274 - Stubborn or Stuck?

Elizabeth: [00:00:00] Okay there. So I have a question for you, and I want you to actually think about it for a second. Now, is there something that you have put off for way longer than you needed to? And not because you couldn't do it, but because you kept thinking that you would get around to it, or you weren't sure if it was worth it, or some part of you just kept deciding that today wasn't the day.

Maybe it was a kitchen remodel you priced out four times before you finally committed, or maybe it was leaving a job that you knew wasn't right for you. Maybe it's something completely mundane like signing up for yoga class. I had two whiteboards sitting on the floor of my home office. You can't see it.

It's behind the monitor. But they were there for three and a half years. Three and a half years, and I finally hung them up last week, and they are genuinely the best thing in my office right now. I am so excited about them. [00:01:00] I use them all the time. And when I stepped back and looked at them, my first thought was, "Why did I wait so long?

What was I even doing?" And it's something that we all do. We put things off. We keep trying to manage without the thing that would actually help, thinking, "I don't have time for that." And we do it for reasons that feel completely reasonable from our thought process, right?

And so today, I wanna talk about where we do this in our health, specifically why so many women keep trying to figure it out alone when that actually costs over time, and what tends to happen the moment that they finally stop. So this one is definitely worth your time. Stay with me

Welcome to the Total Health in Midlife Podcast, the podcast for women over 40 who want peace with food, ease in their habits, and a body that they don't [00:02:00] have to fight with.

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Total Health in Midlife podcast. I am your host, Elizabeth Sherman, and I am so super glad that you are here with me today. I know I say that every time, but I really, really mean it. I wanna start out today's episode by telling you a story about me, myself. And if you've been listening for a while, you may have heard this story before because I've told it, and the reason is because I think it's really important.

So bear with me because I am telling it again for a reason, and I promise it goes somewhere a little bit new today. So picture this. It's the middle of the afternoon. I am standing in my dining room, staring out through my plantation shutters at the street outside of my house. And I've been standing there staring at the empty chocolate wrappers on the counter trying to figure out- How did I get here again? Because [00:03:00] this wasn't a one-time off thing.

This was happening almost every single day during the week. And here's the part that made it so confusing, and honestly, quite embarrassing. At the time, I was a certified nutritionist and a personal trainer. I spent my days helping other people eat well, move well, feel well. I knew exactly what I was supposed to be doing.

I could have told you the calorie count of every single thing that I ate, everything that went through my mouth. I could have written a meal plan in my sleep, and I was still standing there in front of the evidence that something was not working. I was running an hour every single day. I was lifting weights.

I was logging my food on the regular basis. I was spending money on supplements, hoping that one of them would be the thing that [00:04:00] finally clicked for me. And my body, I felt like it was not reflecting the amount of effort that I was putting in. I was exhausted, I was frustrated, and I was starting to wonder if I was just broken in some way that all of my training couldn't explain.

I also had a stress injury at the time, probably from overtraining, and I was terrified to stop moving, so I kept going. I was sore, I was tired, I was eating chocolate in the kitchen and telling myself that I just needed to get it together. I had a lot of information, and I didn't have the results that I wanted.

And so that's actually what today's episode is about. Not the chocolate, not the overtraining. What I wanna talk about today is the thing that actually changed everything for me, and why so many of us [00:05:00] wait so long before we do it, why we keep trying to solve the problem alone even when the problem clearly is not getting better, and why asking for help with our health feels somehow wrong for so many women.

It's like something that we should be able to handle ourselves. So let me back up a little bit because there is a piece of context here that really matters. Before I became a life and health coach, I was working as a personal trainer and a nutritionist.

That was my whole world for years, and I was really good at it. I could look at what someone was eating, look at how they were moving, and figure out pretty quickly what needed to change. And a lot of my clients got really great results. They would show up to their appointments. They would get stronger.

Their clothes would start fitting differently. They would come in on a [00:06:00] Tuesday and tell me that they actually had energy last weekend, that they defied the treats that were presented to them. And I could see it on their face that the thing that happens when someone actually starts to feel like it's all working.

But then something would inevitably happen. Not something health related, but something in her life, a problem at work. Maybe it was some problem with her marriage, a kid going through trouble, a season where everything felt like just a lot. And just like that, the whole entire process would fall apart.

She'd start canceling appointments. Her food would go sideways, and we'd basically be starting over again. I watched this happen over and over and over again. And for a really long time, I didn't fully understand why it wasn't happening [00:07:00] because from where I was standing, the plan should be working. The food was good.

The workouts were solid. So why couldn't it hold up when life got hard? I could help a woman with that... I could help a woman with what she was eating. I could build her program and be there while she did it. Sleep, I had all the answers for that as well. But there was one other category that I struggled with: stress.

And every resource I had for that felt completely inadequate.

When we think about stress management, you know what we think about when we talk to women about stress? We tell them, "Get a manicure, take a bath, light a candle, do some yoga." Now, I'm not saying that those things are bad. In fact, I think that they're all terrific. But they are not stress management. They are a [00:08:00] break from stress, which is an entirely different thing because when you stop doing that activity, you go back into your life, which is stressful.

The stress is still there when you get home. The load is still there. The thing that's keeping her up at night is still there. A bath and candles don't touch any of that. It just gives her a reprieve. So I could give a woman a really solid plan, and she could follow it beautifully, and then one hard month would come along, and the whole thing would entirely unravel, and I didn't have anything in my toolkit that could actually address why.

That's when I started to understand something that now seems so incredibly obvious to me, but at the time it generally changed how I thought about my work.

See, here's the thing, Health doesn't live in a silo. I think that's [00:09:00] something that we have been taught to believe.

We believe that all we have to do is eat these foods and move this way, and then we are healthy. What that fails to expose is that what's happening in a woman's relationship actually affects what she eats at 9:00 at night. What's happening at work affects whether she gets out of bed to exercise. What she believes about herself, what she's carrying, what she never talks about, all of that is connected to whether the plan holds up or it falls apart the second life gets hard.

But I couldn't see that clearly yet, but I was starting to feel it. So I did what I probably should have done sooner. I myself hired a coach because I was going through some stuff. And I wanna be clear [00:10:00] about what I was expecting because I also think that it's relevant. I was expecting information. I was expecting someone to look at what I was doing and tell me what I was missing.

Maybe a different approach to food, a different way of structuring my training, some piece of the puzzle that I hadn't figured out yet. That is not what happened in these coaching sessions. What happened was that someone sat with me and helped me look at the entire picture, the entire picture of my life.

Not just what I was eating or how I was moving, but what wa- what else was happening in my life, what I was carrying, what I believed about my body, about food, what I had to do to earn the right to look the way that I wanted to look. And for the first time, I started connecting the dots that we had never been able to connect before.

The way that I was [00:11:00] exercising wasn't just a fitness strategy. I was doing it out of fear. I was terrified of what would happen if I stopped. My food logging wasn't just tracking. I was trying to control my body, and it was exhausting, and it was making me obsessed with numbers in a way that had nothing to do with actually feeling good.

The chocolate in the kitchen every afternoon wasn't a lack of information. It was my body sending me a signal that I didn't know how to read. My coach taught me how to use the hunger scale, how to check in with myself before a meal, during, and after, how to notice what my body was actually telling me instead of overriding it with whatever the plan said or what I was supposed to do.

That sounds simple, and on paper, it is. But after years of [00:12:00] following other people's rules about food, trusting my own body felt really super scary and foreign. It was uncomfortable. I had spent so long treating my body like a problem to manage that I didn't even know how to treat her like something that she was worth listening to.

And so it took time, and I made a lot of mistakes, but the things started to shift in ways that they had never shifted before. My hunger started to become predictable, and my energy evened out.

I stopped being constantly sore and exhausted. The afternoon chocolate spiral started to lose its grip. And here's the part I think about a lot even now. I had been trying to figure this out on my own for years, years of running, and tracking, and logging, and supplementing, and [00:13:00] white-knuckling my way through it.

And working with a coach, I got further in just a few months than I had in all that time combined. That's what I mean when I say that coaching can collapse time. It's not magic. It's just that when you're inside of a problem, you can't see it clearly. You're way too close to it. You're too invested in the story that you've been telling yourself about why it's happening.

Someone outside of that, someone who can see the whole picture and ask you the questions that you're not asking yourself, can help you move through it in a fraction of the time that it would take alone. I didn't need more information. I needed someone in my corner. Now, fast-forward a little bit, and I'm in coach training, okay?

I had seen what coaching did for me, and I wanted to be able to do that for other people. [00:14:00] So I enrolled in a coaching program where I learned how to become a life coach. And as part of training, we needed practice clients, real people to work with so that we could build our skills. Now, around the same time, I had a friend who kept bringing up her health, her weight, and every single time we talked, it would come up.

She wasn't feeling great. She was doing all of these hacks. She wasn't happy with how things were going, and she wanted to make changes, but she couldn't seem to make them stick. Sound familiar? And I was doing my best to help her the way that you would with a friend. So I was listening. I was offering thoughts.

I was sharing what I knew. But I wasn't her coach, and I didn't wanna be her coach in that informal, no structure, kind of setting, right? Because that's not actually helpful for either [00:15:00] person. So when my program put out the call for practice clients, I thought of her immediately.

I offered her free coaching for another coach, not discounted, but free. So this was from someone who didn't know her, didn't have any connection to her, who did understand what she wanted.

And she was being trained by some of the best coaches in the field. And I was genuinely excited to offer it to my friend because I had seen what this work could do, and I really wanted that for her. I wanted her to have that breakthrough. She said yes, which was terrific. But then a little while later she came back and she was like, "Yeah, no, I'm not gonna do this."

And her reason was this: "I feel like I should be able to do this on my own." And I remember just sitting with that for a second because I genuinely did not know what to do [00:16:00] with that information. She had something free available to her, free from someone who cared, for a problem that she had been struggling with for a really long time, and she was turning it down because she said that she felt like she should be able to handle it herself.

Now, I was a new coach. I didn't yet have the skills to help her see that way of thinking was actually getting in her way of being successful. So I didn't push it. Honestly, I was really super disappointed, I'll be honest. But I let it go. What I couldn't let go of was the thing that I had just watched happen.

Here was a solution sitting right in front of her, available at no cost, and she chose a belief over having that solution given to her. The belief that asking for help meant that she had failed at [00:17:00] something that she should have been able to do alone. And that belief, that one sentence, "I should be able to do this on my own," was more powerful than the actual opportunity in front of her for her.

I think about that a lot because I don't think she's unusual. She's not an outlier. I have heard that sentence or some version of it more times than I can count from women who are smart, capable, and genuinely struggling, women who have been trying to figure this out on their own for years, and who will keep trying because somewhere along the way they got the message that needing help is the same thing as failing.

But it's not. And I understand why it feels that way. So where does that belief come from? Because it doesn't come from nowhere. Nobody is born [00:18:00] thinking that they handle... have to handle everything alone, right? Those thoughts get installed, and for most of us, it got installed a long time ago. We are raised, most of us, to be the ones who give, the ones who take care of things, the ones who hold it together for everyone else.

We are taught directly and indirectly that being strong means not needing help, that asking for support is a burden on other people, that a good woman, a capable woman figures it out herself. And we absolutely absorb that completely. So completely that it stops feeling like a message that we received and starts feeling like just who we are.

Think about how early this starts. You watch your mother do everything for everyone and never ask for anything in return. [00:19:00] You get praised for being self-sufficient, for not being difficult, for not needing too much, for being the cool girl. You learn that it's better to give than receive, and that lesson applies to everything, including help.

By the time that you're an adult, the idea of asking someone to help you with something that you feel you should be able to manage yourself doesn't just feel uncomfortable. It feels like an admission of incapability. Like you're announcing that you can't cut it, and so you keep trying on your own, year after year, with your health, with your finances, with your relationships, with the mental and emotional weight of just living in a world right now which, if you've been paying attention lately, it is a lot.

There is a lot happening right now,

And a lot of women are carrying the [00:20:00] stress of it completely alone because asking for help processing it feels self-indulgent somehow, like they should be stronger. Here's what that actually costs. Not in a everything falls apart kind of way. It's way more quiet than that. It's the problem that stays a problem for five years instead of six months.

It's the energy spent going in circles on something that someone else could help you move through. It's the cumulative weight of trying to be your own everything, the nutritionist, the therapist, the life coach, the financial advisor, all while also being the person who holds everything together for everyone else in your life.

You've heard the saying, "You cannot pour from an empty cup." And most of us know that, right? We nod along when we hear it, and when we go back... And then we go right back to trying to pour anyway because [00:21:00] stopping feels worse than running on empty. And that's not a problem with your character. It's conditioning.

It's a pattern that was handed to you and has been running quietly in the background for a very long time. The problem is that it keeps you stuck, not because you're not capable, but because some problems are genuinely harder to solve from the inside. And the belief that you should be able to solve them alone is exactly what keeps you inside of them.

So let me offer you a different lens of looking at this. Asking for help is not a sign that you couldn't do it. It's a decision to stop spending years on something that doesn't have to take that long.

There is something that happens when you sit down with someone who is fully focused on you and your situation, who doesn't have a dog in the fight, [00:22:00] someone who is not in the middle of their own stuff, not half listening while they make dinner, not giving you advice based on what worked for them or what they think you should do, someone who is just there with you in the problem, helping you make sense of it.

That experience has a name. It's called being witnessed, and it is one of the most powerful things available to us as human beings, not because the other person has magic answers, but because when someone sees you clearly, really sees what's happening and reflects it back to you, you start to see it differently as well.

Things that felt murky get clearer. Patterns you couldn't see from the inside become visible. You start to understand not just what is happening, but why it's happening, and that changes what you do next. This is not [00:23:00] a luxury.

It is not something that you earn by suffering long enough on your own first. It is something that you can choose at any point. And here's what I notice over and over and over again with the women that I work with. When they finally ask for help, whether that's coaching, therapy, a financial advisor, a doctor who actually listens, whatever the area of their life that needed support, the response is almost always the same: "What took me so long?

Why did I wait?" And not because the help was magic, but because they had been carrying something alone that was so much lighter with support, and they were able to move through it, and they had been doing it for so long that they forgot it didn't have to be that hard. Your health is not a test of your character.

It is not something that you have to earn your way [00:24:00] through alone to prove that you deserve to feel good. The struggle is not the point. Getting help is not giving up. It is the thing that actually moves you forward. So here's what I wanna leave you with today.

You can absolutely believe that you should be able to do this on your own. I am not here to tell you that that belief is wrong. A lot of women hold it, and I understand exactly where it comes from because I used to hold that too. I was a nutritionist, and I was a personal trainer, and I was still standing in my kitchen eating chocolate and wondering why nothing was working.

The question I want you to sit with is not whether the belief is valid. The question is whether it's working for you. Is it helpful? How long have you been trying to figure this out on your own? How many times have you started over? How much time and energy have you spent going in [00:25:00] circles on something that with the right support might actually be solvable?

I'm not asking to make you feel bad. I'm asking because I think for most of us, when we actually stop and look at the math, we realize that the cost is higher than we thought.

It's just quiet and cumulative. Year after year of the same problem, the same frustration, the same start on Monday that doesn't hold by Thursday. That doesn't have to keep being a pattern. Help is available to you. Real help. Not a new meal plan, not another set of rules to follow, but help that actually looks at what's going on with you specifically in your life, with your history, and helps you to figure out why this keeps breaking down and what to do about it.

If you're not sure where to start, I have a quiz. It's at elizabethsherman.com/quiz. I will put that link in the show notes. [00:26:00] It just takes about three minutes. It's all multiple choice, and it will show you exactly where your follow-through is breaking down and why. Not in a general way, but in a very specific, this is actually what's happening for you kind of way.

It's a good place to start. You don't have to keep doing this alone. Thank you for so... Thank you so much for spending this time with me today. If this episode hit home for you, share it with a woman in your life who needs to hear it. I will see you in the next one. Bye-bye

Hey, before you go, if you are someone who says, "I know exactly what I should be doing, I just don't do it," hey, if that's you, I made something for you. It's a free three-minute quiz that gets underneath that exact problem, not to give you more information, but to show you the specific reasons your follow-through keeps breaking down, because it's not the same for everyone.

And once you can see your pattern clearly, everything [00:27:00] else seems to change. Head to elizabethsherman.com/quiz. It's free, it's fast, and it's honest