Ep. 267: Creating MAGIC

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Dive deep with me today on this episode of the Fitness Matters podcast as we uncover the secrets of your MAGIC.

Do you believe in MAGIC? I definitely don’t. Except, of course, when I do. Which is to say that I believe we are all born with MAGIC inside of us, and have the ability to create any kind of MAGIC we want in the world.

Dive deep with me today on the very last episode of the Fitness Matters podcast (which will be the Get Your GOAL with Pahla B podcast next week!), as we uncover the secrets of your MAGIC.

What You’ll Learn:


👉  Where MAGIC comes from
👉  How to harness your innate MAGIC
👉  Why you can’t give your MAGIC away (even when you try)
👉  Where to find your MAGIC

Transcript

You're listening to the final Fitness Matters Podcast with Pahla B and it's episode number 267: "Creating Magic". Welcome to the Fitness Matters Podcast, where every week we talk about the fitness matters that matter to you. I'm Pahla B, YouTuber, certified life and weight loss coach, soon to be author and your best middle-aged fitness friend. Are you ready to talk about the fitness mindset that matters to you? Me too. Let's go. Yes, I said final, but not because I'm not going to be podcasting. In fact, I will have another podcast out next Sunday, just like always. However, next Sunday's podcast is going to be the Get Your Goal with Pahla B podcast and I'm so excited about it. Oh my gosh. Hey, you know what? We're also going to take another left turn here before I even start talking about creating magic, there was something that I was thinking about.

Well, there was a couple of things that I was thinking about really specifically. I just got off the treadmill and I was going to joke with you about how yes, you hear the sound of me sweating because I made that joke all summer long about how I was constantly sweating because I was always out in my car. Well, this time I'm in my house and I'm sweating, not because the heater is on, but because I just got off the treadmill and I had not turned the heater off. So even in the middle of winter when it is literally freezing outside because yes, California does get freezing cold weather. Not just that I think it's freezing, but it's actually freezing. It's 30 something this morning and so I am drenched in sweat while I'm recording this podcast. And what I wanted to actually tell you, this was the left turn that I'm taking, two of them now, three of them now. That I actually recorded this podcast a couple of days ago and the entire time I was recording it, I was like, "This isn't quite right."

This isn't what I want it to be. This isn't going where I want it to go. This isn't me saying the things that I wanted to say, which happens sometimes. There have absolutely been other podcast episodes where I turn off the recorder and I'm like, "Well that was weird. That was not where I intended to go at all." But this one really specifically, it was a perfectly lovely podcast, but I am re-recording this podcast at a time of day that feels more podcast-y to me. I love recording the podcast for you first thing in the morning. I love thinking about you and what you need to hear while I'm on the treadmill in the morning, getting my mind ready for the day. It is the time of my day where I am thinking about you the most. And then I go out and execute different things.

But later in the day when I am doing things like I'm doing right now, which is to say building the Get Your Goal platform. It's going to be amazing and opening soon. Fingers crossed, it's going to be opening to everybody in the middle of January. I was aiming for the 1st of January and my friends, that is not possible. So I'm aiming for the middle of January. It's going to be absolutely amazing. There is a wait list right now if you want to go to getyourgoal.com and join the wait list. Totally awesome. I'm also, as you well know, rebranding the podcast. I've got a couple of other things going on behind the scenes. I have a brand-new 5-0 method coming out possibly by the time you hear this podcast, maybe a couple of days afterwards. Again, fingers crossed by the first of the year.

I've got a lot on my plate right now, which I mentioned a couple weeks ago. So anyway, in the middle of my day, I'm kind of thinking about myself more. I'm thinking about my tasks, I'm thinking about getting things done. I'm thinking about being productive. I'm thinking about the nuts and bolts of what is the design of this particular thing looking like. How do I want to say this thing that I'm saying. I'm thinking more about me than about you. And so while I was recording that podcast, I was like, "Okay, this is funny. It's interesting, it's not bad." But it's also not for you in the way that I really want the podcast to be for you. And so I prefer recording the podcast first thing in the morning. And that's what I'm doing right now as I just mentioned, just got off the treadmill thinking about you.

It's five o'clock in the morning. It's nice and dark. I've got just the bare minimum of ambient lights on. It's cozy. This is how I love to record a podcast. This is when I feel like I am, here I'm going to bring it back around, creating magic. And here's what I want you to know about creating magic, a couple of things. We're going to get into it with the podcast episode, but right now the podcast, within a podcast, set yourself up for success by knowing what you like. This is the thing that I have learned over the past couple of years more than anything in the world. And I mention it to you all the time when we're working out together. I'm always like, make the workout work for you. When we're talking about eating, I always tell you, eat the foods that you love in portions that make sense for your calorie target. Exercise in ways that feel good to you.

Unless of course you're exercising too much, but I'm always telling you to make things work for you and I've come to understand that that is the most important thing that I can impart to you. And it's kind of related to how we're talking about creating magic and I'm going to segue into that. But really plainly, really carefully here at the beginning, I just want you to know, not that you shouldn't do things in a way that don't feel sustainable at first. Everybody does that. I did it too. Believe me, I'm still finding things in my business that I'm like, "Oh yeah, I'm not going to be able to sustain that forever. Why did I even start this way?" We all start someplace because we think that's the way it's supposed to be done. And the way to figure out how to do things sustainably is to pay attention to that. And that is kind of a micro version of the macro thing that I tell you is that you are going to find all your ugly thoughts, all your unhelpful thoughts, all of the yuck before you find the beautiful golden nugget underneath.

Which is to say the way things work for you, the sustainable magic that you create for yourself is the way you personally are making everything work for you. So that's related but not entirely related to where I want to go with today's podcast episode, which is Creating Magic. I'm going to give you a quick content warning right here and not because I'm going to be swearing, even though I might, You never know with me, but I'm not planning on it. I'm going to give you a quick content warning that I am going to be talking about magic and the practical aspects of, I'm going to use some air quotes here, "magic". That if you have young children listening to the podcast with you, that you might want to pop in headphones, you might want to listen to this one as an adults only kind of podcast for your own reasons.

And that's all the content warning you're going to get because now I'm going to tell you that I don't believe in magic, that I am one of those parents who I did not care for, and I'm going to call it lying to my children because that is how I see it. And if you don't agree with this, if you love magic, if you love Elf on the Shelf or the Tooth Fairy or any number of leprechauns, magical things that we talk to our kids about. If you love that kind of thing, I fully respect that. I actually have a lot of respect for the concept of believing in magic. And in fact, that's where we're going today with this. And I also simultaneously am the most practical human being on the face of the planet in certain ways, because I can't just put that out there as a blanket statement.

I'm not always that practical, but I'm very practical about a lot of things. I took my kids to a birthday party, 15 years ago at least, they were kids and they're adults now. Many, many, many years ago where it was a magic party and it was so much fun. And I spent not only that entire day, but really the 15 years since then, thinking to myself, how is that done? What's actually happening here? In the moment, I do enjoy a good illusion, I have fun with it, but I also don't believe it. I don't believe that this is magic happening. I believe that there is a practical, scientific way of this thing that you are seeing happening. And that's what I want to offer you about creating your own magic. There will be a part of you that believes in the magic because that is actually part of creating magic, is believing that there is magic to be had.

And what I love to offer you is the science behind the magic so that you understand how you are creating magic. And what I mean by magic is creating results in your life. Sometimes, not even sometimes, I think really, really frequently when we see somebody else create something that we want for ourselves. When we see somebody else lose weight and it looks easy, or we see somebody else make a million dollars in their business and it looks easy. Or we see somebody else write a book and it looks easy, or we see somebody find love or run a marathon or do any number of things that seem like something that we want for ourselves and they make it look so easy, it looks like magic. So we are desperate to find out what they did in order to create that magic for themselves.

In my free Facebook group, the Killer B Hive, every single time somebody posts about their success and what they've accomplished, the comments are full of people asking, "Oh, what workouts did you do? What did you eat? How did you do that?" They want to know how it's done. And I will tell you from my perspective that the how is important and also not the most important thing. Believing in your own magic is the thing that creates magic. So let's talk about your own magic. There's a couple of different things that I want to talk to you about with how you create your own magic, how you believe in your own magic. And one of the first things that I want to come to is not giving away your magic. This concept is something that I talk about really frequently in the Get Your Goal group and I've called it a couple of different things.

I think the thing that it's most commonly called is something like giving away your power. And I don't love that specific phrase, really specifically because you cannot give away your power. Your power is yours, it's innate, it lives inside you. It is your superpower. It is biological. It is something that you quite literally own because it is in you. You are the embodiment of power, so you can't give it away. So I tried to give it a clever name, I call it a drainage problem, meaning that you are draining yourself of power. And I like that except for the fact that drainage problem really sounds more like plumbing than electricity. So I'm still working on this concept in terms of I understand the concept and I'm going to explain it to you what it is and how we work with it, but I haven't quite decided what to call it.

So for right now, I'm calling it giving away your power, draining yourself of power and someday I will have something much more exciting and interesting and explanatory to call it. However, for right now, I'm going to explain this concept to you as a type of unhelpful thought that you will notice in your daily journaling. Let me back up just a little bit here. While you are doing your daily journaling, because of course you're doing your daily journaling because of course that's one of the things that we do with the 5-0 method on your way to losing weight or honestly getting any goal. Truly, daily journaling is one of the tasks that you will do on your way to any goal. This is a universal, creating magic concept that we are talking about. When you are journaling, when you ask yourself something like, what do I think about, for example, weight loss or fill in the blank with your goal. What do I think about writing my novel?

What do I think about building a million-dollar business? What do I think about running a marathon? What do I think about running a 5K? What do I think about, for example, one of my goals next year, what do I think about dead lifting over body weight? What do I think about whatever it is that you want for yourself. You will notice, especially if you're looking for it. And now that I'm explaining this concept, you're going to be like, "Oh my gosh." I see it all the time.

You will notice that some of your answers are things like, "It's too hard. My husband hates it when I cook or when I make salad for dinner or the scale drives me crazy or nobody else in my family wants to eat like this." You will notice because I'm pointing it out to you that a lot of your thoughts start with something out there as opposed to the word I. Things out there, meaning the plan, the food, the scale, other people, the world, my job. Anything that is not you is you giving away your power, draining yourself of your innate, inborn, embodied power.

Your power is the power of your thoughts and your feelings. You have the ability to think about anything in any way that serves you. And when you think that something else outside of you is creating results for you, you have drained your own power. You have given away your power, you have not recognized your power. And this is quite possibly one of the most important concepts that I can teach you because we are all taught that this is how the world works. Every single one of us grew up hearing that my job is stressful, the price of gas is a problem, the scale hates me. Other people make me angry or sad or happy. Other people make me feel loved and safe and connected. I know that one's a tough one for you, I'm going to let that one lie for right now because, because I know we are all taught that everything we feel comes from outside of us and it doesn't.

You create your feelings with your thoughts. And further, you are capable, you can think anything. Now, does that mean it's going to be easy? Absolutely not. Does that mean it's going to feel believable right away? Absolutely not. 50 plus years of social conditioning have taught you that everything out there is in charge of you and your results. Unlearning that, unwinding that is the reason I tell you to journal every day because you will become aware of the fact that you are thinking these thoughts that give away your power, that try to give away your power because of course it doesn't actually give it away. You will feel powerless. In fact, let's run the two-step tool really quickly on those sentences. It's too hard, feels powerless to me. My husband hates it when I make salad for dinner. My husband actually doesn't.

My husband loves salad, thank goodness. But also, just really quickly, I know I've already told you eat the foods that you love in portions that make sense. Salad still has calories. In fact, when you go to restaurants and order a salad, sometimes the salad is the most caloric thing on the menu, and that's not necessarily bad depending on what your calorie target is. You can eat literally anything in a portion that makes sense. So don't take that sentence for anything other than a funny little example because I know that lots of us feel like we have to eat some kind of diet food, which also is giving away your power to the food as opposed to making your own choices. Seriously, when you notice this concept, when you start paying attention to how often you think that something outside of you is getting you results, you're going to be shocked.

It's going to be amazing to you and the best thing that you can do for yourself is recognize this and work on in a gentle way, keeping your power within you. Simply recognizing how often you are giving your power away is the thing that can help you shine your power even brighter. "But the scale drives me crazy. Oh my gosh, I feel totally powerless and defeated for that one.

Nobody else in my family wants to eat like this." Also feels very powerless. When you notice that you feel powerless, here's the ironic thing. You are creating that for yourself through your own power. Isn't that crazy? Your brain is so powerful that it can create the feeling of powerlessness inside of you and here's how.

This is the other thing that I want to teach you. So the concept is giving your power away to things outside of you. When you bring your power back home, when you recognize your power and use your power for good, for helpfulness, this is how your brain works. Your brain wants to create what it already believes so that it can continue to be efficient. Your brain is a biological specimen. It's also amazing and incredible and powerful beyond measure, but it's a piece of meat with electricity running through it. So it doesn't automatically think things that are helpful to you, it automatically thinks things that it has thought before because that uses less energy. Your brain takes up so much energy, like most, not most, that's not true. In the neighborhood of 25% of the calories that you burn every single day just by existing, goes to your brain, goes to your thought processes.

So your brain is already, I'm going to call it an energy drain, meaning that if you have 100% of X amount of energy and your brain is already using 25%. Your body's grid is like, "Hey, don't overload anything else. We want to be really careful with our energy." It does not want to expend any extra energy to think new thoughts. However, you are 100% capable of thinking new thoughts. This is actually part of why your brain is such an energy user, is because it is so capable of thinking new things and rewiring itself and forming new neural pathways to do things more efficiently. Your brain would rather continue to think the same things over and over and over again. However, it is capable of thinking something new. So as you look at a sentence like it's too hard. When you look at that sentence with your curious, compassionate observer and recognize this is a sentence, this feels powerless, which therefore means that it is an unhelpful thought.

The recognition of it as an unhelpful thought already starts your brain on un-forming that particular neural pathway. And as you work through the understanding of this as a thought and feeling, that feeling of powerlessness, letting that feeling exist in your body and recognizing that this feeling only comes from your thought, not from the concept of weight loss or something outside of you, but from your own brain. That will free up the space, the energy for your brain to think a new thought, which it can then practice and form a new efficient neural pathway. Your brain wants to be efficient, which means that it wants to think something automatically without spending more energy, which means that there is a period of time when you are expending more energy. The curious observer of your thought as a thought, the feeling of the feeling and the, I'm going to call it brainstorming of a new thought.

You don't actually have to come up with a new thought. Your brain, in the background, will do this work, and at some point you'll hear something ever so slightly different. When you hear it's too hard, you'll be like, "Oh, that's an unhelpful thought. It isn't too hard. I think it's too hard. Maybe it's not too hard. Maybe it's the exact right amount of hard. Maybe it's just challenging enough. Maybe." Your brain will offer you these tidbits of maybe, a possibility, like there's another thought that we could think here, and then you very naturally can hear that more often practicing it if it feels believable, if it feels good, it is therefore a helpful thought. You can practice gently, kindly, not forcing yourself to think a new thought on purpose in an affirmation-y sort of a way. But your brain will very naturally brainstorm something more helpful. Your brain has every single helpful thought available right now, every single helpful thought in the universe is already available to you.

It's simply that your brain is efficiently thinking the unhelpful thoughts right now. Recognizing a thought as unhelpful gives your brain the opportunity to go searching in its own magical way for something more helpful. You are the creator of all the magic in your life. And while there is a magic part of it, there is neuroscience that I can't explain to you. Your brain is working in the background in ways that I understand the results that it creates for you. That your brain, because it wants to be efficient, will always create in reality what it already believes. I get that chain of events. Your thoughts create your feelings. Your feelings drive your actions. Your actions gets results. Your results always, always, always reflect your thought because that's how your brain works. But it's doing this 60,000 times a day in ways that so much of it is not in language that we hear. Therefore, we don't always hear the entirety of the process and frankly, even the process itself. Neuroscientists don't completely understand how it works. They know it does, but they don't know how.

Which means that there's a certain part of this process that we just get to call magic, and you are the creator of that magic. You have magical power inside of you. You were born with it. It's part of your brain. Your brain is supposed to work this way. You were born with this power. It is simply a matter of harnessing it. And I think maybe that might be part of what I call it, though harnessing sounds like mountain climbing. There's going to be something about electricity, like plugging into your power or something. You guys have great ideas. Feel free to share with me your ideas of what I can call this concept that isn't giving away your power because you're not, or drainage problems because really, who wants to think about plumbing? Plumbers do, obviously, and that's magic in its own way.

I tell you what, but there's some better way of talking about this concept. I like creating magic for right now because creating magic just sounds fun and you are creating magic with science, with your own magical, amazing, fantastic brain, my friends. I hope that you are thinking about creating magic for yourself in the coming year. I hope that, well, I don't hope, you remember that episode 100. I don't hope, I know. I have decided that we are all going to create some amazing magic in this coming year. Thank you guys so much for listening, all of 2022. Thank you for continuing to listen in 2023 as I evolve magically into the next version of me and of this business. We are going to get our goals together. Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you again soon.

If you are getting a lot out of the Fitness Matters Podcast and you're ready to take it to the next level, you are going to love the Get Your Goal coaching and accountability group. We take all the theory and knowledge here on the podcast and actually apply it in real life on your real weight loss and fitness goals. It's hands-on, it's fun and it works. Find out more at pahlabfitness.com/get-your-goal. And let's get your goal.

Listen to the full episode here, and be sure to leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

Originally aired December 25, 2022
Dive deep with me today on this episode of the Fitness Matters podcast as we uncover the secrets of your MAGIC.

Meet Your Host

Mindset expert and certified life coach Pahla B knows a thing or two about changing your mind to change your weight and your life. She’s the creator of The 5-0 Method, Amazon-best selling author of the book “Mind Over Menopause,” and former yo-yo dieter who has cracked the code on lifelong weight maintenance. Join Pahla B each week for the personal insights, transformative mindset shifts, and science-backed body advice that can help you lose all the weight you want and keep it off forever.