#85 Playing Hurt | Recovery Secrets Series

Welcome to the Overcoming PTSD Podcast. My name is Brad Schipke, and this is the limited series called Recovery Secrets Daily Coaching. Now, these were private sessions that I originally ran as a paid coaching program, but now for the first time ever, I'm making all 100+ sessions available for free for all of you podcast listeners. And this series is over 100 days of practical strategies that have helped thousands of trauma survivors fully heal. So make sure to subscribe because I'm dropping a new episode every single weekday until the archive is complete. And you definitely do not want to miss it. So without further ado, let's dive on in.

All right, we're live here. Welcome everyone to our Recovery Secrets daily coaching call. Today is Monday. We're so excited to be here with you for the start of another amazing, amazing week. We have an awesome topic for today. We're going to make sure everything's kind of connected up here, ready to rock and roll. But if you're going to be joining us live, feel free to say hey in the chat box so that we can welcome you. And of course, engage with you throughout the session. This lovely man to my right I haven't said that in a week. This lovely man here is finally feeling better. And you can introduce yourself.

Good morning, everybody. My name is Brad. If you're new, welcome. Great to have you. If you're new to me, great to see you virtually for the first time. And if you're old, welcome back as always. Today we have a great Monday and a motivation style topic for today. And then it's what we're covering is something we like to say is, is a phrase, you have to play hurt, right? So you have to go out there even though It can be uncomfortable or scary, or you might be anxious or feeling fear or whatever it is. Sometimes you just got to get out there and play hurt, play like, and do things you don't want to do, do things that are uncomfortable to you so that you can go out there and really accomplish the things you want to accomplish. And also a lot of times when you go out there and make yourself do the thing you don't want to do, you find that it's the exact thing you need to do to feel better. And it's one of those weird counterintuitive things in healing and recovery, and it applies to so many different things and there's a way to do it where it's, it's not, it doesn't apply more pressure to your life. It actually, actually relieves a lot of pressure from your life when you have the right mindset to go into that. So that's kind of what we're talking about today, but it's, it's great to be back. Great to be here. Definitely missed, missed being on these.

Yeah, it is so fun to have you back here. We missed you for sure last week, but we still got a lot of great sessions in, which was absolutely fantastic. So amazing job. Last week we covered a lot of different things. Last week was our first week. This feels so long ago. Was our first week that we had our health and wellness coach Ryan on. That was a week ago today, and we're going to be having him on once a month. So if you haven't seen that session, it is recorded and it's uploaded to the platform so you can check out his session. It was super valuable, super awesome. We had a ton of fun doing it, and he'll be back next month and everyone following, at least for the next year or two. Do sessions like that. So it feels like we did a lot last week, and and it was a it was a strange week, but it was great. So, like Brad said, today we're talking about a topic: You have to play her. I think it's interesting that you had mentioned already that this is like a motivation topic, because when I was thinking about it this morning, I was thinking I'm going to have to preface this topic with this is going to be a hug and kick in the butt, Mullen. And I guess that kick in the butt is motivation in a sense. But it really is how you take this information. And some information I do like to preface like that because it is a kick in the butt. And this is one of those topics that it's, it's, it's time to show up. It's time to do something about the things that you want to change. And just the whole general idea of like, you have to play hurt. You have to stand up and you have to go and do that thing. And you're going to be better for it always. And like Brad said, this doesn't add more pressure to your life. It relieves pressure from your life. It builds your self-confidence. It builds your motivation. It builds your energy. It helps you in every single area when you push yourself out of your comfort zone. So there are different ways to think about this. When you push yourself out of your comfort zone and then see the results of that. And so a lot of times we have a tendency as humans, as people, To wait until we feel good, to wait till we feel good enough, to wait until we feel ready enough. And the big secret to life is you're never ready. You're never ready. I remember my parents talking to me about like raising kids, right? And they were like, yeah, no parent is ever ready to raise children. And I was like, wow, that's really interesting because I would've thought that now I'm like about at the age probably where they, you know, got married and started having kids, whatever. And it's like no one's ever ready, right? And so that's like you're never fully 100% there. So if you're waiting for you to be 100% motivated or 100% rested or 100% ready, you're going to be waiting forever, and that time is going to slip through your fingers. And that's the harsh part of this session and this lesson here today is if we don't take action, if we don't push ourselves out of our comfort zone. The growth won't happen if we wait where it's safe, where it's comfortable. The growth isn't going to happen. We want to be uncomfortable. We want to push ourselves because that's where we grow. Now, we're in a unique situation here having PTSD because it's so uncomfortable that it's necessary to grow. It's already so uncomfortable. But even in regard to recovery, there are moments that we can apply this.

Mm-hmm.

You have, you have to do the processing session when you don't want to. You have to show up and do the mindset work when you don't want to. You have to go out and exercise when you don't want to. You have to make that phone call when you don't want to. You have to have that conversation in the relationship when you don't want to. There are going to be so many things you don't want to do. There are still plenty of things every day almost that I don't want to do, at least initially. But then I think about, okay, well, what's my goal long term? And that's I want to do that thing. So some mornings I wake up and I'm tired, tired. We went to bed a little late last night. I'm tired. I don't want to go to my workout today. But immediately that thought changes. It that it's so automatic now that thought seems like it doesn't even happen. But immediately that thought changes to well what outcome am I seeking? I want to be fit. I want to be healthy. I want to be around for a long time. I want to not have issues later in life with heart conditions and blood conditions and all sorts of stuff like that. I want to be there when my kids get married. I want to be there when they have their kids. I want to be there. And so immediately it turned in from, well, I didn't get as much sleep as I wanted to last night, so I'm tired. I don't want to go. Immediately— now this is because I built the habit around this— immediately that turned into, I'm excited to go. I'm going. Even I don't care if I don't want to go. I am going because I want the outcome. I'm pushing myself because I want the outcome. So that's what we're talking about today, playing hurt. You have to play hurt sometimes, and it's okay. And I really want to press on this because I feel like culturally, at least from my perspective, we can— and I'm tentative to say this, as you can probably see— we can very often be too soft on ourselves, and we can give ourselves a lot of excuses. People are going to give you a lot of excuses. That are all super valid, super valid. You know, you have nightmares through the night and you're exhausted in the morning getting up to go to that workout. Like, that's— those are super valid excuses. You have every excuse in the world to not do those things. And at the same time, if you want growth, if you want change, as Mimi's saying in the chat box there, you need to take that action. So I think a lot of times culturally, people, cultures, governments, whatever, will give us the excuses. We don't even have to give it ourselves. They'll give us the excuses. And so you have every excuse in the world to not do those things. And again, they're all valid, and no one's gonna blame you for it. No one's gonna look at you any differently. But if you want that change, you can't accept those excuses. You cannot accept excuses people place on you. And so this mindset, when you adopt it in the way that we're talking about today, it's not putting more pressure on you. It's not saying you can't take it easy and rest and, and go easy on yourself and be kind to yourself. It's really about holding yourself to a standard and pushing yourself out of your comfort zone so that you can grow in your life. I'm not talking about going from no workouts and never getting up at 5 in the morning to getting up at 4:30 in the morning every single day for the rest of your life and doing 2.5-hour workouts in the morning. That's not what we're talking about. That's not the kind of push that we're looking for. We're looking for out of the comfort zone. Your comfort zone right now is Right here, this is your comfort zone. Okay? Out of your comfort zone is right here. That's where we want to be pushing ourselves. Right? So I'm not talking about going from that comfort zone to somewhere way out in left field. We're talking about just growing that zone slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly. And that's why it's not more pressure. Like Brad said, we're not adding more pressure to our lives. We're adding growth, which is going to add confidence, motivation, Momentum, happiness, delight. It's amazing when you do this.

Yeah. And that's an important aspect as well. And I remember last week when Adam was talking about implementing new health and fitness routines, he talked about what are you willing to do, right? And this is something that I, I overpressured myself in the beginning where I was trying to make this big change. I was trying to be out at this red line. And I thought I had to push myself to the nth degree to like my max every day. And It wasn't sustainable for me. And it was, it was scary. It was very scary, but it is important that you don't have to do much. And what happens here is like this comfort zone here, it's, it's built up of, like Kaylin said before, excuses and fear. And that's something that we have to realize too, is that our past experiences, whether they're traumatic or not, are altering the way that we see and perceive our current reality. So our current reality might not be scary, but since our past experiences have hurt us or traumatized us, we view this, this tame, this peaceful reality, or this reality that doesn't have any sort of— it's basically like a neutral reality. And we can see that. And then basically through our lens of trauma, view it as something extremely painful and fearful. So something that also helped me was, was telling myself. I feel like this is scary, but I know that this situation is different, right? So I feel afraid, but I know that doing this, there's nothing to be afraid of. And that helped me in our relationship. And there's all different areas that you can push yourself out of your comfort zone. So in this example, in our relationship, that's something I had to tell ourselves, tell myself all the time that, you know, I'm scared that this is going to turn into a fight. I'm scared that I'm going to get hurt and that this, this conversation is going to escalate to the point where it's traumatic or whatever. But I know that things are different now and I'm going to follow what I know, not what I feel. And when you can lean more on your logic and bring more presence to just your life and decision-making, you can slow down and you can see reality for what it is, even though you might be feeling all of these emotions and all this fear, you can see it. And know that it's safe. Know that it's okay to move forward outside of that comfort zone. And you are going to feel some discomfort, right? It's not going to be like this easy thing. But when you face that discomfort, when you face that fear and find that, hey, it wasn't as scary, like nothing bad happened, what you start doing is you start building these references to support new beliefs that then break down that old fear. That you used to have. So every time that I would have a conversation with Kayleen and I'd tell myself, I feel terrified. I feel scared that something really bad is going to happen, but I know things are different with us. I know we did the work. I know that like this conversation is going to be calm. I faced that fear. I got a reference of having us having a great conversation and that belief that supported that fear or gave me that fear started to crumble. So not only do you like— I mean, that's probably the primary way that you grow, I would say, is that you face reality that you're scared of, and then you realize, hey, this isn't that bad. And all those old beliefs that were causing you so much fear just kind of crumble away. So I'll let you move on with that.

No, that's beautiful and a perfect example of what we're talking about, right? And so Brad is using the word comfort and discomfort. Now, if you look back at the board here, In black, we have our comfort zone. In blue, just outside of that, I've written the word discomfort. Where we have this red, which is leaps and bounds from the original square here, is pain. There's a difference between pain and discomfort. For those of you who exercise, you might know this. When you work out, you don't want to be in pain, but you want to be uncomfortable. If you are not uncomfortable working out, if I'm lifting 1-pound weights, While doing bicep curls, there will be no growth. There will be no growth. If I'm doing eight, six, ten-pound weights and I do a certain amount of reps, it's uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable. It's not painful. If I try to do maybe twenty-five or fifty pounds, that's going to be painful, and I'm going to do damage. Okay, so we're not looking to do damage, and this is why it takes the pressure off because we're growing steadily. By just gently— it's re— it's, it's uncomfortable, but it's gentle— gently expanding that comfort zone. And so I want to draw another image on the board here, if you want to draw it. The work that you put in initially can be uncomfortable, but you get pleasure as a result. So we've drawn this image before, and it's a representation of something we call short-term discomfort. You say— we, we usually say short-term pain, but in, in Today's example, we don't want to use that term, right? Short-term discomfort, long-term pleasure. Okay. So I'll draw that on the board in a minute. Short-term discomfort, long-term pleasure. And you will build these references. When you wake up and you're anxious and you're like, I'm too anxious, I'm not going to go to my workout, and then you push yourself and you go to your workout, and at the end of your workout you feel better, you feel clearer, you feel less anxious, and you are so proud of yourself and happy that you went. You've expanded that comfort zone. You've shown yourself that even, and maybe especially, in those times where you feel that way in the morning, that is the exact thing that is going to help you. Think about that. Sometimes the thing that we don't want to do is the exact thing that is going to help us. Almost always.

Mm-hmm.

Okay? We, our brains are wired for pleasure. Our brains are wired for shortcuts, which means we live in a world— this is not why we live in a world, but we live in a world That our brain is going to optimize for those things. So it's going to be easier and more delicious in regard to what your brain looks at to have Pop-Tarts and processed foods and McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts. It's easier, it's faster, it's yummier, but it doesn't satiate you and it doesn't help you achieve your goals long term. So our brain is just looking for that hit. Our brain is wired for survival. It is really not wired To help us live long term, that's something we need to wire on our own. It's wired for little right now. Right now, here's this thing right now. Here's how I survive right now. PTSD is a great example. You went through something and your brain was like, okay, right now we need to just push this into the attic, into the basement. We need to push this away right now so that we can survive right now. And that's done damage long term. Now, in an effort to protect you, did that. I'm not saying your brain is out to get you, but if you see potato chips and you see celery. Your brain wants the instant rush. And there's other reasons for that, but it wants the thing that's going to fill it up. It wants the thing that not long-term, short-term is, is the hit, basically. And so we live in a society where it's one-day or sometimes same-day shipping. This has even changed since we started like having each other. Same-day shipping, microwave dinners, everything is instant. It's right now. It's there. If you have to wait 20 minutes for a pizza, And the pizza place is right across the street. You're like, this is such a long time. I ordered an item a couple days ago off of Amazon. It was running late, and I'm like, where is this thing? Right? Because it's, it had, it's not here in the 2 days that I ordered it. And actually, I was, I was like, well, I don't even know if I want this thing. That's how instant this, this world is. And so we live in this world where it's constantly giving us instant hits, whether that's social media or, or shipping or TV dinners or whatever it is, fast food. And we need to train ourselves to make decisions based on our goals. And so it's not going to be initially— and this is the trick— initially it's not going to be the thing that you want to do. If right now you have a diet where you eat Pop-Tarts and Fluffinutter sandwiches and you eat McDonald's and french fries and pizza and all stuff, stuff like that, you are not going to want to have the healthy option, have the salad and celery and the chickpea salad, you are not going to initially want to do those things because you're wired to do the other thing. So initially there's going to be pain. But once you do that thing, you have the healthy breakfast, and you feel it, you, you're building this reference. Hey, wait a minute. That felt good. That felt better than having, I don't know, what do people— Cat hair for breakfast.

Right?

So I had, you know, that felt better. I felt better. So you're, you're building these references. So you're doing something you don't want to do in the moment, but you— and this is the kick in the butt moment— you make yourself do it, and then you get the feedback from that, which is going to be positive. Hey, that felt good. It felt good to have that oatmeal instead of that pop tart. I feel better. I feel full longer. I have more energy. I feel more focused. I don't feel as bloated, whatever it is. So that's how we want to start to train ourselves and start to understand and think that it's not always going to be the thing that we want to do, but it can still be the thing that is best for us long-term. And we've had this conversation when we talked about self-care as well. You want to do what's best for you long-term. Self-care is not sitting in front of a TV and binging and eating pizza and ice cream all night or all weekend. That is not self-care. You are not thinking about your future self. You're not taking that into account. That's damage. That's self-destruction. And here's where I can go off, and I'm going to kind of reel myself in. We live in a world, in society, in a culture that has changed the conversation on self-care and has brought self-care to the conversation for the first time, which is beautiful. But from my perspective, is getting it very, very wrong because taking a day off to binge TV all day is not self-care, in my opinion. You are not thinking about the long term. You are not thinking about the health of yourself, the wellness of yourself long term, and taking care of yourself long term. Taking a bath at night, great. Taking a day off, going for walks, hanging out with friends, reading, whatever. That, in my mind at least, is self-care because you're taking, you're taking the rest. You're thinking about the long term. You're not doing damage to yourself. So all things that we would want to consider. And I want you to remember, if anything from today, that the thing that you might want to do least, the thing that you don't want to do, Very often can be the thing that you need to do and the thing that will move you forward, the thing that'll make you feel better. So you have to make yourself do it, and then get the feedback from that. And you're going to feel more motivated, more confident, healthier, and it's going to start to get the ball rolling. And here's the cool thing. You eventually get to a point, when you do that consistently, you eventually get to a point where there is no more really like short-term discomfort of those things, where eating healthy is second nature, where going to the exercise is second nature. Where even doing things that might be uncomfortable, it's second nature. You don't even think about this, that discomfort, because you know the long term, you see the long term, you train your brain to look at the long term.

And for those of you who have been through the roadmap or in Broken to Unbreakable, and you know the processing tools, you can use any of that discomfort that you become aware of as a jumping off point to start processing deeper on something. Because I know for me that, again, some of like my trauma in my past created so much of that fear and that terror and that discomfort. And it doesn't mean that you can't go and do that thing. I want to be very clear on that. However, it can be— for me, it was something that really helped me with my processing. I started looking at, okay, where am I feeling all— all like, where am I starting to feel resistance? All right, where do I feel the most resistance in life? That's a sign that I could do some processing there and remove some of that resistance if there's trauma underneath it. So Just another angle for those of you who know the processing tools, you can use that as a, as a tool to become aware of what you need to process or what you need to process next. Because once you, once you start processing, the biggest challenge you will have moving forward into recovery will just be, will just be becoming aware of what you need to heal and process next. So for those of you who are, who have completed the roadmap in Recovery Secrets, you know, the processing tools that have been with us. That can be another great— this could be another great way to become aware of things that you, you need to process, to heal as well.

Absolutely. And so what I've drawn on the board here is that image that I was describing, which is short-term discomfort, long-term pleasure, short-term discomfort, long-term pleasure over time. The exercise— this morning it was, it was raining. When I got up, it was raining. I was like, man, like, okay. And so I work out outside. So we go outside and unless it's, especially in the summer, it's warm rain. You're not, you know, freezing cold or anything. It wasn't thunder and lightning. I know we're working out in the rain and, you know, I was like, okay, I don't really want to. It's raining, right?

Like I'm tired.

Maybe I should just stay in, right?

Glasses now.

Yeah.

Glasses now. And okay, short-term discomfort, work out in the rain, long-term pleasure. I have more energy today. I'm working towards my long-term goals of health and fitness. I'm more focused today. I feel better about myself all because I went and did that hour in the rain.

Again, it's— Feel like a badass.

It's cool. Well, I like— and he didn't do it today, but normally Ryan will play like rain songs. So specifically he'll play— and this is my jam— Umbrella by Rihanna. And yeah. And so I like when he plays the rain songs because it's like raindrops keep falling on my head. Yeah, he'll play that. And I don't know if he has like a rain playlist. I should have asked him today. But it's, it's a, it's a fun thing to do. And then it's an experience too. But again, that discomfort leads you to that long-term pleasure. And last week, I forget what day it was, we had actually talked about on here excuses, excuses and blame, and basically placing blame on other people, right? You're the reason that I can't do my workouts. You're the reason that I can't do my healing because of stress level or whatever, stuff like that. And making excuses for ourselves. Well, I can't change my lifestyle. I can't change my diet because I have to cook for my partner. He eats meat, or my partner buys my favorite snacks and keeps them in the house, or my kids buy, you know, I have to buy Fruit Rolls for my kids, whatever it is.

Yeah.

And this is a— you can apply that conversation that we had last week to this conversation, because here in this discomfort, that's where you're gonna make excuses. You're going to make excuses there. But pushing yourself through the excuses, that's what that's going to look like. You're going to say, well, I can't, or I don't want to, or I shouldn't, or, you know, well, maybe it's maybe tomorrow, right? That's where all the excuses come in. When you start to push through those excuses and recognize them as excuses and say, you know what, I'm just going to do it and I'm just going to go for it. Again, you, you can make up— I can make up a thousand excuses to not go on my workout every single morning. I could. I could, but I don't, right? Because now I'm in the habit of I'm not making those excuses. So when you start to become aware of excuses, that's your moment to push through. And honestly, I feel like the first time pushing through is the hardest, and then it gets easier and easier and easier. Because the first time you push through, you, you prove to yourself. Once you prove to yourself, you've opened basically a new path in your brain. So sometimes we talk about neural pathways, right? And there's a For example purposes, simplification, there's a negative neural pathway and there's a positive neural pathway. Every single day, maybe for the last decades or your entire life, you've taken the negative pathway. When you've gotten up, you've had maybe negative thoughts and didn't do the things that you said you were going to do. You didn't exercise, didn't work out, didn't take care of yourself, didn't eat right. Negative path every single day. It's going to be hard, and the first time is the hardest to open up that positive path. Now it's there. You just have to kind of unlock it. Right? So when the first time, the initial time that you push yourself through and you say, you know what, I'm done, this is it, I'm going, I'm going to a workout, going for a jog, I'm going for a walk, whatever it is, and I'm going to come back and I'm going to have a healthy breakfast. That's all I have to do. And like Ryan talked about last week, what are you willing to do? You don't have to go nuts with this, but then you open up that new path and you can start to see it clearer. And the more that you do that, the more you close off the old path.

So I think that's great, something that that you say all the time is you can talk yourself into anything or out of anything. And that kind of applies here too, as well. Like what you were saying with like the excuses, like you can talk yourself out of anything. You don't want to do something, you could talk yourself out of it. We all know that. We know, we're all very good at talking ourselves out of things, but we don't often think about, hey, we can talk ourselves into anything we want either. I think it could be helpful now to kind of go into some different examples that people may be facing. So I'd like to hear, I will go through a few.

No, you read my mind.

go through a few, like on our own, different examples that we had throughout our recovery journey. But also, what things in your life right now, let us know in the comments, what things are you maybe avoiding in life that you, you think you kind of need to just attack head on, and, you know, face that discomfort and work through it. So let us know there, let us know where you're struggling with that, and we can help you through it. But I know for me, workouts was a huge one, waking up on time was a huge one. Processing was a huge one. You know, I was so scared just to face my past. And I think all of us here can probably relate to that, where it's, we have so much fear and terror because we were like, I don't know what to expect. Maybe I've had this trauma for years or decades or my entire life. And I don't know, I don't know how to face it. It's scary. And it is. But that's just another example of the comfort zone. Like, if you, if you stay inside of your— it is weird. It's weird when you talk about comfort zones and trauma because Your comfort zone could be exceptionally painful, but you're comfortable in the painful because it's what you know. So comfortable doesn't always mean what's best for you. It just means that is what's normal for you, right? We, we become comfortable in whatever environment like is normal to us, right? And we are scared. There's natural discomfort when we leave that normal or those habitual patterns. So your normal right now might be your comfort zone. And that's not a good thing. That's what it's a good thing to become aware of, right? Your, your normal, maybe, you know, having pain 24/7 or having anxiety 24/7, or like with Kayleen, nightmares and flashbacks all night. Or I know in your relationship with, with me, you, you even said that, you know, it's, it's normal. I thought it was normal to fight. And you were scared to leave that. You were scared to step into peace. And you can talk a little bit more about that because I think that's really interesting. I think a lot of people can. relate to that and/or will get a lot of maybe awareness or an aha moment being like, oh wow, that is what I'm experiencing too. Because it's, it can be like a, uh, insidious, sneaky thing when we're talking about comfort, though comfort can be exceptionally painful.

We, pain is, is comfortable.

And you can be afraid of the good life.

For a lot of people. And this is really common where you're, without even realizing it, afraid of healing, afraid of that next step, afraid of maybe who you are without the pain. And so I know for a lot of different areas in my life, but especially within my relationship with you, Brad, the pain was very, very comfortable. The chaos was very, very comfortable. We had our patterns, and I felt like they fit well because they that they were that's what it was. Yeah, right. And so the fighting in a sense made me feel like well we're connected, we're passionate. If we're fighting with each other, then we're communicating, and I'm I'm getting this attent even though it's negative attention, I'm getting that attention from. him. And I'd rather that attention than no attention at all. And so these are all things you kind of have to discover. But we can— pain can be very, very comfortable. And it can be uncomfortable, as weird as it sounds, to grow and to change and to heal and to no longer fight in a relationship. And you need to think about and really spend time thinking about this pain, or this rather this discomfort versus the pleasure. And so what I had to think about in that fear of growth and that fear of changing myself and healing and the relationship and everything like that was, what would I rather have? Because right now I, I'd rather have all this, this pain because that's what was comfortable, right? But what was uncomfortable was having a conversation that didn't end in a screaming match. And that was actually very uncomfortable. Because the attention wasn't the same. I didn't feel like the emotions were the same, the attachment, the attention on me, right? So it was very uncomfortable because I wasn't quite getting that hit. I wasn't getting that high that I was used to. But then the long term for that was unbelievable because we got closer. We were able to have better conversations about just fun things. We were able to have more fun, have more intimacy because we went through that discomfort. So it can be uncomfortable to just break out of a pattern, even if it's vicious. It can be uncomfortable to break out of that pattern. So that's something to think about too in your healing, in your recovery. Are you, are you afraid of that, that next level? Your comfort zone can be incredibly painful, and moving out of that can be scary, not knowing who you are, not knowing what it will look like. But once you try it, and this is kind of what this is all about, trying it, stepping out, going into that discomfort, then you're going to see the results of that. And very often you're going to see the results of that very, very quickly. Yeah. And you want to log that in and then basically keep doing that. So I think that was a great, a great thing. But I want you— or a great question that you asked: where in your life are you making excuses? Where in your life are you maybe setting goals very consistently but are unable to execute on those, or execute on those long term, or for a while? Brad had mentioned, you know, there's all different areas. It could be relationships, it could be workouts, it could be You're processing. Where are you setting those goals and not finding yourself achieving those goals? That's typically where you need to go into, or rather out of your comfort zone and into that discomfort to get to that next level. And there are all sorts of ways to think about this. And back to that box, we, those boxes we had drawn on the board before, you might be trying to take, take a, a huge giant leap.

Yeah.

And we want to taper that back to something that, that Brian was talking about, last week you're willing to do that is still out of the comfort zone but isn't putting so much pressure on you that you feel like it's unsustainable and you're paralyzed by that pressure. Does that make sense?

Yeah, 100%.

I think we forgot to welcome everyone. Welcome everyone to our session. I think we just kind of started today.

Are you gonna welcome them now?

Yeah. Yes, I will. I guess. Welcome, welcome, Larry. Welcome, Judy. Welcome, Joe. Welcome, Lorena. Welcome, Delaine. Welcome, Lizzy. Welcome, Barbara. Welcome, Bonnie, welcome. Happy birthday, Bonnie. Welcome, Larry. Great to have you all here with us today. So where in your life do you need to kick it into gear? Time to shine. Stop making excuses. It's time to do the thing. If you want change, you have to change. Okay, that's the, the end-all be-all here. If you want change, you have to change. Nothing is going to change if you stay the same. I mean, it's, it's so, so simple logically. It is another story entirely when It's time for the rubber to meet the road. It is so easy. Was it David Goggins who said this? Where he described every time I set this big ambitious goal, I'm laying comfortable in my bed.

Oh yeah. Was it him?

And it's like, it's funny how whenever I— David Goggins, for those of you who don't know, he was a, he's an ex-Navy SEAL. Ex-Navy SEAL.

Yeah.

Okay. I almost— there we go. He's an ex-Navy SEAL and now he does like These massive like marathons, he had ultra, ultra marathons, like 100 or I even forget, maybe hundreds of miles. At one point, I don't know if he still is anymore. He was like the world record holder for, you know, pull-ups in a certain number of time or something, which is like, I forget. It's like, I don't know, thousands or something.

It's great.

Something ridiculous. But yeah, he said, it's funny how whenever I, whenever I decide to set these, like, like, oh, I'm going to run this 300-mile race through Death Valley. I'm laying comfortable in my bed.

And I mean, we all have the tendency to do that. Like, oh, tomorrow I'm going to get up, I'm going to work out. And maybe you even kind of visualize it. Get up, I'm going to work out, it's going to be great. And then when it's time for rubber to hit the road, we make excuses. And that's the bottom line. And that's why I wanted to come into the session and preface it with hug, give them a hug. We make excuses. We make excuses. You have to sit down and do your processing. You have to do it. You have to make time for it. If you want change, you have to make time for it. If you want to change your, your physical life, You have to make time to like buy and cook good food or learn about good food or learn about workout, find a workout routine. You have to make time to get up and work out. You have to make time for those things. And I think a common excuse people give is, oh, I don't have time for those things. You have nothing but time. You have nothing but time. Because if you really want the life that you are picturing and the things that you say you do and the things that you feel you do, You have nothing but time because we spend our time. We only have a set amount of time, but it's about how you're spending your time. And so you're just not spending it in the right areas. There is always time. There's always time. And I want you to think about that. And if you're in your head saying, well, like, nope, I don't have time, there's a great example of an excuse that we're making. Where is the time? Last week when we had a conversation about excuses, we brought it back to the how can I attitude. How can I make time? How can I make time to cook and eat or get good meals? There's so many meal services these days. Brad and I spend time on Mondays. We go shopping, we cook together, and it's awesome. It's a number of hours, but then it's set for the week and it's good meals and it's healthy. Those meals are not just going to show up in the fridge. You need to do something to get them. We need to change.

And that was something like to bring back, like Ryan, he came on last week, then he had us go through, he talked about the 4 pillars of health and he talked about picking out 2 different things to do in each area of the The 4 pillars. And that's something we reflected on too, because just bringing that up, you know, because we've plotted these things too. We were always growing, always trying to get better. And we're thinking about our meal planning. It's like we historically, we do it on Sundays, but we reflected like, oh, we don't, we're not super consistent with that.

You messed up on Sundays.

Sometimes we're like, I'm at my family's house in Connecticut and then we come home and it's like 8:30. It's like, well, we can't go shopping and cooking for 3 hours and, you know, prep food for the week. So it wouldn't get done for the week. So we're lucky and we made a change. So now we're doing it on Monday. So that's what we're going to do tonight. So we're going to go out shopping and we did it last week and it's, there's nothing that can get in the way. So it was another tweak that we made to our schedule, to everything to get it done. But I mean, there's discomfort in that too, but then you learn to enjoy it. I guess the whole thing, it becomes your new normal. It becomes your new comfort zone, right? It's all about building these new habits, like doing anything new, doing any change in your life, whatever the change is, is uncomfortable, right? Because you're out of your routine, you're out of your normal, but then it becomes your normal and it becomes your new comfort zone, even if previously it was super uncomfortable. So if, you know, going to the gym 5 days a week wasn't comfortable in the past, if you do that consistently over time, that will become your new comfort zone, even though working out uncomfortable, it will be your new comfort zone. Because like I was saying before, your comfort zone can be extremely painful, right? If you're experiencing a lot of trauma and pain and nightmares that you can be That can be your comfort zone. You can be afraid to leave that.

So I think the thing about like these things, not only do they become your new normal, but you enjoy them and they give you more time. Us taking the time to do that meal prep saves us time. It also saves us money. It saves us mental energy and figure out what are we going to eat today? What are we going to do tonight? Right. So we're going to make pasta, right? Like it saves us time. It saves us energy. And I'm at the point where I would much prefer spending the hour in the morning working out than the extra hour of sleep because it gives me more. It feeds me. And so these things that you're, you're talking about and thinking about doing and going to start to do, they give you more time, they give you more energy, they give you more out of life. And that's the thing to think about. You spending an hour a day working out, if you're like, I just don't have an hour to spend, you need to make an hour to spend. And that hour is going to give you more energy, more focus. It's going to give you more time. It's going to give you more life. I mean— Quite literally, workout is a great example. It's going to give you more life. If you make time, an hour or 30 minutes, whatever it is, what are you willing to do? If you make time each morning, each evening, whatever it is, that's going to get like literally put more time on the end of your life. Literally, it's going to give you more life. So things to think about there. And I, I want to bring it back because I love what Ryan talked about last week in regard to willingness. What are you willing to do? So, Lorena, I just—it caught my eye. Lorena sharing—I appreciate you sharing this, Lorena. Making excuses about about everything is what you shared. But processing, for example, what are you willing to do on a daily, weekly basis for processing? What are you willing to do? Are you willing to do thirty minutes a day? Are you willing to do an hour a week or three hours a week? And you split it up Monday, Wednesday, Friday as your processing days. What are you willing to do? Start to take action towards those things. Grow that comfort zone. Make it. Bigger and bigger and bigger and encompass more and more and more. And I promise you're going to do those things, you're going to feel the results, and it's going to be a positive feedback loop. You're going to want to do more of those things. Initially breaking the barrier on any one of these things is the hardest part, I promise. Cleaning the house isn't as bad as we make it up to be. Doing the workout isn't as bad as we make it up to be. Doing the processing isn't as bad as we make it up to be. Breaking that barrier Proving to yourself the first time—that's the hardest part. From there, you have the reference. You say, "You know, I did that last week. It only took me an hour to clean the house. That was great." Where we did together, it took us, you know, 45 minutes, and we did a deep clean. That was awesome. That didn't take so long. That wasn't so bad. You ever get to the end of something? You're like, "Hey, that was not so bad. I am not that big of a deal. That is not as big of a deal as I thought it would be." That's what you'll find when you do this, when you push that comfort zone. All right, so let's go back here. Delaine, this is a— I love, I love when people have this problem. It's not excellent, but it's still good, right? So Delaine's sharing, I was dead tired last night, but I couldn't get sleep. My mind was overstimulated with thoughts of excitement for the things I want to explore as soon as my work slows down in October. That's awesome. I love when, and I'm not sure like before this happened for you, but when people's journey change— changes from, I can't sleep because it's like trauma and nightmares and anxiety and stuff, to I can't sleep because I'm so excited about this next thing, or I'm like feeling so good that I'm just like giddy or whatever it is. That's awesome. And Delaney also sharing, that was out of my comfort zone and now I'm more exhausted. So are a lot of my future pursuits. So it's okay. You want to pick things that are out of that comfort zone. You want to pick things that are out of that comfort zone. And if you need to give yourself permission, or if you need to hear that you have permission, you have permission to push yourself out of your comfort zone because that is where the growth will happen. So give yourself permission to push further, to want more, to do more, to take action on more. And again, like, consistency is one of the pillars of recovery. So we're not talking about making giant, giant leaps. Make small changes. What are you willing to do? But it's still going to be a push. So with that, Lacey's sharing, when I first got in recovery, my sponsor told me the only thing I needed to change was everything. And positive change is good. Think about the areas of your life: finances, relationship, physical health, mental health, relationship with, with kids, family. Whatever, whatever it is, right? Living situation. Handful of areas. If you want change in every area, you're, you're literally going to need to change everything. And that's okay. And that's okay. So you want to think about those different areas. I would encourage you to pick one at a time and focus on one, and that one to be you and your mental and physical health, and focus on that. And that's gonna ripple out to everything else. But that's okay. It's okay if you want change in every area. I still want change in every area. That doesn't really change. The fact that you want change, you want growth, actually is not going to change. As much as our relationship has grown, I want something more. I want the next level of it. And there'll always be a next level of it. And there'll always be something more, something deeper. As much as I'm really happy with my physical health, I want something more. I want something deeper. As much as I'm really happy with my mindset, I know that there's another level. I want something more. I want something deeper. So you're always kind of wanting that, that next level. Just the next level continues to look different throughout your journey.

It's awesome. That's such a great quote.

I love this one, Bonnie. Sharing.

I don't think you need to change. No, I was talking about Lizzie's. Yeah. The only thing you need to change is everything.

Oh, that is good. That's it. I love this quote. It's true. Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right. I think that sums it up perfectly.

That allegedly is a Henry Ford quote, but also apparently has a lot of quotes that might not be his.

We'll have to fact check those.

But that one, yeah. I love that one too though. It's just so true. Feeling sharing.

I have had a couple grueling weeks away from Couple grueling weeks of work away from home, and I need to recharge my batteries. So this is an excuse not to do what I need to do today. So couple things to think about here. You know, if you spent that time— rest is an okay thing, right? And I, I don't want that to get lost in the message here. Rest is an okay thing. Rest can be like taking care of yourself, can be resting. We have something in our workouts Ryan and I say all the time: resting your best. And that means you want to go until it's uncomfortable, But you don't want to push that pain level. You do not want to be in pain. And so as you start to find yourself maybe approaching that point, whether it's mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually, in your relationship, whatever it is, it's okay to take a break. And that can be part of taking care of yourself. So I want just— I'm not sure if that's where you're at, but I want you to consider that. Hey, I had a tough couple of weeks. I'm going to take a couple of days, a day, a couple of days to myself to relax, recharge, and then I'll get back on track with everything. And that is An okay thing to do. Rest is okay.

And that's a, that's a good line to start learning. Like, am I truly making an excuse? Like, you know, when you, when you're making an excuse, you know, you're like, I made this plan to do this thing and not, or like, I made this plan to work out in the morning and now I wake up and now all of a sudden I don't want to go, you know, versus like when you need rest, learning that, hey, I'm exhausted. I need, I need this rest to be my best. Right. So like rest is okay. Rest is, rest is very important. For physical health, you know, when you're working out and in that example, and also your mental health. If you do an intense processing session, allow yourself to take a nap, allow yourself to rest after that. And that's all like, that is part of the healing process as well. It's not all this active processing. So much of the healing and the growth happens when you allow yourself to actually rest in your brain to make those connections and, you know, really solidify what you just, what you just processed. So. Rest is a very important element to all this. And it's not about just grinding yourself into the ground or grinding yourself into like a really fine dust.

Actually, in Ryan's pillars, one of the pillars was rest and relaxation, right? And so it's an important thing to build in. I think for me, at least where I can distinguish between, am I resting because I'm giving an excuse and I do have more in me, or am I resting because I need it? Like Brad said, Typically more obvious when you're giving an excuse, but I will plan my rest. If it's an unplanned rest, it's probably me making an excuse and me saying, you know what, I'm just kind of getting up early. I'm done, right? Versus, hey, I had a tough couple of weeks, or I see on my schedule I have a couple of weeks ahead of me that are going to be tough. After that, I'm going to take 4 days off, 5 days off, a week off to rest, to recharge. Right. And so for me at least, and this is, this might be just personal, when I plan it, I know it's rest that I need. Even if I'm like, okay, this week has been really tough. I need a day next week. I'm going to take Monday off, whatever it is. I'm planning it versus just kind of taking it at random versus waking up that morning and being like, you know what? I need to rest. Right. When you would plan to do something else, something other than rest. So that's how I distinguish it. So Larry Chang, finishing some tasks critical for moving forward. and past current hangups, not completing critical tasks. So that, so that's where the excuses are coming in, right? It's, it's sounding like finishing critical tasks, critical tasks. So we wanna think about what those things are and we wanna figure out what we're willing to do. And this was actually something that was helpful for me in different areas of my life too. When I would get honest with myself, I would say, listen, I set myself up for failure. Basically, I say, I'm gonna do all these things during the day. And then I do none of them. And so I would really think I need to do these things in a day in order to be productive or in order to move the ball forward, and I would do not one single thing. And so I finally was able to get into a mindset where it's like, what am I basically— what am I willing to do without realizing it at the time? I'd say, okay, I'm setting myself up, I'm trying to do 100 things and I'm doing zero things. I had to pick 3 of these things, and it doesn't matter how long it takes me, That will actually move the ball forward. That is something I'm more than willing to do. I know that I'm more than capable because I'm not doing anything all day anyway. If it takes me an hour, 20 minutes, whatever it is, I'm actually moving the ball forward because I'm starting to chip away at those things. And I love that willingness because a lot of times we are, we're trying to go way, way, way far, and it's causing pain rather than discomfort. We want discomfort. We don't want pain. We want to distinguish between those 2 things here.

Something I want to touch on too is that a lot of times when we I'll say for myself, when I started becoming aware of all the excuses I made, what I would do is I would, my only tool was applying pressure. And there's always going to be an element of like, there needs to be some pressure for you to take action. Right. But I would apply so much pressure to myself that I would burn out. Right. So that's when I kind of, well, I came up with the idea and it helped me of relaxed action. So it was like, I can take action. I can do these things that Are uncomfortable and be relaxed. Excuse me. Excuse me. But that was something I would tell myself a lot. It was just like, just, you can be relaxed while doing this. Like, it doesn't have to be this big stressful thing. And if you think about the actual action that you need to take, it's probably pretty simple, right?

Mm-hmm.

Like even just like working out, it's like, I need to go to the gym and walk on the treadmill or go on the bike and just move some weights. Most of the pain is not the actual activity. Most of the pain that you experience and that you're dreading is the The psychological pain, right? And that is something that we can control. And that's the majority of the pain we talked about in the past. This is something from the Buddha, but the Buddha talks about first darts and second darts. First darts is the pain that reality, that life, you know, throws at you. So it's the pain that life inflicts on you. And that's something you cannot avoid. But most of the pain are second darts and those darts are all thrown by ourselves. So when you think about doing any of these activities, whatever activity you're avoiding, You know, whether it's like some of those critical tasks, like you said, Larry, or, you know, whether it's working out or processing, like you're scared of processing, know that most of that fear, most of that pain that you're anticipating is psychological. It's not the actual pain that you experience in the activity. And when you think of that, you start to understand that you have a lot more control over that situation than you previously thought. And that you're making it so much more stressful than you need it to be. And that's something that you can, like, that's a mindset that you can move forward.

Yeah.

And hopefully that like opens some of your eyes because that was a huge thing for me, realizing, wow, I'm inflicting most of this pain. And I became aware of it when I was running, right? Because sometimes when you're running, it's just you and your thoughts for sometimes like 1 or 2 hours. I would do it back in the day. I don't do that anymore. But, and I was, I became very acutely aware of, you know, my body, my body is fine. My body is very capable of doing this, but it's my mind.

Yeah.

That is causing me all the stress. My mind is saying, hey, like, you're really tired. Hey, this really hurts. Hey, or hey, this really sucks. You don't want to do this anymore. And that's where most of the pain and resistance was coming from, was in my own head, not from the actual activity. My body was fine. My body was capable of doing so much more.

Yeah.

I probably would have gotten like, I would hurt something. I have from pushing myself too hard physically, but know that most of the pain that you experience is psychological and we have control over that and we can, we can change that. And that should bring some solace to you guys that, you know, it's most of the pain is coming from us. Yeah. Yeah.

I love that you brought that up because when I say you want to make yourself do something, that's an important thing to realize that I didn't even, didn't even mention here today. For me, making myself do something, what does that look like? What does that sound like in my head? It sounds like, hey, Kay, you've got this. You're awesome. You're fantastic. Here's why you want to do this. Think about the future. You want to be there for your kids, and you want to see them get married, and you want to see them have kids, and blah blah blah blah blah. And it's it's pumping myself up. It is not you need to do this; otherwise, you are failure. That's very different. So that self-talk, that internal dialogue is a huge game, right? Brad had his his mindset of relaxed action. For me, it was all about the self-talk. It was like, hey, I can do this. Let me just go one step at a time. Let me get vertical. I know I can do that. Maybe a coffee. I know I can do that. Let me just get myself in the car and see where— one step at a time. You can do this. It is positive. Me making myself do something is like the kindest, gentlest thing in the world. It would be like me making a toddler do something, like, hey, you've got this. Let's just, let's just put that shoe on, and then we'll go from there. We'll put the next shoe on. That's awesome. Great job. Here, now let's get in the car, right? And so it is literally Now, that works for me. That's how I talk to myself. That's how I make myself do something because I've tried the other way and it doesn't work for me. It doesn't make me feel good when I can talk myself up in a positive way when I'm working out, right? And so, I'm working out and I'm starting to get fatigued. It happened this morning, right? And I'm starting to— my form's starting to loff. And I just think to myself, I say, hey, Kay, you've got this. You can do this. Let's just take a couple deep breaths. We'll rest for a couple seconds, 10, 20 seconds if we need to. We'll rest. Take a couple deep breaths, and we can do this. We just focus on one rep at a time, one rep at a time. We only have an hour here, or this exercise that I'm doing—it's Ryan says this all the time—it's only a minute of your life. All you have to do is this for a minute. How fast does a minute go by every single day? And I love that. And so you just—you want to talk yourself up, not down. You want to talk yourself into it in a positive way. So I'm really glad that you brought that up. Lizzy sharing making the right choice: face everything and recover, or forget everything. One, I've been practicing this a lot, and it's nice to say that I'm choosing my recovery. That's awesome.

Love that. I haven't heard that before. Face it. Face everything and recover.

I love it. Bonnie sharing, when you make time for your healing, you'll find that you have much more time and energy in the long run because you no longer spend so much time in trauma mode. Bonnie, thank you for sharing that. That is a beautiful example. When you take that, it's a deposit. That's what it is. It's a deposit. You go into the red just a little bit, discomfort. You spend the time. You have to make that time investment. You get pleasure forever, forever, forever, forever, forever. The time that I spent processing, however many, let's just say 100 hours is a nice round number. The 100 hours that I spent processing continues to feed me and give me pleasure because the 100 hours that I spent, I no longer have nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety, fights in our relationship that would go on for days, weeks, whatever, depression, like all of that gone. So it continues to give me time.

Oh yeah. It's just, it's, it's wild when you think about it, all the time that's taken up by trauma and PTSD. And it is a deposit. When you think of a deposit instead of buying Cheesecake, put it in the bank, put it in in whatever, invest it, whatever. And then over time that compounds and it gets becomes more and more and more and more and more. Eventually you find out you don't even like cheesecake in the first place. That's very very specific. He only likes cheesecake though. Who? Shiloh, Spencer, Caitlin's dog. Ate my brother's homemade cheesecake on Thanksgiving.

Our first Thanksgiving with his family.

And Shiloh jumped up on his and ate half of the cheesecake. He didn't get sick.

He didn't get sick. Well, he has like the most sensitive stomach in the world. Low-fat cheesecake. I was so surprised. He ate literally half of it.

I don't think it was low-fat.

It was— no, it was, it was something like that. It was yogurt cheesecake or something. It was a light version. And I was so embarrassed because it was my first Thanksgiving with your family and they had a brand new dog. Hank was brand new. And I was like, Shiloh is not like— he's so well behaved. And I was talking to your grandma. He knew it. She knew it. I was talking with your grandma. We were having a great conversation. And then all of a sudden my like mom sense tingled. I was like, shoot. It's been a while since I've seen him. He took advantage of me. Yeah. And he did. That's a good story. Larry's trying— I seem to be avoiding critical essential tasks to moving forward and changing. I'm uncomfortable and resisting, not happy about pushing through. So Larry, we want you to start to see that push through as this. That push through is not just this. It's not just a push. It is insane pleasure on the other side of it. It's confidence, motivation. You're going to feel better about yourself. Your life is going to get better, your environment, your relationships. Everything that you want and desire gets better because of this. So it's not just this. It's it's not just this area. A lot of times we think the push is just this. The push gives you all this, and that's what to think about. And again, that push is can be such a positive thing. It can be talking to yourself in such a positive way.

Yeah, and I I would say too, Larry, if there one thing that is my alarm. One thing I would I would suggest you did one thing after this live ends and. Something that it doesn't have to be a big thing, but picking one thing, I would say this for everybody. If you've been avoiding something, whether it's just, it can be taking out the trash or it can be doing the dishes or it can be doing some little thing just to get the ball rolling and basically prove to yourself, hey, I can do this thing even though I've been avoiding it for a while. For some people, I remember I did this with somebody on a Q&A for our Breakthrough Breakthrough program. And he was like, I have this stack of bills. And I'm like, all right. Actually, I did it, made him do it on the live. I'm like, go grab that right now and do it. Right. And break that resistance right now. But Larry, kind of what we were saying before about the pressure, remove the pressure as much as possible. And most of that pain is psychological. And for me, I said like relaxed action. And I would also allow myself or tell myself, just relax and release. So like relax my body and release the tension, right? Relax my body and release it. Relax and release. And that was super helpful as well.

I love that. So that's your action for today. Whatever it is you've been avoiding, go into this discomfort, Right now. It doesn't matter if this won't be in your normal routine. This is something that I would do too. Go do a 30-minute workout. Go for a walk. Go for a jog right now if you can. As soon as possible, just take the time. Send that email. Make that phone call. Make that appointment. Whatever. Right now. Do it right now. Prove to yourself that you can break the resistance and the other things are going to get easier as we go along here. So, amazing job in this session today. Brad has to hop off because he has another call, but beautiful, beautiful job. Stick with us for the rest of the week. We have some awesome topics plan. And I believe next week already might be a bootcamp. If it's not next week, it's the week after. So amazing job. Do you have a closer? That's it.

Great job, everybody. Go take that action. Do that one thing. It doesn't have to be a huge thing, but make sure you do that right now. And also, you know what I think you should do is post a little thread in the comments. Okay. I will do that. What is the thing that you crushed? You crushed it. All right.

Well, that thing, and then report back.

You report back. Say, I did this X, Y, and Z.

All right. Love you. Believe you. See you bright and early tomorrow. All right. Bye, everyone. See ya.

Hey everybody, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you want to learn more about how you can coach with me directly, there's a link in the description you can check out. There's absolutely no pressure. The main thing is I wanted you to get value from this episode here, but I hope you have a fantastic day and I'll see you in the next one.