Ep.74 What got you Here wont get you There

Summary
In this episode, Andrew Costa discusses the concept of 'FML' - Feeling, Meaning, and Lesson. He explains that in order to progress and reach the next level in life, we must be willing to make changes and learn new tools. Coach Andrew uses examples from health, business, and relationships to illustrate how the same strategies and approaches may not work indefinitely. He emphasizes the importance of aligning our feelings and actions, finding personal meaning in our goals, and learning the lessons that life presents to us. By embracing these principles, we can overcome plateaus and continue to grow.

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Takeaways
To progress in life, we must be willing to make changes and learn new tools.
Aligning our feelings and actions is crucial for success.
Finding personal meaning in our goals helps to maintain motivation and fulfillment.
Learning the lessons that life presents to us is essential for growth.

Chapters
00:00 Introduction
03:00 The F in FML: Feeling
09:02 The M in FML: Meaning
17:16 The L in FML: Lesson
29:30 Conclusion

Transcript

0:40

Hello, my fine podcast family. How are we doing? This episode comes from a great conversation that I had with a client last week, in which I shared basically what got you here is not gonna get you there. So I wanna go into a really big deep dive with this. And to do this, I wanna share with you the context of our conversation and effectively how I walked her through it, because the reality is, is... You have to do things different and you also have to think differently in order for you to get yourself to the next level of your life or to be able to see more progress with your health and your fitness goals. So let's get into this client conversation here. So I had a client who shared with me her frustration that she felt so close to her goal. She had done all the work. She had lost 35 pounds already and she's at her final 10 pounds, but This is at the crossroads where her weight has stalled and it hasn't budged, even though she's 35 pounds down already, it hasn't budged for three weeks now. Okay? So I will say this in this journey of better health, it can be normal to experience a few weeks where maybe your weight doesn't change, or there might be weeks where you don't get to lift a heavier weight at the gym, or you might even feel like sleeping that extra hour for the week actually... didn't make a difference at all to your sleep. There are so many times where when we are doing something with our health and with our fitness, we see progress and we continue to see progress and we grow accustomed to seeing growth every single day or every single week in a linear fashion, okay? But the majority of the times in life, success is not linear. Now, this isn't just with health, this can also be, the case within your personal life where maybe you might take on a job, you get three consecutive straight promotions year after year, and then this year you don't get promoted. You're like, what the hell? What happened? Year over year, I've continuously gotten better. So where's the stall? What am I doing wrong? Or even in the case of doing something like building a business where month after month, you see a growth and an increase in revenue and an increase in clients. And then, Month after month, you're going up, up, up, then a six month halt, no growth. Just a stall that leaves you staring blankly trying to figure out what the heck did I do wrong? Was it my business? Is it me? Was I not taking care of my clients correctly? All of these things happen in life. And at that point, this is where we start to then question what we're doing, as well as start to reevaluate what we need to do or do differently in order for us to be able to get the results that we like. So now back to my client, in hearing my client express her frustration, the immediate reaction for her was for her to say, fuck my life. Now she said it as a joke and I laughed. I was like, yeah, it's funny. We both laughed about it. But the whole fuck my life can be a real mental struggle for people sometimes. We can experience frustration and it's normal to experience the feeling of frustration with our own journey. through our own subconscious way that we find ourselves stuck repeating the same habits and continuously trying to put more and more effort into something until a different result comes. That's just how we operate. But there's something that I want you to know though. And this is exactly what I shared with my client to break her out of that line of thinking so that way she could continue to grow and see that last 10 pounds come off. Okay. I said to her, what got you here is not. What can be the thing that gets you there? And this is why we need to make changes, changes to your food. We've got to change up your workout routine, but also changes to your sleep and your work schedule so that you can continue to see results. And I share this with her because the body has tons of different checks as well as different fail safes to make sure that what you're doing with your health is sustainable and it doesn't hurt the body long -term. Because after all, if we do something like lose weight, too quickly, we can permanently damage the way that we're absorbing nutrients in our gut. We can slow down our metabolism and damage that by stressing out our thyroid. And we can even permanently damage our adrenal glands by overworking them and by putting our body under too much stress that it doesn't heal. So you're gonna start to experience things like chronic fatigue, weight gain, all that type of stuff, okay? So why do I bring this up? I bring this up because there gets to a point in everyone's life where we need to make changes to get to the next goal, the next thing that's in front of us, but also the next level in life where what you're doing is only going to take you so far. Okay. In order to get to that next stage, you must then learn new tools. You must learn new skills to help you continue to grow and to stay in growth mode. because growth mode is really what's important. If you think about it, just like life and like nature, if we are not growing, we are dying. Being stagnant means that your body is not growing, it's not changing, the metabolism is not continuing, cells are not being replenished. Being stagnant in business means that your revenue is running out. Being stagnant in work means that someone might take over your job. We always have to be in a state of growth, okay? So as an example, I want to talk business first, tell my business peeps, okay? And this is very relatable for most people. When it comes to business, you can't continue to outwork and to build a business with just you. That gets to a point where you can't keep trading your time. You can't keep just tacking hours on the clock and shorting your sleep because if you continue to do so, you're going to burn out. Now, most entrepreneurs in the early game first... one to two years, they get stuck here. And that's why they say most businesses fail in the first one to two years, because they're stuck on, I just need to do more. I just need to spend more time. I just need to keep shorting my sleep. And then they burn out. Now, for the ones who succeed past that point, those people learn through mentors. They learn through friends in the space. They learn through coaches that they have to build a team because building a team, this team, is then gonna start to take hours and tasks off your plate where you can focus on sales and bringing money in to get to the next stage. Now at that point, what does the next stage become? As you start to bring a team, you're gonna realize that you're gonna now then start to have to build marketing to fill that team. So there comes the next struggle, okay? And then once you have the marketing to fill that team, you're then gonna come to the next stage where you're gonna need someone to manage that team while you work on the vision and mission. the team moving forward. So with each step in business and in life comes a new barrier. A barrier in which as a person, that entrepreneur is gonna have to not only change what they do, but they're gonna have to change what they focus on. They're gonna have to change their priorities, which means ultimately changing yourself. That's a big piece. Because if they don't change themselves, They're going to be stuck in the same place where they're trading time for money and they don't own a business. They actually just own a job. Now using an example of a relationship. Okay. When it comes to a relationship, the beginning of each relationship is relatively easy. Things are exciting. They're new and really, I mean, like first year of dating somebody, as long as you put in time and effort, right? As well as like pretend you're listening, then you're pretty much in a safe zone. Everything's exciting, everything's new, every time you go on a date you feel great and you're like, oh, I'm seeing so much progress in my relationship. Now most relationships will stay like this for the first year, year and a half. But then another level comes where now you have to consider if this person's a marryable. At this point, most relationships come to a grinding halt because a deeper level of understanding and of internal growth is required, okay? And, Communication needs to be built and always worked on, otherwise the relationship's gonna break down. So at this point, things like bedroom sex and new fancy dates is not gonna keep you connected anymore. You need a deeper level, a deeper level of understanding for your partner, you need to ask deeper questions, you need to have a higher level of integrity and accountability, and that becomes required as you get to that stage of marriage. Then there's the different stage of once you're married and after that first honeymoon year is over, you're gonna get to a next stop where you're gonna say, well, this marriage can't just be about us. It has to be about family. It has to be about connectivity. How does our families then become married together? And this is what gets you to the 10 and 20 year mark. These examples, it's important because what it goes through is, The classic sign, whether it's health, business, relationships, anything in your life, it's the classic sign of doing the same thing and expecting a different result is only gonna get you to a certain point. And there gets to a point where you cannot outwork what you're doing to get to the next level. Because we all have finite amount. This is why you need to change what you're doing. you need to change what you are doing. So as an example, when it comes to weight loss, like weight loss, you can't use the same nutrition to take you all the way down to a 45 pound loss, because the body has hormonal checks and triggers, like I did with my client, that might make them rebound. So what I had to do with her is basically after she lost the first 20 pounds, we did a hormonal reset. Then she lost, first 20 pounds, sorry, we did a hormonal reset. Then she lost the next 15. Then her next hormonal reset came early. So we had to put more fats into our diet. We had to do a refeed to show her body that, hey, you know what, it is okay to pass checks. She stayed stagnant for those three weeks. And then the week following, she lost 4 .2 pounds and then two pounds and then two pounds and then two pounds. So you have to do the change and... The change is not because you always have to switch things up because there's going to be things in your routine which will be consistent. So for example, sleep routine, always consistent, workout schedule, always consistent. But there's going to have to be things that you change in your routine in order for you to get to the next stage because the next stage you got to be able to go deeper. That's the biggest thing. Okay. Now, In order for you to go deeper, okay, we have to take a look at this whole FML, okay? And it's not fuck my life, okay? Although many people would want it that way. It's not when work throws you over time, you go, oh, well, screw it, you know, I had a good eating schedule and a good healthy routine, but now I gotta throw everything out the window to sacrifice this for a goal, okay? Or it's not in a relationship. Someone all of a sudden asks you to show up more and you say, okay, well, you know what? I guess I got to cut all my favorite hobbies and I got to stop this and I have to end my personal life to go to this. Okay, it's not an ultimatum that makes us have to sacrifice something to get to the next level. Many people, many people will have you believe that in order for you to get to the next level in your life, it involves getting rid of something else in order to do it. That's not true. It involves changing and reassessing what you're doing to do things differently so you can move forward. So let's go into this whole FML, okay? The F, it stands for feeling. And this is what I share with my client. The feeling is whenever you experience a plateau in your life, you should ask yourself, Why do I feel this way? And you should ask yourself, what is the feeling that I'm striving for with this experience? So when it comes to an example of my client and talking to her about this extra 10 pounds. The first thing that I asked her was, why do you feel this feeling of frustration? Well, I feel this way because I feel like progress should be stable. It should be something where I see two pounds down every single week, regardless of how much I've lost already, which is 35 pounds. Okay. Well, I said, well, how do you want to feel at the end of this process? Well, I want to feel like it's sustainable. I want to feel confident. I want to feel comfortable. And I want to feel like this, these are realistic changes. Okay, great. So would it be a realistic change to expect that your weight continue to go down and down and down and down and down without having any fluctuation where you're just continuously stripping food away? That's not realistic. That also probably wouldn't make you feel good. So here's the big thing with the feeling. The feeling is about doing and feeling being in alignment. Most people just do. And I'll talk about that in a second. But when you align feeling, you have to say, what is the feeling that I'm striving for? What am I striving for this experience? If I want to feel fulfilled, if I want to feel confident, if I want to feel like it's sustainable, but the feelings that I'm experiencing through this is it's not sustainable. I'm not confident and it's hard. I'm not doing something right. There's either something I'm doing wrong. something I'm trying to implement that's not in the right spot, that I'm not doing it at the right time, that I'm trying to rush the pace, that's preventing me from experiencing this. So like, you have to look at how you're feeling through the process. Because if we take the feeling out of something and just strive to hit the goal, we just strive to get to the next level, getting to the next level will not make you feel good. So as an example, I've had clients in the past way early at the beginning of my journey who like lost 50 pounds down there, like I don't get it, Andrew, I'm down 50 pounds. Why do I not feel happy? Well, because you're trying to rush the process to just get there and you're not falling in love with your body. That's number one. You have to love who you are. Or many people, I've had many friends that build incredibly successful businesses. They get to a million dollars in a year. They're like, yes, a million dollars. Every guru and coach out there says in order for you to be successful, you got to make a million dollars BS. Okay. They hit a million dollar run rate. And then I'm like, what's the matter? You seem kind of down. And they're like, truthfully, I hate my business. I feel like it's all that I work on. I don't love it. I loved that at the beginning. It's not exciting anymore and it's super stressful and I hate it. And I go, okay, well, why did you build this business? Because I want it to feel in control. I want it to feel. I wanted to feel confident. I wanted to feel fulfilled. Okay. Well, does the million dollars make you feel fulfilled? Does it give you confidence? Are you happy with it? No. Great. So you built a business on the wrong feeling. You wanted the feeling of getting there. So when the rush of just getting there, you lost the feeling of fulfillment and feeling good and just delivering value and getting excited about business, which is where all entrepreneurs start. Now when it comes to in a relationship, if you come into a relationship, you want to feel good in your relationship. You want to feel loved. You want to feel strong. You want to feel like you matter. And if two years into a relationship, you're like, I don't get it. I just feel like I'm battling. I feel like, uh, like I don't matter. I'm not valued. Your relationship is not lining up with the feeling that you're setting. So it means probably that you're not doing something right. or that there's something you need to consider or something within you that needs to grow and maybe it's involved looking at your feeling. That's the first thing, that's the F. Now the next thing, the next thing is meaning. That's what the M stands for. its meaning in FML. What is meant to be done? And what does this feeling mean that I am experiencing currently? Many of us, immediately create a vision board with what you want with your health, with what you want with your life. You write everything down and it's all superficial shit. It's like, I want a yacht, I want a hundred thousand dollar car, I want six pack abs. And I go, great, what meaning is the yacht gonna bring to your life? Nothing, no meaning whatsoever, no value. You could not even have a boat and still be completely happy, okay? When you... don't have meaning. And what I mean by that is like, what does this feeling mean that I'm experiencing currently? Are you putting those things? Are you doing the do? Are you doing the task? Are you just trying to check off the box? Because you feel like it is the right thing to do. You feel like you should. You feel like that's what everyone else does. So your meaning is the experience of others. I'm doing this for someone else. I'm doing this for something else other than myself. If you are operating out of a meaning of lack, like what is lacking in your life, if you are just trying to experience something to just get a quick hit of feeling good, and you're doing something just because you feel like it has to get done, you don't have a real meaning behind what you're doing. So this is especially true with So many people just want to lose weight because they don't feel body confident. Their doctor kind of shames them a little bit and they get scared and they're like, well, I've been meaning to do this for a while so I should just do it. That's not a strong enough meaning. What is the actual feeling behind that? It's very hollow. It's very routed in fear. It's very routed in resentment. And when you operate from that way, there's not a strong enough meaning to keep you doing that thing. And this is where a lot of people, like the daily non -negotiables or just showing up daily for yourself always gets backburnered because you don't have a meaning behind what you're doing. So what is meant to be done? If you have to look at everything that you have to do every single day, from a health perspective, I gotta eat clean every single day. I have to have consistent meals every single day. I have to get eight hours of sleep every day. I gotta wake up at the same time every day. I gotta make sure I get my workout in or like 30 minutes of movement. I gotta stay hydrated. These are the foundation. They're the fundamentals and the basics. If you can't get the fundamentals and the basics done, you have to ask yourself, what's the feeling that I'm experiencing with these currently? Because that's what's meant to be done, so why can't I do it? What is it in this moment that's preventing me from doing it? Now, I'll say this, the majority of the people that I work with, their meaning is super clear. They know what's meant to be done. I love it because the people I work with are incredibly self -led. They are all in on meaning. They know what it means to be healthy. They know what it means to be dedicated. They know what it means to be focused. They know what it means to be there for their family and they know what it means to put themselves first. So whenever they have something on the calendar, they don't move that shit, right? Like if you're a calendar mover, oh man, fix that first. Literally stop this podcast right now. Don't even listen to the rest. Fix moving shit on your calendar and say every single day, I'm going to go and whatever gets in my calendar gets done. because that's gonna give you a habit, it's gonna give you a routine, it's gonna give you consistency, and it's gonna make you selective about what you mean to do every single day. When you have the meaning, then whenever you hit a plateau, whenever you hit a part that's hard, that's sticking, you can go back to, am I doing what's meant to be done every single day? Nine times out of 10, you're missing things. You're slacking on certain stuff. You're falling and that's where you need to do more growth. Meaning it's not about doing new things every single time. Sometimes it's about doing the basics better. And it's about, of course, finding a group, finding a community, finding a collective, a coach, working with a team, hiring a team to make sure that they can help you with the daily non -negotiables of what's meant to be done. Now, the last thing is the LNFML. That's the lesson. If you are stuck in a plateau right now, you have to ask yourself, what do I have to learn? What is it that I have to learn from this plateau? And what, if anything, needs to be done differently to get me to the next steps of my journey? A lot of times, if you keep having the same struggle points, if you keep hitting the same plateau, if you keep finding yourself against the same wall, or you're going through the maze of life and you're always like, oh man. I picked the wrong path again. You have to ask yourself, what do I have to learn from that? Because you keep getting there. A lot of times, and this is where we get stuck in the do. We just wanna do. I'm gonna try the next thing. I'm gonna be random. I'm not gonna be conscious. I'm gonna be reactive about what I'm doing. And you're not learning the lesson that's in front of you. Life will make you learn in the strangest ways. It will always make you learn. never in the way that you thought that you'd learn the lesson, and it always makes you learn from the teacher that is probably gonna be the most difficult teacher. So what I mean by difficult is not a bad teacher, I mean the most challenging teacher will appear to challenge your views to make you learn in the best way. So like a great example for this, okay, this is personal one of my life I'm gonna share, okay? Most of you know, or maybe some of you don't know, okay, I have a rental property. And me and my wife, we own a rental property. It's a duplex. When I purchased that property, I got a really great deal on it. And it came with a tenant. Okay. Had an upper tenant. We'll call her Yen. The lower tenant called Yang. Now it was easy for me to get this property. I will say that we did all the right steps, the financing, it took time, but it was easy. I didn't have any struggle. Then I hit a wall. I hit a wall with this lower tenant where this person was incredibly difficult. Life presented me a very interesting way to teach me appreciation for that home, to teach me appreciation for the value that it provided my family, and for me to learn people's living conditions and the way that the system worked. I learned so much from her. Now, she was difficult. She destroyed the place. She toppled everything, she was not well. But that being said, it made me learn communication, it made me learn patience, and when I found myself at a crossroads with how am I gonna tackle this issue because it's preventing me from enjoying this property, it made me step back and say, what is the lesson here? The lesson is I need to be more cautious in vetting tenants. The other lesson, was I need to be clear with expectations and communication so that way these things don't happen in the future. That was my what if anything do I need to be done differently. I started communicating differently. I started being more appreciative for the person upstairs who was a phenomenal human being who just showed up and just wanted to learn in Canada and be a part of the system because she's not from here. I share that with you because The lessons that we have to learn will always continue to repeat themselves over and over again until you change, either change your mental state, change your emotional state, or change what you're physically doing. This is the biggest part of FML. It's the biggest part is the lesson. Because when we ignore the lesson, it appears later on in our life at a greater amount of difficulty. to force us to stare at it. And many people in life ignore the lesson every single time. We try to not look at it, we try to skip over it. For example, when it comes to health, most people I find the struggle is they keep going from crash diet to crash diet. That's the main challenge I see with everybody. That gets to a point where, when most of the clients reach out to me, where they're like, I'm done doing diets. The lesson is every time I do a crash diet, the weight comes back on and I feel like a bag of shit. The lesson is every single time I strip calories, the weight bounces back. I've learned the lesson. So now I need to do something differently. And because I don't know what needs to be done differently, I need to work with someone to get to the next step of the journey. Now here's the big key with lessons. Sometimes the lesson is, about learning knowledge, like, hey, you need to consider this from now on. You need to learn this new tool. Maybe you need to work with a coach or a mentor or someone who has done where you're trying to go or been where you've been or where you want to be in order for you to get to the next step. But sometimes the lesson is acceptance. The lesson is for you to become okay and to be patient. This world now, social media, the way it's built is designed to make you feel lack. And there's a reason why, and it's interesting, like when I say this, like there's a reason why in my podcast, I don't put people down. You feel enough lack from everywhere else in your life. And while I hope you see me as a leader, you are responsible for making your own decisions and your own damn opinions. You are intelligent enough, you're strong enough, you're focused enough, you're dedicated enough to actively choose what you need to learn. and what you need to do differently. You have all the knowledge and all the answers. You don't need anyone. Sometimes you just have to be patient. If you don't have the knowledge or the tools, find a mentor, work with a coach. That's the best way to get knowledge and tools. But if you have all of the information that you need and you're still stuck, then life is trying to teach you that you need to practice patience. And patience is hard, okay? Because here's the thing with patience. Patience is what you pay into it. You must pay. Pay in time, pay in dedication, pay in hours, pay in consistency, and that's the only way that it pays off. That's the first part of patience is pay. And some of us are not willing to put that cost because we want it right now. So those are the three things, okay? It's the feeling, it's the meaning, and it's the lesson. This is how we assess what we're doing is whether or not it's working or not, and changing our mindset, changing our emotions, or changing the physical to then break past our plateau. And it was crazy because although I didn't go this deep with my client, when I talked to her, I was like, this part of it, like three weeks, you've already lost 35 pounds, to be stuck for just three weeks and still maintain your weight and not have any digestive issues and to be free of bloating like you have been, how come you're not content with just even the success you've had? That might be the sticking point in itself. And lo and behold, we make a few adjustments, you talk through the challenge, and then she started seeing that. that consistent in that change. So this podcast episode, okay, it's about FML. Instead of fuck feeling, we need to find feeling. And the meaning, the meaning becomes my meaning, not someone else's. Because we often are trying to hit goals that other people have hit because we believe that's what will make us happy. Once we find the feeling behind why we are doing something, the meaning must be yours. What does this goal mean to you? What does this achievement mean to you? What does this business mean to you? What do you mean to do with this? If you build a business, why are you building it? If you're losing 30 pounds, why are you doing it? If you're in a relationship, or you're trying to find a relationship, why do you want to be in that relationship? What is the meaning of what you're doing? And it has to be yours, not someone else's. Finally, the lesson. The lesson becomes life lesson. So, FML, find the feeling, it's my meaning, and it's my life lesson. When we look at those three things and we focus on them, this is when you start to recognize that point, that liminal moment, that's basically a pinpoint moment in which you can decide to choose in your life. This is where you realize, what got me to this point was great, it was good. It allowed me to get here, but I'm gonna have to change what I'm doing moving forward in order to get me to the person that I wanna become. Now, the greatest part about this, okay, and I'll leave this with you guys before I hop off. The greatest part about this is as you start to grow in this moment of like, I'm getting to my... I'm getting to the next level, to the next stage, to the next area of growth in my life. Remember the future you has already gotten there. The future you already has the tools. Talk to yourself. Figure out what you want. And be confident to know that the only difference, the only separation between your success and your failure is time. As long as you continue to show up for yourself and you are willing to recognize that moment that like, Hey, what got me here is not going to get me to the next stage. You're just going to keep growing. You're going to keep growing. You're going to keep seeing results. You're going to keep changing. And that's what's going to allow you to bypass this. So hopefully you got some value from this. And I want you guys to, to literally implement this, implement the FML. into your life in a positive way. But like I said, like at the very beginning of this process, okay, and I remembered it literally as I said, FML, if you are moving shit in your calendar and you're like, I block a bunch of things in my calendar, but I always like, whoop, just kind of shift it to the next day, figure that shit out first, because I'll tell you now I'm ready for the FML stuff. Okay. Love you guys. Hope to see you on the next episode. Catch you later. Bye.