Why you Keep Stopping & Starting Over- a Book Review

In this episode, I’m talking about a concept that might completely change the way you see yourself and why you keep stopping and starting over.

I’m diving into one of my favorite books, The Big Leap, and why it’s been so powerful for me (even after reading it multiple times).

We talk about the idea that you may not be lacking discipline or consistency… you might actually be bumping up against an internal limit for how good you allow your life to feel. 

I share how this shows up in real life...like doing really well for a stretch and then suddenly falling off track, creating stress where there wasn’t any, or going back to old patterns just when things start to feel easier.

This episode is really about understanding your “baseline” - the emotional patterns you’re used to - and how your brain will try to pull you back there, even if it means creating problems.

I also walk you through some of the common ways this shows up, from weight loss to relationships to self-worth, and why it has nothing to do with you being weak or doing something wrong.

Because when you can recognize what’s happening, you can start to change it.

This is about learning how to stay in the good moments a little longer… letting things feel easier… and allowing yourself to actually have what you want without undoing it.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re always starting over...or like things go wrong right when they’re going well....this episode will help you understand why, and what you can begin to do differently.

Enjoy!  Courtney

Get instant access to my free Playbook (Take Control of Your Evening Eating) HERE

I currently work with women privately to achieve their health, mindset, and body goals.  I would love to offer you a consultation HERE to discuss the changes you want to make to create more joy, health, and peace in your body and life.

Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

Bob, welcome to modern body, modern life. The podcast for women who want to feel powerful, healthy, strong and confident, inside and out at every age. On this podcast, we talk about becoming a woman who is fully in control of her eating and movement, so weight loss, strength and energy become permanent. We also talk about something bigger, becoming the woman who takes her deepest desire seriously and goes after more in every area of her life. I'm body and life coach Courtney Gray, and I believe you can get in the best shape of your life at any age, and when you do, it becomes a catalyst for everything else, your relationships, your confidence, your joy, because when you feel like you and your body, all of life gets better. Let's get started. Welcome to the podcast episode 128 why you keep stopping and starting over? This podcast is going to be another book review. I have been suggesting this book to my clients for years. It is one that I have read at least four times. I've read it in hard copy, and I also am doing more and more audible, and I just think it is so powerful at many, many stages of our growth. So this book really is going to help you understand yourself at a deeper level, which is always where we want to start understanding ourselves, understanding why we tick, what makes things go well, what why sometimes we self sabotage, all the different things. And this book recently was suggested to me by my coach, and she knows I've read this book, but she goes, you've read the big leap. And I'm like, yeah. She goes, You need to read it again. It's getting in your way. And I laughed. I'm like, Okay. And so that weekend, I walked two days in a row, and I listened to the whole thing. I walked, and I think I listened to it a little when I did some gardening, and I listened to the whole book, and it it's almost like it hit me in a new way, and I thought, Ooh, I really need to do a podcast on this book. So this book is called The Big Leap. It is by Gay Hendricks, and even if you get it on Audible, notice the picture on the front is so beautiful. It's this beautiful blue background with this fish bowl, and there is a beautiful little bright orange goldfish that is jumping from a smaller little fish tank, a little fish bowl into a bigger fish bowl. It's just it is the perfect cover for this book. Have you ever seen a book and you look at the cover and you're like, why who chose this cover? Like, were they drunk? What's happening this cover just is such a beautiful cover. You've got to see it. So if you get it on Audible, make sure you really take note of the cover of this book. I just absolutely, absolutely love it. I have to think that after Gay Hendricks wrote this book, and because I don't think that the author usually does the cover, I think it's suggested by the publisher, but I have no idea. I've never done this, but I have to believe he looked at that and thought, oh my god, it's perfect. So have you ever noticed that things can be going really well in your life overall, or maybe even in a certain area of your life, and then suddenly something happens where it's almost like you self sabotage, you feel like you self sabotage yourself, or you feel like something goes wrong. And sometimes you feel like it's out of your hands that something goes wrong, but you just were, like, feeling so good, things were going well, and maybe you were being really consistent. And then you fall off track. Maybe you feel like you've been working out and really enjoying working out, and then all of a sudden you just like, like, you maybe you get a cold, and then you just like, stop working out, or you're feeling really good, and then you kind of like, pick a fight, or get in a fight with your partner, or you feel like you're eating well at night, and then all of a sudden you overeat, and you kind of get the fuck it's and then you shut down. This is what this book is going to address. It's going to address, really, what holds us back from taking that big leap. And now, let me just say too is, you know, when I when we think about the little goldfish, and we think about it leaping out of the little bowl into the big bowl, which is so cool, right? When it gets in that big bowl, life isn't perfect in the big bowl, right? It doesn't mean that it that, that, you know, there's always consistency. It doesn't mean things go wrong. But I think that what this book really addresses is that sometimes we really get in our own way, often subconsciously, when things are going well, and it addresses why this happens. In the first time I listened, it was powerful, but this last fourth time I listened, it was like my mind kind of exploded. So let me explain the concept. So we all have a comfort zone for how good we allow ourself to feel. I like to think of this comfort zone, like as a baseline. And we all have a different baseline with the kind of emotions we feel on an average day. I think we have a baseline. That I think we have a baseline of how much happiness we experience. And this baseline, we can think of as our comfort zone. And when we think of a survival instinct, we think of our primitive brain wanting us to survive. It really wants us to be at this baseline. It wants us to be at our baseline comfort zone, happiness and struggle. It's where we have survived and when, all the sudden, we start getting happier or more successful, more money, more you know, weight loss, whatever. Sometimes that is not our norm, and our primitive brain wants to go, you know, this doesn't feel quite safe. This feels out of the norm of our comfort zone baseline. So we're going to actually create, subconsciously create some drama, and we're going to go back to what feels normal. One of the best examples, and he uses this example in his book, is the statistics on lottery winners. Now, I've heard the statistics before, so I really wanted to do a little bit of research, and not just like, blatantly start spouting numbers that I didn't, at least do a little googling of. And so there is this myth that 70% of people who win the lottery within like five years go bankrupt, and that's not actually accurate. It is about like they say 33 like 33% about 1/3 of lottery winners eventually declare bankruptcy, and a lot of them do it within three to five years. And so why is that? Why does that happen? So Gay Hendricks, in this book, The Big Leap really addresses that, and he says it's this concept of wanting to go back to our comfort zone, that even after someone wins the lottery, their comfort zone is striving. Their comfort zone is not financially not that they're not financially secure, but they're certainly not a millionaire. They're not someone who can hold and steward a lot of money. So then all of a sudden, when they go above their comfort zone, when they get, you know, more money, more joy, more freedom, more all these things with this money that they're not really comfortable with, that they don't really know what to do, it's almost like too much. And so they kind of self sabotage, and eventually have to end up declaring bankruptcy. Now, of course, this isn't all people, but it's a lot of people, and it's a really great analogy for this concept. It's this upper limit. He calls it an upper limit problem. So when we go beyond our upper limit, we get more success, more joy, more ease, we subconsciously start creating problems. We subconsciously pull ourselves down to a place that actually feels more comfortable. And the there, the very like, I guess, like, easy way that I like to describe this to some of my clients is, all safe. You've been living your life in overwhelm. All of a sudden, if circumstances align and there is no overwhelm, you're going to create overwhelm, because it's what you've been doing. If you've been living your life stressed out. Or we can take away all those technical like, quote, unquote, stressors, but you are going to go back. You're gonna find something to stress about. If you've been telling yourself a story that you're not capable, you're not reliable, you're not consistent, if all of a sudden you start finding evidence that you actually are, there is a tendency to go, Yeah, but we know this isn't gonna last and go back to our lower limit, right? The upper limit problem is this is too good for me. I'm going to go back to what is comfortable so we don't self sabotage because there's something really that wrong with us. We self sabotage because our brain is trying to protect us and return us to what feels familiar. Because what is familiar is ultimately what is safe. It's Remember, our primitive brain always wants us to repeat, repeat, repeat. What's working. It doesn't want us to experience anything new. It just wants us seeking pleasure, avoiding pain and conserving energy. And so even you would think like, Oh no, our brain wants us to be happy, not necessarily. If we have been not happy for a long time, it feels a little unsafe. Think for a moment about what your baseline emotional set point is. Do you spend a lot of time, if you look at yourself now and over the years, do you spend a lot of time and stress. What about overwhelm, guilt or kind of a feeling of like not enoughness? I see this a lot with my clients who are getting ready to retire, and they have this thought, like, once I retire, I'm going to be so much happier. I'm going to be so much more organized. I'm going to put myself first. And then they retire, and technically, they have all the time in the world, but yet their set point is stress and not enoughness and overwhelm, and they will create that for themselves. I think this is a reason a lot of women and men, when they lose weight, they end up gaining the weight back, because their set point is struggling. It's it's talking to themselves in a not loving way. It's having fun, and that's tied very deeply to food. And then all of a sudden, when they lose the weight, those ties are still there. They haven't created a new self concept. They haven't learned how to eat and feel in control of their eating. They haven't learned how to prioritize their health. They haven't learned how to say no because they feel guilty when they're saying no. They haven't learned these things. They go back to their baseline of struggle. And here's one thing to ask yourself, if joy and confidence but also ease, if something feeling easy does not feel familiar, your brain is going to try to get you back to feeling the struggle, to feeling like things have to be harder than they are. The reason my coach suggested this book to me is I am a really hard worker, and that's a good thing, but I also, in the past have really tied hard work to money. I have this idea that, Oh no, I'm going to work harder than everybody in order to make the money I want to make. I'm going to make myself available in ways that other people don't have to make themselves available. I'm going to work weekends. I'm going to do all of these things, and that's going to get me to the making the money I want to make that's going to get me to the success. That's going to get me to the joy and peace and confidence. But also when, if you hear what I'm saying, is there has to be struggle. And so what she was guiding me to is, Courtney, you've said you don't want to struggle. You've said you want to work less. You've said, like, How can this be easy and fun? But you have this innate belief that you're a hard worker, and so let's go. You're going to work harder than everybody. It'll be Sunday morning, and I'll think, you know what I should do another podcast and get ahead of the game. You know what? I should really create a new program. I should really do this. And it's like, Wait a minute. Can't we just let this be easy? Can't we just do this Monday? So reading that book again was so powerful for me to see, oh, one of my kind of baseline is hurried, like pressure, stress, you know, those kind of things. And I'm like, no, no, I need to recognize that in myself, so I make sure to not self sabotage. So let me talk a little bit more about how this might show up for you. If you are really wanting to lose weight, eat better, feel in control, drink less, get healthier, maybe you do well all day, and then all of a sudden at night, you say, You know what, life's too short. Part of that is all the things I talked about in my playbook. If you don't know, I have a playbook, and it is all about feeling in control of your eating in the evenings. And so you can head to modern body, modern life.com, and you can grab that. It's free playbook, and I'll also link it in the show notes. But I talk about how there's a lot of things that contribute to the fact that evenings can be harder for most people, eating the way we want to eat, eating in a way that's aligned with our goals. And there it's things like decision fatigue at the end of the day, physical fatigue at the end of the day. A lot of times we start the day off, like, today's gonna be a great day, and then things go wrong with our day. But one of the other things that happen is this upper limit problem. Maybe we eat good all day and things feel like, wow, they're going really good. But we're not used to things going good. We're used to being inconsistent. Maybe we're used to our baseline is struggle. Maybe our baseline is telling ourselves you knew you weren't going to be able to last. You knew you were going to mess it up. Life is too short, right? So you do well all day, and then all of a sudden you go back to your baseline of struggling in the evenings. Maybe this shows up for you in in consistency. Maybe you have a great week, and then you like, maybe you're working out really hard all week, and then you skip the weekends. There's reasons. Sometimes we skip the weekends. We have this idea like, oh my god, it's finally time for me. Also, during weekends, our schedule is a little bit disrupted. Maybe we have friends visiting us, maybe we have a wedding to go to, maybe we have a huge house project going on, right? There's different things about the weekends, but it also could be an upper limit problem. It also could be throughout the week you were getting really good feeling really like dialed but then your brain was like, we're feeling too good, and we're used to struggling. So let's go back to the struggle, because that feels more comfortable. Maybe this, you can see this in your self worth. Maybe someone gives you a compliment, but you're so used to not seeing yourself as doing well. You're so used to mentally whipping yourself, telling yourself you're not doing good enough. And then this compliment, it goes against that, and so then you downplay it, or you deflect it, or like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oftentimes that is that feels uncomfortable to actually accept a compliment and tell yourself, maybe I am looking good, maybe I am doing well. That might feel uncomfortable because it's not the norm for you. Now let's talk about relationships. How this might show up in your relationships. Maybe your relationship is going well. Have you ever found yourself like doing really well in your relationship, and then all of a sudden you kind of subconsciously do something to create tension in the relationship? Or maybe you don't even feel like you did something, but all of a sudden you notice something, like, maybe you get the ick. Have you ever heard of the ick? It's like, all of a sudden you're like, oh. All of a sudden you're like, Oh, I'm not liking this, or I'm not liking him, or he's grossing me out, or she's grossing me out, whatever it is that can be an upper limit problem. So this isn't a lack of discipline. It's not you not being worthy of living a more aligned life. This could be an upper limit problem. It's almost like, in a way, and he talks about this in the book. It's almost like, in a way, your brain's like, this is too good, something must be wrong. And I want to talk about the four barriers. He lists four barriers that really prevent people from, like, getting to the upper place they want to be at in their life. And these barriers you can think of as like as self sabotagers. It's things that happen that really keep us from what we say we want. He talks about something called the zone of genius. It's where, it's where all of us really can live this beautiful life, where we're experiencing more joy, more happiness, more alignment. And these four barriers get in the way. And I will tell you one thing that's interesting, and this is the power of when you love a book. This is the power of Reading it or listening to it again. Is the first few times I read this book, I remember thinking, Oh, this book's going to really help me with my clients, which it has. But I didn't really the first three times I read it, I didn't really see myself in this book, but this last time I saw myself in this book. So let me go into these four self sabotaging barriers that keep us from, like our upper, upper level of either zone of genius or true like happiness, consistency, goal. You know, achieving. The first barrier is feeling fundamentally flawed. It's this belief that, like, we really at our core are unworthy or we're bad, and this causes us to, like, self sabotage our success. Because if we really believe that we're not worthy, or we really believe we are, like, inherently flawed, is the way I like to think about it, then anytime things are going well that doesn't align with what we really think. It's like, well, wait a minute, things can't be going really well for me. I can't be really making this money. I can't really be fitting into these clothes, because at my core, I think I'm not good at this. At my core, I feel like I'm not a consistent person. At my core, I feel like I always give up on myself. And this is why for a lot of people, when they reach their goal weight, if they haven't done it in a way where they are learning how to manage their emotions, learning how to think differently, learning how to lose weight, in a way where you are living a better life in general, right? What I teach on this podcast, what I teach in my programs, it's why we oftentimes gain the weight back because our self concept, if we think we're really flawed, if we think we're inconsistent, if we think we're sloppy, if we think all those things, but then all of a sudden we look in the mirror and we're seeing something different. We want to get back to what matches our self concept. We want to eat in a way that matches our self concept. So feeling fundamentally flawed this time I actually really resonated with because I'll give you the others I didn't resonate with, but I was like, I think that there is a very sneaky, very deep baseline belief that I feel like, maybe I'm not quite good enough to take the time off. Now, I'm a very confident person, and that's why, three times I read this book and I'm like, Oh no, that's not me. But I was like, Courtney, if you have to choose one of these, which one would you choose? And I thought, I think that at my core, I think that there's a part of me that thinks I need to overwork because maybe I'm not quite where I want to be yet, and the I'll get into why it's so powerful to identify which one is you in a minute. But this has really been a game changer for me. I think it's just a sneaky little problem. Overall. I think I'm doing great, but it is a sneaky little problem. I'm really glad I identified so the other three self sabotaging barriers that. Keep us from really living in our zone of genius are disloyalty and abandonment. So this really is the fear that achieving high success in any area, like reaching your goal or reaching that level of happiness, means it's like you're going to be abandoning kind of where you came from, or you're going to have to, like, leave friends and family behind. You know this one might resonate with you, or it might not. For a lot of people, this is very true. They feel this thing like, if I really become the best version of me, I'm going to be ostracized from the people I'm around. I've coached many client around clients around this, and sometimes it's just a feeling you have. But sometimes, when you start achieving more, feeling happier, living a more wonderful life, the people around you will actually say things like, You think you're better than us, or Oh, you, you know, oh yeah, we know you. You're gonna do this. You're gonna do that. They literally will say things that kind of confirm this deep fear of like abandonment. So the next one is success brings a bigger burden. This is like a false belief that the more success you get or create, there's going to be like burdens that are associated with it, that are like, too much for you. So when I'm coaching business owners or entrepreneurs, it's like this idea of, if I make more money, I'm gonna have to pay more taxes, which is a true thing, I'm gonna have to pay more taxes, I'm gonna have to hire people, and then that's gonna be annoying, and that's gonna be really hard. And I don't know if I want to do that. I experienced a little bit of this with my jewelry business. It took me a long time to really hire my first employee because I truly thought it was going to be a nightmare. I've heard so many people say employees are like the worst part of their like entrepreneurship journey, and I really was worried that was going to be the case, and it kept me from going to my next level by hiring an employee, and then I hired an employee, and she was a dream. And then I hired another one, and she was a dream. So it's I look back at him while that was so interesting, I spent so much time in this barrier of thinking more success is going to be a burden, and it sometimes you can actually prove that not true. Many times you can prove that not true. And here's the way I like it. Like to look at it is, there's burdens at every level. There's burdens when you're overweight, there's burdens when you lose weight, there's burdens when you make 20,000 there's burdens when you make 200,000 there's a burden either way. What sounds more fun in the end is a great question to ask yourself. And then the fourth self sabotaging barrier that many people experience is it's he calls it the crime about shining, the fear that like shining too brightly will harm others or make others feel bad, and so it makes us kind of like dim our own light. Many people that I've coached can relate to this, from when there were children, when if they were really good at something like, more than their brothers or sisters, their siblings, their parents, sometimes would be like, oh, like, let's not talk about that too much, because they were worried about their other children's feelings. And sometimes, if we start experiencing more success in any area then the people we're around, we feel like we need to muzzle ourselves and not talk about it because we don't want to make them feel bad like that, our success makes them feel like they're not enough. And again, sometimes people actually make comments that reconfirm this thought, all of these four barriers are really important. Now you might have another barrier you come up with. This is just his barriers. I like to think that this he wrote a beautiful book and but there might be another barrier like I love to think too of the love The Five Love Languages book, which I'll be doing a review on that one soon, because I just think it's so powerful. The person who wrote The Five Love Languages said that there's five, but I'm sure there are many more. And I think also, I think they even talk about, I can't remember who wrote that book, but I think that I think it's a woman. I think maybe I don't know. I think the person who wrote The Five Love Languages also even says, sometimes you can have a combination of the two, but this is just the brilliant work of one person. So maybe you can dive deep and find that you have a barrier that when you start succeeding in any area, all of a sudden, you find yourself self sabotaging. And why do you think that is? And the reason why it's so great to identify this barrier is then you're prepared for the future. Then, if you have seven or eight days at the gym, and you're feeling really strong, and all of a sudden your brain starts telling you, oh, you you know, don't take a rest today. Not that there's anything wrong. We all should have rest days. But if you feel like your brain's kind of self sabotaging you, right? For me, what would happen was I would work out really hard, and then I would go on vacation, and I would. Work out on vacation, but then I would come home and I would kind of convince myself, I need a few days to, like, vacate from my vacation, like a few days off of working out, which, it just makes no sense. And I realized that's an upper limit problem, right? That's a barrier. So when we see that, when we can diagnose ourselves, then in the moment we can go, Oh, I think that this might be self sabotage. Oh, I think this might be an upper limit problem. When you know better, you do better. So the moment you see it happening, you can really stop participating in that self sabotage. You can be like, Oh my gosh, I'm about to undo a good streak. Oh my gosh, I'm starting to become a perfectionist, and that's not what I want to do. There's no reason for that. Oh my gosh. Like, I'm starting to create stress when there isn't any stress. Or like, Oh, I'm thinking about working on a weekend when I've decided to not work weekends, you become more aware of your thoughts and your emotions and your patterns, and what happens is you get really good at instead of escaping a good feeling, instead of escaping your hard earned progress, we can stay in it. We can say things are going really good. Can I create a new baseline here? And you can. I've done this in my own life. I've gotten to where my baseline emotions are higher and higher and higher all the time. I very rarely slip into overwhelm. I very rarely slip into discouragement, and if I do, I get out of it much faster. So it's really important for you to see where are my baseline emotions, and what do I want them to be? And how can I really be on the lookout for these barriers so I can increase my comfort zone, increase my baseline. So you've heard me many times, always talking about discomfort. And when we think of discomfort, we think of negative emotions. But this time, I want you to think about discomfort in a new way. Sometimes feeling successful is uncomfortable for us. Sometimes feeling proud is uncomfortable because we're not used to feeling that way. And so if that feels uncomfortable, our brain wants to get us out of that uncomfortable, back into what we are normally feeling. So we will subconsciously create drama for ourselves. We create discomfort where there was comfort a moment ago. Here are some practical steps for you to get better at this, for you to first of all, I would definitely read the book. But then here's some practical steps for you to use the book to your advantage. Notice when things are going well, and then you can catch this urge to self sabotage. You can catch the urge to overeat. You can catch the urge to make a problem when there maybe isn't a problem, maybe you come up with a problem, and you go, Wait a minute. Is this really a problem, or am I is this just an upper limit thing? I would love for you to have that conversation in your head. This is the conversation I'm now having in my head. It's like, Wait a minute. Is there something really wrong, or am I creating drama? And then you can ask yourself, pause, and then ask yourself, can I just stay here in the good feelings? Let the good feelings last longer than usual. That's how you bump up your baseline, so you don't need to keep starting over, although starting over is awesome, we're all going to mess up. We're all going to have bad days. We're all going to have bad moments. Totally not a problem. But I love the thought of, maybe you're not starting over, maybe you're just catching yourself quicker, and you're not rolling down the hill, you know, you're not totally getting like unraveling all the beauty you've created. And I love this thought for you, is it possible that you can become the woman that lets herself have what she wants, the more joy and ease and success you feel, the more they become part of your new normal. I hope you are running to Audible after this podcast to download the book, or I hope you're going to actually order it, because it really is a beautiful book to have in your library. It would also mean so much to me if you would share this podcast with a friend that maybe you've had a conversation lately that you're like, oh my god, they would love this podcast. So it would mean so much to me if you would share, and it would mean so much to me if you would have an amazing Tuesday for information on how we can work together. Head to modern body, modern life.com. To schedule a consultation with me. I'm currently coaching women privately, and I offer group coaching programs you.