are and allowing yourself to be really accepting of yourself. So I love that he said, “You can’t be half envious and half grateful. Comparing yourself to other people is inevitable and can be a source of useful insights. When it leads to envy though it’s useless.”

And when we are grateful we actually don’t have any room to be envious, to be angry, to have any of those feelings. So when we allow ourselves to be grateful, we’re allowing ourselves to be in that positive emotion rather than always looking for what’s not so good.

So then he said, “Be grateful. Cultivate gratitude by thinking about or even better, writing down five things you appreciate about that person, their accomplishment and what that means is possible. It’s a great source of insight into what matters to you and can uncover some goals you may have had for yourself but not looked at until now. You can’t be half envious and half grateful. It’s either one or the other, so choose gratitude, it’s a state of mind that will give you the happiness and confidence of knowing you have lived in a world of abundance.”

So one of the problems that I see a lot in weight loss and just life in general, going to a quilt guild meeting, on Instagram or Facebook we really do fall into the trap of comparison. And comparison truly is the thief of joy. And when you compare yourself to others and when you think their life is better than yours, or they have done something better, or whatever that is. You’re literally giving your power away for you to decide your own happiness. So you’re saying, “Oh my goodness, I can’t quilt like you do so I apparently am not allowed to be happy.”

Or “I am not as productive as you are so obviously I’m not allowed to be happy.” So when I say you’re giving your power away, you’re giving away the ability for you to believe that you can create your own happiness which is actually the only way you can create happiness is through yourself. So when we think about gratitude, and I am going to include in this episode some gratitude prompts that you can read and write about.

Because I know that when I focus on having gratitude in my life, I’m just so much more happy. I’m so much more fulfilled because I’m not allowing my brain to go to the negative place. I’m truly allowing myself to be in that positive.

And just on that note there is a book called The Gap and The Gain. And it’s an amazing book. I’m really enjoying it. And it’s Dan Sullivan’s principles and it’s told by one of his students. And he wrote the book and if you get the audio version, I really like it because Ben, the man who wrote the book, he will read the chapter and then he and Dan Sullivan will chat about it. And Dan Sullivan will just tell some stories and he’ll kind of just give some insights about the concepts that Ben is teaching.

And it’s been really interesting for me because what it’s teaching us is that it’s another way of looking at – you can’t feel envy and gratitude at the same time. You can’t feel fear and gratitude at the same time. You can’t feel any of those negative emotions and gratitude at the same time. And so they talk about this concept of when we compare ourselves in our negative spot, instead of looking behind and really seeing how far we’ve come. So I’ll give you an example.

So if I have a client who’s lost 15 pounds in 10 weeks and then maybe there’s somebody else in the group that has lost 20 pounds or 30 pounds in that same amount of time. If you’re focused on the other person and their successes and it makes you feel envy, or it makes you feel disappointed, or it makes you feel those negative emotions. And she’s taking herself out of the gain of look at what I’ve done, I have lost 12 pounds in 10 weeks, I am doing something right. If she had gained 10 pounds in 10 weeks then we’d start talking.

But she had figured something out that’s working well. But when she is comparing herself to somebody else, so she’s in that gap then she’s not able to see the joy of the gain of the process of her being able to figure out how to make such an amazing accomplishment happen. And those people who are going to be joining my mastermind in February, that is going to be one of the books that we do as the book club because the mastermind’s focus is on how do you maintain your weight loss and how do you make it really solidified and it’s part of who you really are.

And there is so much out there on gratitude. And I’m not going to spend any more time on that. If you wanted to, you could do Google search after Google search. But I did want to talk about just looking at gratitude, if you are spending time in gratitude then that means that you’re spending less time with envy, or annoyance, or overwhelm, or discomfort. And you’re putting yourself and your heart into such a beautiful place.

And then I’m going to talk about this concept that I learned at The Life Coach School. It’s really understanding how to be able to create more and more results for your life. And this is why there are women in my program that have had just so many amazing results, it’s because one of the reasons they’re doing this is because they’re learning this tool. And it’s called having gratitude ahead of time.

So in order for us to have gratitude ahead of time we need to fast forward to envisioning that you’ve already had the success. So you’ve already lost all the weight. And you’re on vacation, you’re wearing the bathing suit that you really wanted to wear. You feel comfortable in your body. You’re walking around just with a beach cover on. You’re going out for dinner with your spouse, or your children, or your friends. And you’re just comfortable in your body, you’re actually grateful for your body.

And so in order for you to have more success in life we need to be able to believe that it’s possible for you to have that kind of life. And so when you can believe it, and when you can put yourself there, and you already know that it’s done then you can feel gratitude ahead of time. And when you feel gratitude ahead of time then you’re able to create those results so much faster. So one of the things that I want you to do is when you visualize you really need to be really clear and make it very believable that you had that experience.

So I’m going to give an example of this happens with weight loss, this happens with vacations, this happens with anything really. And one of the things that I wanted really badly was to feel comfortable and at ease in my body at family functions. So Christmas Eve we would all get together, and it was always such a magical night. We would have these special cheeses that my dad would go and curated, and he did all this research. And we had beautiful appetizers and the cheese. And we would have the specific salad that was so yummy.

And we would play dance tag and we would just get together. We did the nativity, and I always had the costumes. And my dad would read it. And we just really enjoyed it. But I always felt super self-conscious. And so it was really powerful for me to visualize ahead of time me being thin and me being not only thin but just me being super comfortable in my own body and not worrying about what other people think or other people say.

And so let’s say that you also want to – it’s an event like Christmas Eve, or a wedding, or a vacation, or whatever it might be. And I want you to just imagine everything about it. I want you to imagine what it would smell like. What does the house smell like? Or what does the, if you’re in Mexico, or Maui, or wherever, what does that smell like? And visualize the surroundings, are there trees? Is it a certain room? What does the furniture look like?

I want you to get very, very clear and really believable that you are in that place. The key to this process is that your visualization has to be so clear and believable, you are able to experience the feeling now just by thinking the grateful thought.

So if I said to you that you won a bunch of fabric. And you were at the quilt guild, and they had this big fabric giveaway. And they drew your name and they called you up and you walked up there, and they gave you this beautiful basket of the most beautiful fabric. And as I’m explaining it to you, what do you feel like in your body? How does your heart feel? How does your chest feel? How excited are you? And it’s not even happened but you’re imagining that it happened. So are you still experiencing those emotions of having won it?

So I want you to go to that place of really literally imagining yourself winning that beautiful basket. What would you be wearing and what would you be doing? When you create the experience of winning the lottery or this beautiful fabric in your mind, you just get those feelings, you get those emotions. So if you are having a hard time with feeling more gratitude, to overcome the obstacles that get in the way of gratitude, understand that you have a model. So that is what we do in our brain, we have thoughts that create emotions, and our emotion create actions, those actions create a result.

So you just have some thoughts that are interfering and creating an emotion that’s not producing those results that you want. So as you are creating anything in your life you are able to look at the results and actions you’re taking in relation to your goals. If you’re not feeling positive emotion and if you’re not creating the results that you are grateful for you know that all you have to do is reset your emotions. So I want you to just take a minute, I want you to go back to gratitude. How does gratitude feel in your body?

Go back to that space where you have already created the result that you want, so you think about in six months losing that 50 pounds or whatever that is. Go to that feeling of gratitude for yourself that you created that. And that will give you the beautiful reset you need in order to create whatever you want in your life. So when you go to gratitude, and you imagine that that goal has already been completed then you are using that emotion to fuel you. And when you’re in that vibration of gratitude, abundance, and positivity you will attract a lot of positive things in your life.

This is how the process actually works. If you can find your way to gratitude from your mind then you almost ensure that you have created whatever it is you’re grateful for. So the stories we tell about our past and future are optional. We get to create the future however we want it in our mind.

So I’m going to close this episode with an invitation to you. The invitation is what do you want to create for 2022? And I want you to just write it all down. And then I want you to imagine that we go into a time machine. And we go into the time machine and it’s December 31^st, 2022, and you are at my house. It’s not fun. Or I’m at your house or we’re on Zoom even. And you’re telling me everything that happened this year. And you’re explaining to me about all the amazing things that you accomplished. And how much that has meant to you.

And you just are just pouring out your heart with just so much gratitude of the life that you have. You’re just so grateful for it. So when you do that and you allow yourself to feel that gratitude, that, even though it hasn’t happened yet, that emotion is real. And that emotion will help fuel you, it will allow you to be in abundance and positivity. And it will be so much easier for you to attract the kinds of things you want in your life. So this episode might be a little bit different than you would expect.

But I want to tell you that this is brain science. This is how our brains work. We go to a movie, and we cry because our brain doesn’t know the difference between what’s really happening or what’s happening. They’re all thoughts that create emotions. So if you have found that you can’t lose the weight and that you’re always stuck it’s just because you haven’t been able to get to a place where you believe that it’s possible for you to lose the weight and keep it off.

And going through gratitude and doing that exercise that I explained, you’re kind of talking about the importance of gratitude and going to the future and believing it already. That’s what going to make such a difference for you.

Alright, thank you for joining me for today’s episode. And again, if you are interested in my lifetime membership program, Love Yourself Thin, the doors open January 15^th, and you can find all those details on my website at daratomasson.com. Take care. See you next week. Bye bye.

Thanks for listening to Weight Loss for Quilters. If you want more info, please visit daratomasson.com. See you next week.