182 How to Spot When an Identity Breakthrough is About to Happen

If you’ve been trying to release some excess weight, at some point you likely won't feel like putting the fork down when your dinner is so delicious or saying no when the dark chocolate is calling your name. 

Instead of saying, screw it, complying and then your body stays the same, this episode will help you completely reframe how you think so that next time you stick to your plan with ease. 

You’ll learn:

• To reframe those moments when you just wanna give up as ‘The Dark In Between’ in which you’re on the cusp of an identity breakthrough!
• What real transformation ACTUALLY looks like
• How to shift yourself from someone who thinks it’s hard to eat optimally for your body to someone who does this with ease

Book a free call during Next Steps June to see if the Mindful Shape coaching program is right for you.

• Instagram: @mindful_shape
• Free Self Coaching Resources
• Interested in getting coached by me? Go to my website mindfulshape.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi and welcome to the Mindful Shape Podcast. I'm Paula Parker and I'm really here to help you become in charge with food and feel great in your body. So I'm in this body transformation program myself right now, and there is a very active group chat in which people are sharing how what their experience is, how they are doing. And there are two kinds of messages, energetically speaking. There are uh questions and comments that are obvious to me that they are in a mindset that this is difficult, this is challenging, I'm not doing it good enough, that kind of mindset. There's also more of a positive um commentary or questions that you can just tell by the the question that they are more into the you know possibility mindset, that this is working kind of mindset. So in this episode, I really want to invite you into having an identity shift. So whatever plan you are doing to build muscle, to get in shape, to start to change your body shape in any way, whatever goal that you have when it comes to your relationship with your body and with food, just check in with yourself now. How are you showing up? So, which version of you is leading? So you may be going through the motions, you're tracking or you're eating the salad, you're eating the veggies, but you're really like dragging yourself to do it, like you're doing it with some resistance or a little bit of resentment, or like, ugh, this sucks, like the uh kind of feeling. And so the version of you whose impossibility is not leading there, it's the this is hard is like dragging that other part of you. So the possibility version believes I know what to do, I can do it, and what I do will make a difference. Or the other version is this is hard, I just want this to be easy. This version of you might be making excuses, or you don't feel super motivated, or you're just kind of waiting for motivation to happen to you. And what I will say to that is we want to remind that part of you that it's really hard both ways. So, yes, there are trade-offs, right? But there's that part of you that wants to hit the easy button because it's hard and overeat or skip the workout or beat yourself up because that's kind of your mo and it's diet starts Monday mentality. And so maybe on Sunday you're giving yourself permission to like, uh, just eat whatever you want, whenever you want, because you're really going to get on track the next day. And so that is also very difficult, is very difficult to be in that tug of war of wanting something and then not seeing yourself move towards it. It's very difficult and hard to quit, to have these mini quits where we get the relief of that immediate pain, like not of following through, like choosing the salad instead of the burger. But then, of course, we have the pain of maybe how our body feels a couple hours later, how we feel that night before we go to bed, our sleep, and ultimately our relationship with ourselves and our body. So it's not a free pass from pain to in that moment do what is maybe more convenient or comply with the urge to snack or overeat when we've had enough food at mealtime, say, just because the food is so delicious. So here's the mental shift that I'm calling you into so that you don't need it to be easy, but you can do it with more ease. Because how can we do it with more ease? I think the key is to really know how change works. Like, what exactly is the path of personal change? So in this episode, it's going to be on how you can really spot when an identity breakthrough is about to happen. Because having this context will just make things seem easier because you won't want to quit too early, assuming that nothing is really happening, anyways, or you go off your plan a little bit, and then your brain comes up with this big narrative that, you know, see, I knew you couldn't do it anyways. You fall into that all or nothing thinking trap, and then you end up snacking or grazing the whole day, or just going in like a food frenzy. So human change is particularly fascinating. Change in complex systems like a human being is usually not from A to B. Okay, so it's not going to be smooth or linear. It tends to alternate between gradual accumulation, so things slowly changing over time, and then sudden shifts. So oftentimes you might find yourself lamenting on how slow your progress is when it comes to releasing excess body fat or changing your body composition, or how much work it is to simply adopt a new way of being, like not eating dessert or not snacking so much in the weekends, or waiting until dinner to eat rather than snacking on those chips and salsa while you are making dinner. You might think it will get easier with practice because more often than not, we just think of change as slow and gradual. Think of like learning a new skill, like language, or even lifting weights, like learning how to work out for our body, it feels really slow at first. And so habit change often looks like nothing is happening for a while. So even though, like, you know, dread eating before a Zoom call, which is very common with my clients, or you're snacking out of boredom, all of that is happening less, it's still happening and your brain's gonna focus on that. So here's why this is happening. You're changing the structure beneath the surface, but there's no visible output yet. So you can't really see the results. Which, if we are really dependent on seeing results quickly to feel good, to feel motivated, then it does feel like a slug. It feels hard. But we also don't want to discount those sudden shifts, those breakthroughs can't happen, those like non-linear leaps. And I think of this as almost like a portal into a new identity or a new timeline. So it's that moment on say, um, a coaching call, if you work with a coach, when something just clicks, or when you notice, wow, it's so easy for me to just go to my yoga class now, like I don't even think about it anymore, or I just go for my walk after my lunch or dinner. Or maybe you realize that, wow, I haven't eaten popcorn on the weekend for over a month. Or maybe it's something you hear that you've heard before, but for some reason it just lands deeper in. It just clicks and you get it. When you realize, oh, maybe I'm literally one thought away from eating for my desired body, or I'm eating to maintain my current weight. There's a thought difference there. I'm either thinking in a way that's going to make it easy for me to feel the willingness so that I'm eating for my desired body, or I'm thinking in a way that's going to make me feel desire and permissiveness so that I'm eating to gain weight or maintain my current weight. So, what if it's simply one thought in that precious moment, that precious moment of choice, that really makes all the difference? Now, imagine that you are having these leaps over and over and over again and more often. Now, this can only happen when we are consistent, when we are making all of the smaller, less noticeable, non-glamorous, often tedious work of doing what's required. I call this aligned action. It could be planning out your food in advance, planning what you're going to do, how you're going to handle the weekends, tracking what you're eating. Maybe that's just on paper for you. Maybe it's in an app, a meditative practice, mindset work. And I actually do remember this concept from university about it was in relation to evolutionary biology. It was actually in a philosophy class where there are long periods of relative stability, and then they are interrupted by short bursts of rapid change. So when we think of evolution, we think slow and steady, but that's only half the story. So what's the structure here? I want to give you some examples. So step one is repetition without visible change. This is when you are exposing yourself to new behaviors, but those old patterns are still kind of like what you tend to do. You're taking action, there's internal restructuring happening. Okay. So you start maybe feeling a little bit better, but you're still leaning back on those old habits to overeat or overdrink. What can happen in that moment is people will say it's not working, and they are relying on external results. So the scale going down or your clothes feeling better to feel motivated to continue on. And when you don't aren't generating that feeling of motivation, it feels like a slog and you want to quit. You think nothing's worked, and then you do what I call like mini quits. So you might just be a little bit more permissive, and slowly over time, that really gets in your way. The good news is that if you can work through that, and I'm gonna talk about that in a minute, you will have one of those leaps, and you'll find yourself just saying, you know, like nothing worked for so long, and then suddenly it did, or I didn't really notice anything, and then all of a sudden it clicked and it seemed easier. So, what changed really wasn't the effort, it was all of the internal reorganization that had accumulated over time because of that tedious work that you were doing. So, my kids, it's summertime here, and my kids have this plastic bucket that they found behind the shed and had this big hole that like cracked in the bottom. And my daughter had the hose, which is a bit dangerous because she's like two, she's almost three, and she's putting water in the hose, but the the size of the hole was big enough that the water at first just started going through. So at first it just drained out, and of course she gets like super upset. But eventually she just kept going and the water was going in faster than it was leaking out, and the bucket started to fill up. So it fills up eventually. That's like identity shifting, right? So it's really slow at first. You're like, I'm just kind of the same person, I'm my old self. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh wow, I've stepped into this new identity. My bucket is all filled up. So a big part of doing it with ease is really trusting the process and raising your standards. Let it be hard when it feels hard. And remember that the only thing that's hard about it in that moment is the negative emotion associated with what you were doing. So, for example, my husband bought these cinnamon buns from this place. I live on Vancouver Island, and he went up to this town that has apparently the um best cinnamon bun in the world. So we can give them the benefit of the doubt inside. This is the best cinnamon bun in the world. Okay. So he brings it home, he he carves it up for the whole family. Now, that is enjoyable to me. I'm gonna have a couple of bites, I'm not gonna overdo it. Now, after my couple of bites, did I want more? Of course, I'm a human being. The cinnamon bun was the best in the world. I can see my kids, I can see my husband continuing to eat it. There is an emotional lull that I am going to experience that I did experience in that moment. It wasn't a positive experience, but you don't need to be positive all of the time. You just need to be powerful. What makes it hard is that when we feel that lull, deprivation, self-pity, sadness, because we're not having more of this pleasurable thing, when we don't allow that, then that's when it feels very hard because we are resisting that negative emotion. So in this process of change, when it feels really hard, I also want to offer you a reframe that the next time you find it very, very challenging, whether it's hard not to beat yourself up after overeating and you have a tendency to go into what I call screw it mode or a diet starts Monday mentality, what you're really doing, what you're really doing in that time is navigating what I call the dark in-between. Okay. The dark in between is that space between your old identity and your new identity when there's that emotional wall. Every time you act differently than your old identity predicts you will do because your brain is a prediction machine, it will track a mismatch. It will code this experience as a mismatch. This is the dark in between. Your brain is like, wait, this is not what I expected of you. Usually you just eat the whole cinnamon button. This is weird. This is, I don't expect this from you, right? This is not who you are. This is not your identity. So in neuroscience, this mismatch is called a prediction error. And it can feel very uncomfortable. But if you say, Oh, this is transformation, this is my old identity trying to like get its hooks in me and crawl its way back into my present reality. And what this is is the dark in between. It feels particularly hard because internal change is happening in real time. The dark in between is like a slipstream into your new identity. So the next time it feels hard to follow through, lots of resistance to putting the fork down, to not going for the chips that are on the counter, or even that tug of disappointment that is so familiarized for your brain when you get on the scale and you don't see the number you want to see, or after you've had an indulgence and you have like guilt and disappointment in yourself, that is a pattern that's not going to serve you. It's not going to generate any kind of motivation or willingness to keep going. So remind yourself an identity breakthrough is coming. Okay. So when it feels hard, you're like, an identity breakthrough is coming. You do that and you get right back on track. You then allow the next urge that comes, then again, then again, until, you know, there's a bigger challenge, slightly harder conditions. Now you have your favorite food is offered to you, or you are at somebody's house and then you feel obligated, it's even harder challenge, or you've had, you know, two bites of the cinnamon, and what is one more bite? It's not going to make a difference. Your brain is offering that justification thought. Each time you are able to allow that experience while you're in that dark in between, your old identity weakens slightly, and your new identity gains evidence, but it's below conscious awareness for a while, and we don't see it externally, but then suddenly it will snap into place. And then at some point, something really shifts. You feel differently. How you think about yourself is so different because your brain has enough evidence of the new you behaving in this new way. Also, you don't get the same pleasure you once did. You just have too much awareness now, right? So going for that fourth, fifth bite of the cinnamon bun is just like not gonna bring you as much pleasure because it feels out of alignment with who you are. If it's not serving you, if it's not something where you like your reasons for it. There's nothing wrong with eating a cinnamon bun. Absolutely, right? Eat the whole thing if you want. You just have to like your reasons. So the brain will update, it will make its best guess about who you are because why? It's a prediction machine and it will recalibrate. So that recalibration period can feel uncomfortable. Again, I call it the dark in between. Then what happens is you will just get the experience of, I don't even think about popcorn anymore. This just isn't me. It would feel so weird to go back. It's kind of like when you get really in the habit of working out and then you skip a day, you're like, oh, it feels kind of weird not to work out today. Just feels weird. Of course, we take rest days, that's not the thing. But say you take a week off because you're sick. That's gonna feel really weird if you're not showing up to your workouts. This is the identity leap moment. Okay. So clients often describe this as something just clicked. How you might experience it is in the beginning, you're like, okay, I'm gonna experiment. I'm going to try this new program or going to try to eat differently. Then at some point in the middle, you'll think of yourself as like, oh, I'm somebody who is, you know, pays attention to what they're doing. I'm somebody who cares about this. And then after you make that identity leap, after you've gone through that dark in between, you will just be like, oh, I don't really eat like that anymore. Like that's not me. And what's interesting is oftentimes you might not even be aware of it, but external reality will show it to you. For example, somebody might bring you candy. And for you, that might be jarring. This happened to me where my girlfriend came to visit me and she brought me a bag of candy and she said, Oh, I know that you really love candy. And it because I had shifted my identity so much, it was very jarring to me. And I'm like, Oh, yeah, no, she hasn't been around me in a while, so it hasn't updated for her, but I don't think of myself that way. I'm not like that. Okay, so that's what will happen. It's so fascinating. But first, you really have to be aware of when that dark in-between is happening and not let it take you down every time. When your brain is saying it's too hard, you know, that's a habit. Thinking it's too hard, that's a habit. Okay. But once you were aware of the habit like this, and you can reframe, it's really not a habit anymore, it's a choice. So choose powerfully and do that with ease. Know that you're in the dark in between, that an identity breakthrough is about to happen. Okay, I hope that was helpful and I'll talk to you again next time.

unknown 18:57

Bye.