Ep. 77: The MAGIC FORMULA

Right this second, if nothing changed in your life ever again, would you be happy being right where you are🤔?

My friends, we are diving into this deep🤿 subject in today’s short and sweet podcast. Our brains have an interesting habit of offering us that we’re not good enough, not smart enough, not thin enough, not (fill in the blank) enough.

But you know what?  You CAN be happy right now🤗. 

How?  Click the play button▶️, and I’ll give you the MAGIC FORMULA. 

Let’s go!

(Don’t wanna listen? Download the transcript here)

Find this episode on YouTube (video below) or on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Spotify, and Google Play.

Can’t see the video? Click here to watch it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/6WPme8Cz5w8

RESOURCES MENTIONED:
Leave a review/rating on iTunes:  http://bit.ly/FitnessMatters
Join the Get Your GOAL Coaching + Accountability Facebook group:  https://pahlabfitness.com/get-your-goal/

Thanks for listening!  Know somebody who needs a little MAGIC✨ in their life?  SHARE this podcast with them!  💛

The MAGIC FORMULA (Full Transcript) 

You’re listening to the Fitness Matters podcast with Pahla B. And this is episode number 77, “The Magic Formula.”

You guys, I can’t even help it. I laugh every single time when I get my super dramatic voice during the intro, “The Magic Formula.” And one of these days, I’m just going to say it in a normal voice. We’ll see how that ever works out for me. Hi, welcome to the podcast. I’m Pahla B. I’m your best middle-aged fitness friend. And around here at the Fitness Matters podcast, we talk about the fitness matters that matter to you. Does this one matter to you? You don’t even know yet. You don’t even know. I am going to tell you the magic formula. I’m going to . . . Spoiler alert, by the end of the podcast, we are going to have spoken about the magic formula. I’ve got a couple of pieces of business I wanted to talk about first though.

Number one, first and foremost. Oh my gosh. Thank you. You guys, when I asked you . . .  Was that just last week? I asked you to write reviews and ratings and stuff if you listen via iTunes. And when you do that, it helps me, if I’m being selfish, because I am, and that’s where I started with this conversation. It helps me find more of an audience, but also it helps other people find the podcast. Other people out in the world, strangers, people you know, just general public people. They might need the kind of messages that we talk about around here. So if you leave a rating and review, you’re basically helping the whole world. And thank you for it. The other piece of business, I wanted to ask you a question and this is actually serious. I’m not going to laugh about this one.

This is a real serious question. And it’s something that I have thought about numerous times on my way to different goals. And I was thinking that this might be really helpful for you today. So here it is: What if this is as good as it gets? Wherever you are with whatever goal you have, let’s say that you are running a race. Let’s say that you are losing weight. Let’s say that you are building, if you’re me, a million dollar business. What if today was as good as it was ever going to get? And I’m not saying that like, “Oh, everything from here on out is going to be lousy. It’s going to get worse.” I just mean, what if you stayed the same? It’s not super likely because we don’t, generally speaking, but let’s just . . . We’re going to the land of make-believe here. What if what you have, what you are, what you do, what you can be today, with your goal specifically, is as good as it gets?

What if it’s never going to get, in your opinion, better? Does that change how you think about where you are? Because you’ve got a couple of options with this one. Knowing if somebody came to you and said, “Oh no, no, no, no. In five years, you’re going to be exactly here. What you weigh today, that’s what you’re going to weigh every single day for the rest of your life. The number of subscribers that you have today, that is the number of subscribers that you’re going to have for the rest of your life. The number of miles that you ran this morning, that is the most number of miles that you’re going to run for the rest of your life.” What if this is as good as it gets? Would you be really happy with where you are? Would you be really proud of where you are? Would you look at what you have accomplished and be like, “Okay, this is amazing. This is awesome?” Or would you resign yourself to spending the rest of your life hating where you are?

Because here’s the thing, you can choose. You get to choose how you react to this news, that you are going to be the same for the rest of your life, that this is as good as it gets. And some of us have already made this choice. Some of us have already kind of resigned ourselves to being unhappy with where we are, to finding fault in everything we do, to being unsatisfied with where we are. And I’m not pointing fingers and saying that you have chosen this on purpose. I’m saying that some of us kind of fall into this. We get into these thoughts. We all do. This is how the brain works. We have talked about this numerous times. This is how the brain works. Your brain looks to be efficient. It wants to be the same, frankly. That’s what efficiency is. It’s being the same because it doesn’t want to burn a lot of energy by doing something new. Your body doesn’t love to do new things. You know that. It doesn’t love to try something different or something new.

Your brain loves to be efficient. It loves to think old thoughts and not challenge them. Lots of us have fallen into this habit of not thinking that we are good enough. And generally speaking, we think that because there’s the prospect of being able to change, but it’s just kind of a prospect. It’s not something that we are necessarily actively seeking. But if you knew that you weren’t going to change, which way would you choose? Now I’m talking really specifically. I just thought about this. That’s why there was a long pause – a long dramatic pause. I’m talking really specifically about where you are with one goal, not with how you think about things. Because if you could never change the way you think, well, then you would be stuck with what you are thinking right now. Would you want to be stuck with what you’re thinking right now, about where you are on your goal? That’s kind of an interesting thought, isn’t it?

Here’s the other thing that I thought about when I asked myself this question. Because I have, at various times along my YouTube journey really specifically, asked myself, “What if?” And I remember thinking this when I had 26,000 subscribers: What if 26,000 subscribers is as big as I ever get? Could I be happy with that? Or would I need to do something else? Because it kind of felt for a long time like I was never going to get where I wanted to go, that maybe this truly, truly was it, that I didn’t have any choice in the matter, that there was going to be a limit, a cap on my success and maybe I had already reached it. And the thing that kept going through my brain when I thought about that, when I asked myself the question, “What if this is as good as it gets?” was this:  I absolutely 100% just didn’t accept it.

My brain argued and argued and argued, “But I can change. I can make new decisions. I can learn new things. I can create new habits. I can . . . “ We’re not talking about YouTube anymore here, “but I can lose weight. I can repair my broken relationships. I can make more money. I can do new things. I can think new thoughts.” My brain just absolutely screamed at me, “but I can change. I can change.” When I asked myself that question about what if this is as good as it ever gets, I keep coming back to that question, “What if this is as good as it gets?” because it does remind me, when I look at things, how very much I unintentionally have really resigned myself to not being happy where I am. I have unintentionally, over the years, even when I remind myself that I don’t have to think this, I fall back into this way of thinking and I even fall back.

I think about it in a new way. It’s a new thought, but it’s a new thought that still keeps me kind of stuck in an old pattern of, “But I’m not never going to get where I want to go. I don’t like where I am. It’s not good enough. I haven’t done enough. I haven’t done this well. There’s something wrong with where I am.” So I’m going to encourage you . . . You knew this was coming, right? I’m going to encourage you to think about where you are as being the best place that you could possibly be. If you knew that it was never going to get better than it is right now, wouldn’t this seem like the best that you could do? Wouldn’t it feel like the best, or would you continue telling yourself that it’s the worst? Now here’s the magic formula, my friends.

When you can love and accept yourself 100% right where you are, and really, truly believe in your bones that this is the best, that you have reached success, that you have done something amazing to be where you are, that you are worthy and whole and complete and successful and phenomenal and miraculous, right this minute, and you can believe wholeheartedly in your capacity to change, that is what equals getting any goal you have in the world, my friends. That’s the magic formula. And there’s no steps to it. This isn’t like one of those things where I’m like, “Now let me reveal steps one through five on how we get there.” No, no, no. This is it. Step one, love and accept yourself and believe in your ability to change. That’s it. That’s all you have to do.

I made that sound so simple, right? Right? But here’s the thing. There isn’t anything more to it. It’s going to take some effort on your part to think it through. There are thoughts to be thunk here, but there’s nothing else to do. Loving and accepting yourself is a step. It is the thing. And in that same thing is believing wholeheartedly in your capacity to change. Your capacity to do anything you want to do simply because you want to do it, because you love yourself completely. And part of loving yourself completely is believing that you can change. They’re different, and yet they’re both . . . They’re like two sides of the same coin of you. You are the coin, and it is the two sides of you. And it is the one step of two things that you need to do to get where you want to go. Now I know this was super short today because this was it. This was the whole thing. This was the entirety of the podcast. But I know that you have a lot to think about with this, and this is your homework, truly.

Imagine, imagine that this is as good as it gets. What would you tell yourself? What would you say to yourself if you believed this was it, that this was amazing, that this was the best? And really picture your capacity for change, really picture why that feels hard to accept that you couldn’t change, because you know, you can. You know deep in your bones that you are capable of change. I would love to hear about this. You know I would. I always love to hear about it. You can leave a review. Tell me what this brought up for you. Or you could get a hold of me in regular social media ways too. That would be lovely, either way. I hope this was helpful for you today. I’ll talk to you again soon.

So totally loving this mindset work, and you really want to do it every day, in order to get your goal? Then my friend, you need to join the Get Your Goal group. It is my personal and private, very interactive, coaching and accountability group, where every day we talk about your mindset and we get your goal. You can learn all about it at pahlabfitness.com/get-your-goal. I’ll see you in the Goal group.