#91 Gradualism & PTSD Recovery: How Tiny Daily Wins Create Massive Healing

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. Give me just a second to make sure everything is up and running. If you're going to be joining us live, feel free to say hey in the chat box there and we will get started. Let me know if you can hear me. I have an AC going in the background, so just let me know if you can hear me when you get a second in the chat box there. Like I said, if you're gonna be joining us live, feel free to say hey so that we can engage with you and of course welcome you here to this session today. I am so, so excited about this session. I love the topic that we're gonna be talking about. I wanted to talk about it yesterday, of course, but we weren't able to meet, so I'm so excited to be talking about it today. There's a lot of fun kind of nuances to this topic that we're gonna cover. And of course, as always in Recovery Secrets, you're gonna notice How certain topics overlap, but how we're taking a different perspective on them. So that's maybe what I'm most excited about today. So welcome, Lena. Great to have you here. Just gimme a little thumbs up if you can hear me all right. Like I said, I have an AC running in the background, so I wanna make sure that's all good to go. And then we'll jump into our topic in just a minute here. All right. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So today's topic is all about consistency, not so much about long-term thinking, but that's gonna come into play here. In something we call gradualism. Not sure if it's a word we've made up. Gradualism. Do a little quick, quick search on that. There we go. Not a word we made up. Gradualism. It's a biology word, but we're going to be using it in a different way here. So what I want to prompt everyone to do here on this session as a basis for this session is think about one goal that they have that it doesn't have to be necessarily Tremendously big, but where you are now, where you are now, and where you want to go. So your goal, right? So I want you to think about those 2 things. I want you to pick a goal. Again, it doesn't have to be enormous, but I want you to have something going into this session so that you can apply this to whatever specifically that you're facing. So if you're going to be joining live, feel free to say hey in the chat. Feel free to put this in the chat, the goal that you're going into this session with today. So that's my challenge for you right now. Is to pick a goal that you are working to achieve. It doesn't have to be enormous, or it could be enormous. Okay? So it doesn't have to be enormous, but it could be enormous. Because what we're gonna do today is basically figure out how to get from point A all the way to, we'll call it point Z, right? So from A to Z. So it doesn't matter how big or small this goal is. I want you to pick a goal right now. I want you to pick a goal right now because that's gonna help you. Get the most out of what we're talking about in the session today. Welcome, Delaine. Welcome, Mimi. Great to have you here. Okay. I love that goal, Mimi. I love that goal. So Mimi's trying to always stay positive. That's a great goal. Now, this today isn't really specifically a session on goals, but when we're talking about a goal, for the most part, we want to make sure we can make it measurable and specific. Why do we think we need to make it measurable and specific? Why do we think it's a good idea to have a goal be measurable and specific? What do we think about that? What do we think? Good morning, Sunny. Good morning, Jeanette. Great to have you here. Sunny's sharing compassion. That's a great one, right? So I want you to get a little bit more specific with that. And I'll, I'll give you a hint here. I'll jump in on this answer. Why do we want it to be measurable and specific? So that what? We know when we get there. If we don't have a goal that's measurable, if we don't have a goal that's specific, how are we going to know if we achieve it? Right? Or if we're making progress towards it. Okay? So that's why it can be really helpful to have those 2 metrics, measurable, specific. Specific meaning, a great example of this is weight loss, right? And I love that, Mimi. Awesome. To see if we get there, right? A great example is weight loss. I want to lose 4 pounds. It's measurable. It's specific, right? So I'm going to be this specific weight. So you're going to know when you get there, you're going to know on your way there because you'll see that decrease. Uh, in those numbers, measurable, specific. Good morning, Lisa. Great to have you here. So my challenge for you right now to get the most out of this session is to pick a goal. Again, see if you can make those tweaks of measurable and specific. Sunny, that was a great one. Compassion. How are you going to know if you achieve that? How are you going to know if you have that compassion? What's it going to look like? What's it going to feel like when you achieve that goal? Compassion, maybe towards someone, maybe it's a specific feeling. It can be feeling, right? It doesn't necessarily have to be a number. You can have goals that reach other things. Sorry. Thank you, buddy. So you can have goals around things that aren't necessarily numerical, right? Of course you can. PTSD is a great one, or rather healing is a great one. Great, great, great, great one, right? But is it still measurable and specific? Now, for those of you who aren't in Broken to Unbreakable, you, we might've talked about this in Recovery Secrets before, but we have certain metrics that we use to track healing, right? We've talked about tracking processing. In Recovery Secrets, we talked about your believability level and we've talked about your distress level. Those are 2 metrics. They're measurable. They're specific. He even healing, even I want to get to a point where I'm at peace, right? And so we paint this picture. It's peace. It's no raised voices. It's not reliant on anything. It's self-love, right? And we paint the picture of what that is. So we actually have definitions for all those things. When it comes to recovery, you want self-love. You want to not be reliant on substances. And then we define those things. What does that self-love look like and feel like? What does not reliant on substances mean? Right? So we paint all those things as a picture so they're measurable and specific. So to kind of get back on track here, pick a goal. We're going to talk about today how to get from A to Z. And in my opinion, the very, very best way and the very quickest way to get from A to Z. So a lot of really fun things I'm very excited to talk about. So pick a goal. I encourage you to share in the chat box. You certainly don't have to. Welcome, Lorena. Great to have you here. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. To be able to create sellable art to support me in old age. That's an awesome goal. That's an awesome goal, right? And again, this is not a session on goals, but we can get even more specific. What does support me mean? I'm assuming there's some sort of financial element to that, right? So what does that number need to be per month? Or what does that number need to be before a certain age in order for that goal to have been achieved or be being achieved. That makes sense. Good morning, Pat. Great to have you here. So today we're talking about gradualism and we'll explain what that means in a second. We're talking about consistency. We're a little bit thinking about long, or we're a little bit talking about long-term thinking, but that's not the specific topic for us today. So now when it comes to achieving a goal, how many people have ever set a goal and Maybe worked for a little while at it, maybe worked really hard at it for a little while, and then done nothing at all. Anyone have that experience where if this is your work ethic here, right? So you're at point A, you're feeling motivated, you're feeling good, you want to get sober, you want to go back to school, you want to learn a skill, right? And your action just goes through the roof. You are just taking so much action. Like that's just your effort. You're just putting so much effort in. And then get to a point where the effort goes all the way down, even into the negative. Just to zero. Anyone been in that position where you're taking so, so, maybe it's even in your healing. I know a lot of people do this, right? So you take so, so, so, so much action. So much act— you're like, you're motivated, you're inspired. I wanna do this thing. I wanna create this thing. It's gonna be awesome. It's gonna be fantastic. You take all this action and then you get to a point where you stop completely. Right? And so we have a phrase for this. We'll call it, and I don't love this phrase, but this is what we'll call it, fly and die. Right? And so where we, we take all this action, it's like chaos and it's It's awesome and it's great and then nothing, right? And so it's chaos and it's awesome and it's great and we're working really, really hard and then nothing. And it always kind of leaves us, it feels like, back where we started. And so what we're gonna talk about today is how to make consistent— we're gonna talk about why that's important— progress towards your goals so you don't have that happen. And now that doesn't mean you're not gonna have moments where you feel inspired and you can't put that effort in. It doesn't mean you can't. You know, be obsessed with that goal and spend all weekend or all week working on it and just like go at it. But it's gonna help you get actually to your goal. And it's about consistency. So my question for you, I love this. If you've read The Art of Trauma Relief, don't cheat here. Don't cheat here. My question for you is, would you rather have $3 million, $3 million right now, or one penny That doubles every day for 30 days? I know some of you are in BTU as well. No cheating. Would you rather have $3 million now or 1 penny that doubles every day for 30 days? Would you rather?

$3 million.

You can do a lot with $3 million. You can do a lot with $3 million. Okay. You could buy your dog all the tennis balls in the world. Probably with $3 million, you could get him as many BANANAS as his little heart could hold, right? So why do we want the penny? Why do we want the penny? What is the penny going to get us? What's it going to get us? Now it's tempting to have the $3 million, right? I mean, if, if literally there was $3 million right in front of you or one penny, right? I mean, it's, it's tempting to have the $3 million. We want the penny, and here's why. For those of you who don't know the math on it, is because of the compound effect, which I'll draw on the board in a second, or I'll draw on the board right now. Let me just make sure we can see it here, right? So there's something called the compound effect, and if we start here with that penny and it doubles and it doubles again and it doubles again and doubles again, right? And so we're going to have this gradual rise. That's called the compound effect. And think about if something just keeps doubling, it doubles, it doubles, it doubles. So day 1, we have a penny. Day 2, we have 2 pennies. Day 3, we have 4 pennies. Day 10, we have $5.12. Now we're 10 days in. Oh, okay. $5.12. Maybe we made the wrong choice. Day 20, we have $5,000. $5,000, just over $5,000 on day 20. So we're 10 days away from the end here and we only have $5,000. We're— that $3 million is looking pretty good, right? Okay. Day 28, we have $1,300,000. Day 28, we still don't have more than this. Day 28, we have 2 days left. Day 29, we still don't have more. We have $2,600,000.

Oh man.

Bummer, right? No, because that doubles. And on day 30, We have $5,300,000, and that is the power of the compound effect, right? So it goes up and up and up and it doubles, and it's not that different with your efforts. So if you've ever been in a position where, like we just described before, you've put all of your energy into basically the short term, right? You've just put as much energy as possible and then something happened and whatever it was, that energy went down to zero. That would be like taking the $3 million. Pat, it's okay. I was hoping somebody would fall for it and I appreciate you falling for it, Pat. Right? So if, if you've ever been in that position where you've taken action, you've been really inspired, you've done all this work and then nothing, you took the $3 million, right? And now here's a little fun trivia. Actually, just out of curiosity, how many of you play the lotto? I play the lotto not often. I only play the lotto when it's a big, big, big, big pot. Actually, I don't even really know how to buy lotto tickets. I went to buy lotto tickets for this last lotto because, um, you know, I was talking to my parents and we're like, oh, we'll go in on a ticket together, which is like $2, right? We'll go in on a ticket together for the Mega Millions. It's, it's a crazy amount of money and, uh, then we'll split it down the middle, right? So we picked all our numbers and we went in and apparently you can't buy a lotto ticket with a credit card, which I guess makes sense, right? So anyway, $3 million. Now, again, here's some fun facts about lottery. Here's some fun facts about short-term, about taking the now, about things only being really like this side here is all about only when you're motivated, when you're most inspired and you're doing so, so, so, so much, right? So that's taking the $3 million. After winning the lottery, 70% of lotto winners lose their money within 5 years or less. So after winning the lottery, 70% lose their money in 5 years or less, end up back exactly where they started. Now, how about this? A third of them, so it's 33%, 33% of people who win the lotto don't end up back where they started. They go bankrupt. 33% of people who win a lottery go bankrupt. Why is that? Why is that? Because We took a short, basically a shortcut, and we wanted the shortcut to last a long time. Right. And so what we're talking about today and what I want to hone in on today is taking steps daily in order to reach that goal, taking gradual steps daily, getting 1% better every day and focusing on that. Again, it doesn't mean you can't be inspired. It doesn't mean you can't be obsessed. It doesn't mean when you're feeling that way, you can't put so, so much into it. As long as you go back to taking those steps daily, right? So that's what I want you to focus on in any area of your life, especially when it comes to recovery, is taking steps daily in order to achieve that goal you're achieving. You're working towards achieving a very big goal. This is a big goal that, to be honest with you, for the rest of your life, way past when you actually achieve it, people will tell you it's not achievable. It's a very big goal, but it's not impossible. Right? But if we only work when we're inspired, we're gonna end up back where we started, and sometimes we're gonna end up even further back. So we need to work consistently over the long term in order to achieve our big goals. And so I want you to think about the goal that you set out today, right? And again, we have, this isn't a session on goal setting, but if you can make it measurable, if you can make it specific, we talked about your stress level for PTSD specifically, right? We talked about distress level. We want to get our distress level down to zero. That's a great goal. What are the things that we need to do gradually? We want this to be a slow burn. We want this to be just piece by piece by piece by piece, step by step by step by step, so that we can get there. And I promise you, that's actually what gets you there faster. This was a tremendous lesson that I had to learn in my life and in my recovery and in everything. How many of you have ever attempted a sobriety journey and been in this position? You're at point A, you're like, I'm feeling motivated. That's it. I'm done. That's it. And you're feeling really inspired for a couple of days, maybe a week, and then you end up back where you started, right? It's because we're not thinking about the long term. It's because we're, we're trying to take this, this shortcut of relying on motivation. Basically, we can't rely on motivation. We can't rely on inspiration. It's nice when we have it. But here's the little tricky secret that's not such great news. This is going to be a little bitter to taste, is that you're not always going to have inspiration. You're not always going to feel motivated, but you still need to achieve that goal. You still need to get there. You want to get there still. Just because you're not motivated to get there doesn't mean you don't want to get there.

Hmm.

Interesting. Just because you're not motivated at this moment does not mean you don't want that goal. Doesn't mean you don't want it. It just means your energy is not going to match what you feel like is necessary to get there. You don't have to be jumping off the walls excited about your goal every single day. There are definitely going to be times where you feel that way. When I sit down and I set my goals and I write my goals, I'm psyched about them. I'm so excited for my future and the things that I'm working towards achieving. When I sit and I think about them and I think about achieving them, it's so exciting. It's awesome. I'm like already celebrating them. And then guess what happens? I have goals that I have that are 30, 40, 50, probably 70 years out, 60 years out. They're 60 years out. And so today, do I feel very motivated to work towards that goal? No, I don't feel motivated at all to work towards that goal. Did I feel motivated when I set it? Yes, absolutely. Do I still want that goal? Yes, absolutely. Okay. And so what we wanna do is just make sure we're taking gradual steps. We're like, we're talking about, they can be baby steps, they can be tiny steps, 1% steps, half a percent steps so that we get to that point. Now remember, for the, we call this the magic penny, right? For the magic penny, we were at day 28 and we still hadn't gotten more than $3 million. We're at day 28. So that's all that we're working on is step by step by step by step by step. And your recovery is not all that different. You're taking all these steps, all these steps, all these steps. And this is why consistency, listen to this, consistency is the only magic pill, the only magic pill in, in life in general, consistency. So we don't have to take these big monumentous giant leaps. We want to take, we want to, this is why we're, we talk about building a lifestyle, right? around this. It's not because it's going to take you a lifetime. It's because building a lifestyle is actually gonna get you there very, very quickly in the scheme of things. Very, very quickly. So again, I want you to think about, you're not going to feel motivated every day. It doesn't mean you don't want that goal. And so what I want you to think about are what is something that you are willing to do? When Ryan was on our session a couple weeks ago now, he had talked about willingness. What are you willing to do each day that's gonna help you move closer to that goal? It does not have to be big. That is the What are you willing to do? Right? So now I'm in the process of, of thinking about writing the next book, and there's a couple of things that I'm thinking about, right? I'm thinking about writing a couple of, either a couple of books or trying to make it one book. So I'm thinking about that now. Now I have a really super busy schedule and this year has been nuts and crazy and all sorts of chaos, right? We've been sick so much this year. I literally still have things from January and February on my to-do list. Okay. So, but I'm, I'm thinking out, I'm thinking about, that's something that I want to get started. What am I willing to do each day or each week? Am I willing to sit and do 10 minutes? Yes. Yes, I am. I'm willing to do 10 minutes. I'm willing to dedicate 10 minutes at the beginning of the day, leave 10 minutes earlier for my workout or whatever it is, and sit down and do the outline and sit down and just get ideas out, get ideas down until I can dedicate stretches of longer time. And that's okay too. Is this making sense? Is this resonating? Let me know in the chat box there if this makes sense to you, if you understand what the concept is here and basically what I'm asking you to do. And I, I want you to take this right now. I want you to think about the goal that you set out. Now, it could be whatever goal that you started with at the beginning of the session. It could be recovery. It could be any goal that you have in your life. And I want you to think about what are steps that I can take daily that I'm willing to do, that I'm willing to do. Every day, regardless of my motivation, regardless of if I'm inspired or not. It's easy to achieve when you're inspired. It's easy to achieve when you're motivated. It's fun, right? To watch the Olympics and then be like, oh man, that's so fun. I'm going to get back into exercise, right? Because you're inspired and you're feeling good about it, right? And then what happens? The Olympics end and you don't have that inspiration, that input anymore. And then for most people, what happens is back to square one because we're relying on that inspiration. We're In relying on that motivation, right? And so again, there's the kind of bitter pill hug kick in the butt. You're not always going to feel inspired. You're not always going to feel motivated. You'll feel more and more motivated, more and more inspired because this progress is going to feel good and it's going to add up. That's the thing. It adds up and you're going to start to see it. You're going to start to feel it, right? So that's what we're talking about when we talk about gradualism. That's what we're talking about when we talk about the compound effect, right? And we talk about consistency. So it doesn't matter how big this goal is. Literally, I have goals that are decades and decades and decades away, decades away. And right at this moment, I'm not motivated to achieve that goal. But there are things I'm willing to do each, sometimes it's each day, sometimes it's each month, each week, each year to continue to take steps forward to that goal. That's all that it is. Steps forward. What are you willing to do? Even if you don't feel motivated, you're not feeling like it, you're, your heart's not in it. Right? There are some days I go and I work out and I'm just like so tired or whatever it is. I'm like, oh man, my heart's not in it today, but I'm still willing to show up and do my best for what that looks like on that given day. Lately it's been super hot, super humid, right? So I've been a little bit slower than I usually am. There have been some days where it's like, I'm a little bit draggy, right? But I'm willing to show up and just do my best. And that's it. I'm willing to just show up and do my best, whatever that looks like on that day. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Welcome, Elaine. Welcome, Judy. Welcome everyone who we have here. Welcome, Joe. Joe, our topic for today is gradualism. We're calling it gradualism, consistency, and something we call the compound effect. Glad it's making sense. Awesome. So Sunny asking, what is a step towards compassion? So I want you to think about what com— what that means to you, right? So I want you to think about what that goal means to you. Compassion around Compassion towards what? The world, a person, a thing, yourself. I want you to actually get down to it and define compassion, right? And this is not, I, I hope it's not coming off wrong, right? This is not me not wanting to give you the answer. I want you to figure out what's your definition of compassion. Brad and I, at a point in our relationship, were on the wrong page about something and it was the word safety. It was the word safety, right? And so of course we're, you know, you're, you seek safety in a relationship. And when he was using the word safety, he was describing one thing. When I was using the word safety, I was describing something slightly different. And so because those things didn't align, we had a lot of miscommunication. And for example, I would promise safety and not fulfill on that because I was fulfilling on my definition, but didn't understand his. And so in his point of view, I wasn't providing a safe environment. In my point of view, I was. So I was promising this and giving this. What I thought, because our definitions weren't lined up. And that's the funny kind of tricky thing about language is you can look up the actual definition, but most of the time you're using your own definition of a word and you have your own kind of twist on it, your own perspective on it, your own goals around it and about it. And so we just wanna make sure that's okay. And honestly, it's typically a lot better than the dictionary definition, but we just wanna understand. What it actually is, what it means to you. There's no wrong there. There's no wrong. Everything is right. Everything is right when it comes to you defining what that means to you. But once you start to define it, then we can start to break it down into pieces. And so this is a great example of what Brad and I have done consistently on our, on our journey, our journey to get here, to get to this point was basically figure out, okay, so what's the goal? What does that mean? What does that look like? What are the parts? What are the pieces? So you'll see a lot of that within the work that we do, within the teaching that we do, the pillars of recovery. What are the 3 most important things in recovery? Mindset, routines, processing. Okay. Steps for processing, right? There's 4 steps for processing. You're going to see those steps again and again because we try to break it down to its simplest element and, and, and really simplify everything. But we need to understand what it is at its core, what it is at its foundation. So I want to do one more example here, one more example here of compound effect. And I love this example. Now, for those of you on the metric system, I apologize because I'm going to do this in calories and pounds, or I'm going to do this in pounds. So again, for those of you on the metric system, I apologize. My brain, my brain does not do metric. Okay. But here's our example here. How much extra weight do you think you would gain or lose by eating 2.5 Oreos a day in 5 years? So here's the prompt here. I'm going to erase this. Here's the prompt. 2.5 Oreos, 5 years. So we'll put 5 years down here, right? And we're looking for weight, pounds. How many pounds do you think you would gain if you added 2.5 Oreos a day, or you would lose if you subtracted 2.5 Oreos a day? 2.5 Oreos. 2.5 Oreos. That is 125 calories. So 125 calories a day. What do you think the weight difference will be if nothing else changes? Nothing else changes in 5 years. What do we think? Just out of curiosity. Just out of curiosity. This is one of the best examples I feel like of the compound effect of how small changes daily change your life. Life happens in the little moments. Your life is happening right now in this moment. You're here, you're engaging in this information, you're taking this information in. It doesn't happen when somebody places a gold medal around your neck. That's the picture. That's the picture of your wedding day, right? Your love is not the wedding day. Your wedding day, that picture of you getting married is a representation of all the work you did before. That's all that it is. It's a representation. It's a symbol. It's an image. That's it. That's it. Right? When you see a golfer or a sports champion and they're holding a cup Or trophy or whatever it is. It's not that moment. It's all the moments that came before. And so your life happens in the little moments. These little things make a tremendously big difference. So 2.5 Oreos, about 125 calories extra a day or 125 calories less. We were big Oreo people growing up. For those of you who have been around a while, you'll hear me talk about my dad sometimes. Big cookie guy, loves cookies. He will have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch. A diet soda, and he will walk out the door with like 2 Oreos. And I just remember this all the time growing up and less so now. He just gave up sweets, right? But he'll have a bunch of stuff in his hand and he'll have the 2 Oreos in between his teeth holding them because that's his snack walking out the door. Okay. 2.5 Oreos. So here's the answer here. Over 5 years, the effect of eating 125 extra calories each day. each day. Nice, Joe. Nice, Joe. Good math. Is 65 pounds. 65. That's not a small amount of weight, right? And 5 years is not 100 years. We're not talking about 100 years. We're talking about 5 years. 5 years. That's what we're talking about. 125 extra calories a day. If you eat 3 Oreos a day right now and you take that back, that's the only thing that you have to change. If you want to lose 65 pounds in 5 years, how many pounds is that a year, Joe? If you want to lose 65 pounds in 5 years, it's 13 pounds a year. That's a pound a month. That's an amazing cadence by just not eating 2.5 extra Oreos, right? If you're eating 3 Oreos, you have half an Oreo a day. That's the only thing that you have to change. 125 calories. That's how small changes can be. And a lot of times should be. We're looking for the long term. 5 years is not that long term. It's not that long term. If you were your ideal weight in a year and a half, 2 years, I mean, holy cow, would you not be proud of yourself? And for those of you who— weight is typically an easy example because it's about numbers, right? For those of you who have maybe been on some sort of weight journey, whether it's weight loss or weight gain, how long have you been on that? Maybe you've been on it for the last 2, 3, 4, 5 Maybe you've already been on it for 5 years. Maybe you've already been on it for 5 years, right? So I know we want things now. We always want things now. That's natural. We're wired that way. But think about a little bit about the long term. Now we've already been on this 5 years. We've already been doing this 5 years. And that's the only change that we had to make. Instead of making these big, big, big, big changes, we can make teeny tiny tweaks and get there and typically get there faster. Okay. So that's what I want you to think about. That's the concept for today. I want you to apply it to every goal that you have in your life, your recovery, your finances. Finances is a great one. I mean, that's a great one to think about. If you save, you know, X amount of dollars a day and you put it in an account that's gaining, I don't know, they don't get a lot of interest these days, but 1% interest, it's going to add up over the course of a lifetime. Are you going to really miss $5 a day? $5 a day. $10 a month, right? Not getting, not going out to eat maybe, or going out to eat one, one time less a month, or not doing the subscription instead of a subscription to Netflix, right? Doing an automatic bank account deposit, right? There's all sorts of things that we can do. Now, we of course want to weigh the benefit of that, right? What's the benefit short-term and long-term? You know, if you're doing something like this, this is an amazing thing to do because you're getting, you're getting education. And education is something that has an immense return because you're growing yourself, you're growing you as an individual. So maybe you're subscribed to something like, I don't know if this is fiction or nonfiction, like Book of the Month, right? That's probably not something you want to cut out financially, right? Because you're weighing, okay, well, my education versus this $15. You can't really put a price on education. It's unbelievable because you continue to grow and it opens more doors. It opens more opportunities for So maybe you're going back to school and you're on some sort of payment plan or you're paying loans or something like that, right? So you want to weigh these things, but still you want to think about the long term. There are things that we can quantify very, very easily with numbers, which is why we typically use weight as an example. But there are other things that we want to weigh as well in regard to our goals. So you can apply this to any goal that you have. Again, your goals, they're, it's going to be a lot better for you To define them, to get clear and specific with your goals. Get clear, get specific so that you know exactly what you're aiming for so that you can taper back and say, okay, what am I willing to do? Don't worry about how many years it's going to take you. Don't worry about it. You're here anyway. I mean, you're here every day anyway. You're doing it. Are you willing to just do this less a day or this more a day if you want to gain that weight? Are you willing to just do that? True Oreos. True Oreos. Come on, right? Come on. It's not even 2.5. It's 2.3. 2.3. All right? So don't even worry about this. Doesn't matter how long, just taking those steps and you will eventually get there. And you're going to find you get there fairly quickly again in the scheme of things and a lot faster than if we took the route where we're relying on motivation and inspiration, right? Makes sense. If you have any questions about this topic, feel free to get them in the chat box and we will discuss them as we go along here. Amazing, amazing job with this. Had a lot of fun doing this. This is one of, one of my favorite things to, I know I say it all the time, but one of my favorite things to teach because it's so mind-boggling when we talk about, when we relate it to this. I don't know, maybe you all have some other examples or what's 125 calories. I'm not a calorie counter personally, so I don't have a really good representation of that, but what's 125 calories? It's 2.5 Oreos, maybe a slice of pizza, right? So maybe you're a pizza fiend. I know I'm a pizza fiend. Definitely was at certain points. Now it's plant-based pizza, right? But, and you just do one less slice a day or one less pizza a week, or maybe you're a, again, you're a cookie. We did Oreos when we were growing up. We did Chips Ahoy when we were growing up, all sorts of just little snacks. It's easy to eat 2.5 Oreos a day. Super easy. What's easy to do is also easy not to. It's easy to do is also easy not to do. So your life happens in the little moments. I want you to think about that. I want you to bring that forward into your recovery as well as into any other goals that you're working to achieve. It doesn't matter how long it's going to take you to get there, right? So again, I have goals that I for sure know are not happening for multiple decades, multiple decades. It doesn't matter when it happens, but I'm committed and I'm willing to do certain things in order to work towards that goal. And that's all that we're asking of you. All right. You have any questions? Feel free to. Get them in. Sunny asked me, started compassion for me. So what are the steps? So I want you to think about, again, Sunny, if you can define what compassion is for you and what that looks like, because that's gonna help us figure out what are the steps to getting there. And maybe what compassion isn't could be a helpful thing, right? So if right now, and again, it, it's gonna come down personally, the opposite of compassion maybe is judgment as an example. And so what it isn't is it's, it's not judging people. And so if you can actually even go through and say, in a given day, I pass a lot of judgments. My initial reaction to everyone is, is judgment. So initially when I see someone or I meet someone or somebody says something, it's initially judgment, right? And so if you can say, okay, so that's not compassion, we can start there. That's a great starting point. So the steps might be for each judgment I notice that I'm passing on someone else, I take a step back. And say something kind. And maybe you passed a judgment internally and you wanna say something kind internally, or you wanna say something kind externally, right? So maybe that's a step towards that goal of compassion. Maybe again, it, maybe it's compassion for yourself, compassion for others. Compassion could be a lack of something, just non-judgment. So compassion, and, and again, we can define it like by the dictionary definition, and this may or may not be the definition that you want, right? Sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others. That personally is not my definition of compassion. So I want you to think of, think about that, right? So if it's just non-judgment and that's what we're working on as compassion, that's a great place to start. An amazing place to start. 'Cause we can notice where we're judging. We can take a step back. We can say something kind. We can say something nice. We can think about maybe the things that they've been through. So something I used to do when I used to pass judgment is, and I used to notice myself getting Frustrated or upset with someone or about something, or really like annoyed at people for doing this thing that I obvi— I thought was very obviously wrong or not the right thing to do, or mean or, or whatever it was, vicious. I would stop and I'd say to myself, okay, I don't know what it's like to any walk in anybody else's shoes. I don't know what it's like. I've only ever walked in my shoes, so I can't possibly know what it's like to be in their shoes. Which means I can't possibly pass judgment because I don't know the things that they've been through. I don't know what's going through their head. I don't know what's going through their mind and their heart and their soul. I just don't know. I know some possibilities and I know that we're all deserving of compassion. That's also a belief that I have. We're deserving of non-judgment. There are certainly times when I've done things that were obviously wrong or obviously, you know, inappropriate, whatever it was, right? And it was because I was so hurt. And so the, the thing that really helped me was, you know, I just don't know. I just don't know. And I can't, I could, I could pretend to put myself in their shoes, but I will never have walked in their shoes. I will never have walked their path. I've only ever walked mine, which means I will only ever have my perspective. As much as I can try and I can ask and I can learn, I will only ever truly have my perspective, my path that I walked. You can't actually put someone else's shoes on. Metaphorically, right? And so that was something that was helpful for me. You just, you just don't know. And again, these are all just spitballing ideas, right? And so if you're working towards this goal of complete compassion or complete nonjudgment, whatever that is for you, you can start with each time I pass a judgment on someone, I'm going to verbally out loud, maybe you pass a judgment on someone that's not even in the room and you text them and you're like, hey, I really hope that you're doing well. Or I, you know, I really like that shirt that you were wearing this morning. It looked Awesome on you. You know, I hope you're well, taking care of yourself. That, that's going to be a step in that direction because you're going to start to build that muscle of doing that. And you're going to undo the, the negative path in your brain that is always judgmental or non-compassionate. So Sunny, let me know if that makes sense. Again, they're all just ideas because we need to start with the concept that you have and the goal specifically that, that you want there. So sharing, typically a tablespoon of oil has 100 to 125 calories. So if you cut out 1 tablespoon of oil each day, You can lose 65 pounds in 5 years example. That's great. That's a great one, Joe. It's amazing how much oil we typically use to cook that we actually don't need. I started doing something quite a while ago now that rocked my world and it's called water sautéing. And so the only time I would really use oil for the most part, unless it was like a cake or something, was when I cooked veggies. I cook a lot of veggies and so it'd always be oil and onion and carrots, whatever was in the bottom there. And I learned about this thing called water sautéing. I was like, no way. In my brain, I firmly believe you had to have oil. It had to have oil, otherwise it would stick. And you don't even need oil to do that, right? So you just cut that out. 1 tablespoon of oil a day. That's awesome. I love that example. Pat, I'm so glad that this was impactful. Pat sharing, can I say this? I'm having a hard time believing these illustrations. They are so shocking to me. It's amazing. These things are amazing. And I, I love them because a topic like this, this makes big pig goals so achievable, sustainable, achievable. So it doesn't matter how big the goal is, right? We wrote A to Z here. We didn't write A to B, and that was for a reason. It doesn't matter how big it is. It's so achievable. So PTSD, full recovery from PTSD, uh, an amazing relationship with your partner. Again, defining what that looks like, defining what that is, getting to the point where you Never raise your voice at each other, never yell at each other again, defining what that is, right? So when Brad and I met, that was, that was Z and then some, and I didn't even know if that was possible. I didn't know it was possible, but hey, that's the goal that I'm aiming for. And I'm just gonna take steps, little steps each day. I'm gonna work on myself. I'm gonna work to bring my best self. And if I just focus, and this is how I kind of did this, if I just focus on getting to, in a sense, creating, uncovering, discovering the truest, best version of me, and that thing is possible, it'll happen in the process of me creating that version of me. Right? And so that's what I focused on for that goal. It was just, I was focused on me. I was focused on every little time that I tripped up or that I got triggered or that I yelled or that I whatever, I reflected on that and I fixed it. Right? So the tools and skills that you have, those of you who are in Broken to Unbreakable, or we've, we've taught some of them in Recovery Secrets. The tools and skills that you have, that's how I fix things. That's how I change things. Every time I, again, got triggered, yelled, raised my voice, broke something, got mad, got extreme emotions, whatever it was, I stopped. I reflected. Now, that doesn't mean I stopped in the middle of that, right? I'm still human, but I reflected on that, figured out why did that happen? What's the root of that? What's the core of that? Processed out of it, changed my mindset about it, whatever it was, and then move forward. Until we found the next problem and then move forward until we found the next problem. So I'm glad, I'm glad it's encouraging and inspiring, Pat. I love it. It makes everything so attainable, which is to me very, very exciting. Awesome. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the chat box here and we'll chat. Good morning, everybody. Good morning, Elaine, Mimi, Pat, Sunny. Great to have you all here. Joe, I know, is here. Judy. It's great to have all of you here today. Here we go, Joe. Here's a good one. One medium fry from McDonald's is 365 calories or 3 days of 125 calories. Okay. This is kind of a fun exercise. You can have fun with this, if, especially if weight loss is something that you're looking to do. This can be a totally fun exercise. So I remember doing this when I was creating a module to For Broken to Unbreakable, for those of you who have Broken to Unbreakable, you'll recognize this content from the module. Thinking about different, like just having fun, like just what it looks like and what it sounds like, Joe, that you're doing here is just kind of having fun. Okay. So a large fry or maybe a small fry is about 125 calories. And if it's just 125 less every day for 5 years, this is what you're looking at. And it can be fun to do those things. And so what I would encourage you to do, if you're going to do that, And if weight loss or weight gain is your goal, is to think about specifically weight loss, to think about things you do have every day. Right. And so when I was in college, my roommates introduced me to cream cheese, right? So we lived in dorms, cream cheese and pretzels, because we had a little fridge. And so we'd all hang out and one of them had a TV in their room and we'd go into the room and sometimes it'd be like an award show or something. And We'd all go into the fridge, bring out cream cheese, go to the closet, whatever it was, and bring out pretzels and just cream cheese and pretzels. That's going to add up. I promise you that. That's something I took way, way past college, right? And that is actually something that I had to eliminate in order to cut down a little bit, right? And so you can think about what are some things I'm doing on a daily basis and you don't have to cut them completely. Maybe normally I finish half a tub of cream cheese. Let's just do, I'm going to do a quarter cup of cream cheese and I'm going to stop myself there. You don't have to. And I love this. I love this. You do not have to fall on the sword sacrifice to reach your goals. You do not have to fall on the sword sacrifice to reach your goals. You can get there gradually. You can live an enjoyable life. You can have all the goals that you want by chipping away at them. So Joe asking, Keely, are you whole food plant-based, no oil?

Yes.

But that didn't happen overnight, right? That was the ultimate goal. But again, it didn't happen overnight. So first it was about getting rid of meat and then it was about getting rid of other animal products. And then it was about, okay, so now that meat and animal products are gone, guess what's vegan? Oreo. Okay. So even though food, or excuse me, meat and other animal products, right? So like dairy products, even though that's been eliminated. Still not at that goal yet. So now it's okay. So how can we make this transition to healthier snacks, healthier breakfasts, healthier lunch, healthier dinners? What are we going to do when we're, when we're on a road trip? So every now and then Brad and I like to go on a road trip. We like to go hiking or something. So what we actually, I don't even remember what we used to do. We probably used to go to like Walmart, get chocolate covered pretzels and maybe stop somewhere and get a pizza or McDonald's or something like that. And so we had to reset all those things. So it was. All these little things, all these little things in getting to that point. And then it was okay, we're basically, we're whole food plant-based, but we're still cooking with oil. We want to eliminate that. Or whole food plant-based, we're still, we're cooking with, I don't know, like, like, like bleached flour or white, white flour. So in the, in the bread that we're having, it's, it's white flour. So now let's get rid of that until you, you get to that point. And again, that was a goal that we had. And that's a goal that we worked on for, I mean, literally for years. Years. And it's a goal that I had, I had tried to do many, many times for years. I'd feel all inspired and I'd read all the, you know, all the studies or whatever I was reading, right? And I was like, oh, this is awesome. Okay. I have to do this. I have to live this way. And I'd feel that inspiration. I'd feel that now I'd feel that motivation and then nothing. So I'd make big, big, big changes and then nothing and end up back where I started. But then I learned how to do this actually with Ryan's help on this. And work there gradually until you achieve that goal. Then you set the next goal. So any other questions, feel free to get them in and we'll get to them here. A lot of fun to think about though. I mean, really, really exciting thing to think about because it is all about the little moments. If you're working to learn a new language, can you learn 2 new words a day or 1 new word a day? Are you willing to learn 1 new word a day? 1 new word. How exciting is that? How doable is that? Can you add that into your routine? Maybe you're brushing your teeth and you pull up an app on your phone. Maybe you just look up word of the day and then you translate it into the language that you're, you're looking to learn. And then you just try to integrate it throughout the day. You just say it and you just slowly kind of immerse yourself, right? Or maybe you put a sticky note, like one sticky note a day and label something. Lamp. There's lamps everywhere. Lamp, dog, couch, right? And that's how you work on, you can learn a whole language that way. There, there's so many things that are possible. Okay? And you're not gonna learn that language in a year, probably. But guess what? In 10, 15, 20 years now, when you're traveling to that country, you're gonna be really glad that you learned a word every day. Again, it's not gonna be perfect. This is not a, a perfect system to say that you're gonna be fluent in a language in 15 years if you just learn one word a day. There's of course more that goes into that, but that's the premise. That's the concept of what we talked about here today. So this can be really exciting. So I want you to think about your goals, recovery and otherwise, and then what are you willing to do each day in order to work towards them, walk towards them? Ah, Mimi, that's so sweet, right? So Mimi sharing, when I meet someone from another country, I always ask, how do you say hello and thank you in your language? What a beautiful thing to ask. Maybe 2 of the most important phrases, hello and thank you. Hello. Thank you. And now, I mean, this is so cool. For those of you, this is a while ago now, at least on the iPhone, they have a translator app and you speak into it and it'll speak something else. And somebody else could speak into it in another language and it would speak in your language. It's amazing technology that we have, right? To digress a little bit, but that's awesome. You just pick little things up. You have a lifetime, like no matter how old you are, you have a lifetime. You have a lifetime. You have years and decades. That's a really beautiful thing. You have days, you have months, days and months and years. That's really cool. That's really super cool. There's a quote. I actually think it's a Tony Robbins quote. I remember hearing it and it was really impactful on me, on me. And it's this concept. And he basically said, most people overestimate what they can do in a year, overestimate what they can do in a year, and underestimate what they can do in a decade. Powerful, right? That's the exact concept that we're talking about today. Overestimate what they can do in a year, underestimate what they can do in a decade. So we're gonna wrap it with that today. If you have any more questions, get 'em in. Amazing, amazing job with everything. I apologize, power's still out at the office, but power's on at the condo, so we were able to, to get on here today. We had some kind of freak thunderstorms and then I've been having toothache, which is still ongoing, but I appreciate all your patience with that and your flexibility with that. I hope you enjoyed those replays that I put out there. They're really, really good. Of course. And sometimes it's nice to have a little break from lives. I know some people kind of enjoy those days every now and then. I'll enjoy those days too. Like in the winter, if maybe the workout gets canceled in the morning because of snow or whatever it is, it's like, oh, like it's like a, it's a snow day kind of thing. So I appreciate all your patience on that. I look forward to the rest of the week, which is one day, but we have some awesome things coming up. I've planned another community meetup session. So community social hour, we did one last week for the first time. It was a ton of fun. We're going to do a theme for the next community social hour. It's not going to be for a number of weeks here, but the theme is going to be hats. So of course, Brad and I love hats. We love to wear hats. If you have any hats, I have a hat that I think that I have here that I think that I still have that I'm going to pull out. It's going to be a different hat, but the theme is going to be hats. So if everyone just wants to wear their favorite hat or the funkiest hat or whatever it is, that's going to be our theme. We also have Ryan coming up in a few weeks. We have our 100th Recovery Secrets session coming up, which I'm so, so, so excited. Excited to to do, and then we have game night. That's the other thing. We have game night coming up. I believe a week from today is game night, and that's with our Broken to Unbreakable community as well. So lots of things to look forward to in regard to events. I think I said Ryan's coming back, so he'll be back soon as well. You can look in the events tab on Facebook to see all those special things that are going on. So lots to look forward to beyond just the content. But also next week is going to be a bootcamp week. So what we'll probably do, we're going to discuss topics for bootcamp week, but what we're probably going to do is also put it out there in the community as a vote for what we want to hear for our bootcamp week. So amazing job here today. I love you all. I believe in you at the very, very, very highest level. Again, thank you so much for being patient and flexible this week and in weeks before with, with this stuff going on. And I look forward to seeing you all bright and early tomorrow morning. I see some Spanish in the chat box there. Keep that going. I love it. It's awesome. It's—

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.