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Proactive Evolution

Unconventional Training & Health Coaching
For Midlife parents
(& other busy people!)

Positive Self-Talk

27/8/2016

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How often do you listen to the words that your mind is saying about you?

If you're like most people, you're completely unaware of the chatter that's taking place inside your head. Instead of talking yourself up,  you're letting a super-critical voice run wild, telling you all sorts of negative things about yourself. The result of this critical voice calling out your every flaw (real or otherwise) varies from a lack of self-respect to complete and utter physical and emotional paralysis. Regardless of the impact that your self-chatter is having, if you're not actively aware of what your mind is saying and re-framing the language to the positive, you're doing yourself harm. You've probably spent most of your lifetime, at least from your teens on,  developing the habit (yes, it's a habit) of talking about yourself with negative words. For this article, I'm not going to get into specific examples because, well, I want to help you break the habit and change the self talk towards the positive and pointing out the negative only serves to reinforce it. 

How does self-talk work?

Unless you're a Buddha or an enlightened mystic who is able to stop thoughts from happening, you think tens of thousands of thoughts per day. As you do so, even if you're not listening consciously, you're programming your body and subconscious mind to perform as instructed. Whatever your mind says about you, your subconscious takes it in without even analyzing it for accuracy. It's only natural, after all, because your mind knows you better than anyone else knows you, so the assumption is that what is being said is accurate and correct. On top of that, as the mind repeats the same message over and over, the message becomes even more accurate and correct to your subconscious, and the habit is strengthened.

What's the first thing to do?​ 

By increasing your awareness of the self-chatter--by paying attention to what you are habitually saying to yourself, about yourself--you can recognize when you're putting yourself down and change things up for the better. As you start to listen to yourself, write down what you hear. As you start to recognize your negative self-talk, ask yourself whether you'd respect a friend or acquaintance who said those things to you. Most likely, the answer is no. It's important to remember that it's not only what is being said, but how it's being said that matters. So, while you may indeed be overweight, it becomes exponentially more difficult to change that when you're beating yourself up with negative words.

So I'm paying attention to what I'm saying, and I don't like it. Now what?

The first thing to do is be grateful that you've raised your awareness. By focusing on being grateful, you are taking the first steps to performing what the experts call "cognitive restructuring." Cognitive restructuring is a therapeutic practice of identifying and disputing cognitive distortions in order to bring about a new way of thinking and behaving. In other words, by identifying thoughts that do not serve you and recognizing that those thoughts are distortions from reality, you can begin to reframe the thoughts into useful and productive messages. The hardest part of all of this is recognizing that the harsh words you say to yourself are indeed distortions of reality. Again, it may be true that you're overweight. However, it's not true that you always fail or that your successes don't matter.

There are ten primary cognitive distortions that you can look for which give away the fact that what you're saying to yourself is not true:
  1. All-or-nothing thinking .
  2. Over-generalization.
  3. A mental filter that dwells on the negatives and ignores the positives.
  4. Discounting the positives.
  5. Jumping to conclusions, mind reading or fortune-telling.
  6. Magnification or minimization.
  7. Emotional reasoning. e.g. I feel like a failure, so I must be one.
  8. "Should" statements. e.g. I should or must have more willpower.
  9. Labeling. e.g. I'm a failure.
  10.  Personalization and blame. e.g. blaming oneself or others.

OK, I notice the harsh words and I notice that I'm distorting reality. How do I fix it?

Here's where practice makes perfect. Because it's likely you've been doing this negative self-talk for a long time, it's going to take effort and vigilance to create a new habit of talking to yourself in positive, uplifting and motivating ways. For example, if you ate more than you had intended, you can recognize what you did ("I ate more than I intended") and then position yourself for future success ("I will pay more attention to the quantity I'm eating and stop when I reach an amount that I specify to myself ahead of time.")

It really helps to have a partner to support you as you begin to recognize your negative self-talk and work to replace it with positive and motivating language. Here at Proactive Evolution, we're experts in partnering with our clients to help you be gentle and kind to yourself so that you can change the way you think and talk about yourself. We know that this is one of the most crucial steps in achieving your fitness goals. To schedule your free transformation session and experience the benefits we can bring to your lifestyle modification, contact us at (760) 56-EVOLVE or click over to our contact page and fill out the form.
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Lose Weight with the Power of Gratitude

7/7/2016

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What is gratitude and why is it important? ​​

Gratitude is simply the quality of being thankful and appreciative for what exists in the current moment. However, rather than being something that you give out, like a reward, gratitude is a lifestyle. People who live in a state of free-flowing gratitude see the world differently and get more satisfaction out of life than people who are miserly with their appreciation. In fact, people who live a lifestyle overflowing with gratitude are happier, healthier and better able to adjust to whatever life throws at them.

Gratitude is important because of it's simplicity and power and because of the wide range of benefits that it provides. For people looking to lose weight, get fit, make a lifestyle change, improve their nutrition, or improve their physical and emotional well being, gratitude can make all the difference.  Before getting into all of the benefits of gratitude and how it can help you, it's probably a good idea to discuss what it looks like to be grateful.

As already mentioned, to be grateful is to have a quality of thankfulness. In our day-to-day lives, we experience a constant string of events. We wake up, start our day, learn about the activities or experiences of friends, family and strangers while engaging in our own activities and experiences. We interact directly or indirectly with other people and the objects in our environment. While it may not seem so to us, all of this interaction is neutral. In other words, nothing that happens to us or around us means anything without us adding a meaning to it. That is a difficult proposition for most people to accept. We want to believe that the things that happen in the world have intrinsic meaning, either good or bad. Again, it comes down to our beliefs.

Perhaps an example will be useful to explain what I mean. When you accidentally drop an object, to the universe or existence, it's just an exchange of energy. The falling object interacted with air molecules which resisted being pushed out of the way. It interacted with the floor, according to the laws of physics, encountering an equal and opposite force. That interaction caused the bonds that held the material together to weaken or break. As those bond broke, energy was released which interacted with the air molecules and caused sound waves. Those sound waves were then were picked up by your ears.

In the realm of the universe, the incident was just an application of the laws of physics. However, on top of the physics, you and I add our beliefs. We believe that the object that just broke was a priceless heirloom. We believe that the object had meaning because it was owned by our great grandmother. We believe that we have done something horrible by breaking the object. We believe that others will be upset with us. It is our beliefs about the world that change a neutral transformation of energy into something wonderful or something horrible.

The Role of Beliefs

From those beliefs, we then respond to the action with emotions such as sadness, anger, fear or happiness. And from here we perpetuate the cycle of our beliefs causing our emotional responses which back up our beliefs. I should note, that none of this is to say that the beliefs are not true or that the emotional response is not acceptable. However, when it comes to lifestyle change, it is important to examine our beliefs and our emotional responses. By doing so, we may find that a large number of our beliefs about ourselves have no basis in reality. Once we discover that these beliefs are just habitual ways of thinking that we've fallen into for whatever reason, we have the power to interrupt the cycle and insert new, valid beliefs.

​This is where gratitude comes in to the picture. If we start to explore the actions and events that occur in our lives from a place of gratitude rather than from other perspectives, we can find positive meanings instead of negative meanings.

The Big List of Benefits for Being Grateful

Studies have shown that being grateful can change your life for the better. An attitude of gratitude will impact your emotional, personal, social, career and physical well being. As a result of finding positive meanings to our experiences, we get the following benefits:

Emotional Well Being
  • happier memories
  • greater resilience
  • higher levels of relaxation
  • higher levels of satisfaction with what we have and where we are in our lives

Personal Well Being
  • greater levels of optimism about the future
  • greater self-esteem
  • greater self-efficacy
  • decreased need to seek out material objects that we hope will provide us with happiness
  • greater awareness of the benefits of the gifts we bring to others
  • greater sense of connection to the existence

Social Well Being
  • higher levels of social interaction
  • healthier and deeper relationships
  • giving and receiving kindness
  • higher likability

Career Well Being
  • larger and more useful networks
  • higher achievement
  • better decision making
  • improved productivity

Physical Well Being
  • improved immunity
  • better sleep
  • increased energy

How Can Gratitude Help Me Lose Weight?

If you aggregate all of those benefits, you will find that the numerous benefits result in one fundamental truth: Gratitude makes us happier.

And as you look at your experience of the world you will probably recognize that happier people tend to be healthier people. Healthier people tend to be more physically active and eat more nutritious foods. And, those who are physically active and eat more nutritious foods tend to be more resilient and have higher levels of self-efficacy when dealing with the ups and downs of everyday life. From this space of resilience and self-efficacy, the cycle repeats.


For weight loss, re-framing your experiences from a place of gratitude allows you to find the positive where previously you found fear, anger or sadness. Whatever was holding you back before now offers you an opportunity to proactively evolve toward the body and lifestyle you want.

What Can I Do Today?

There are several things that you can do that each won't take more than a few minutes out of your day but will give you an immeasurable return. Here are just a few:
  1. Write a gratitude journal.
  2. Create a gratitude ritual.
  3. Re-frame your problems.
  4. Visualize yourself in your best possible future.
  5. Honor people.
  6. Savor your experiences while you're having them and then savor the memories afterward.

How Can Proactive Evolution Help Me Increase My Gratitude And Lose Weight?

At Proactive Evolution, gratitude is part of everything we do. We've watched the simple actions listed above help change lives and result in radical weight-loss transformations. If you want the help of a health coach to integrate a gratitude practice into your life for weight loss or you're looking for holistic personal training in Encinitas (in-person, via Google Hangouts or Skype) to help you achieve your fitness goals, click on over to the contact page and get started today! You'll be grateful you did!
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    Gyan Penrose-Kafka, MA, CPT

    Personal Trainer,  Health Coach, Skydiver, Mountain Biker, Road Cyclist, Vegan

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