Podcast: Mindset Magic: Cultivating Happiness and Health

Transcription of Podcast

Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to Fit and Fabulous with me, Dr. Orlena. I hope that you are feeling amazing, amazing, amazing today. Today I want to talk to you about, drum roll please, mindset. I know my favorite topic. I want to talk about mindset and why mindset is the foundation of any change that you want to make.

Let's set the scene. You are wanting to lose weight and You don't really know what to go, do. There are two options here. Either you're thinking, okay, I don't know what to do, I'm eating perfectly well, everything's super fabulous, and I just actually don't know what to lose weight. Or, you do know what to do, you just have what I call a doing gap.

Now, the second one is actually a little bit easier than the first one. If you're in the first camp, yes, you may very well be eating healthily. But there are changes that you still need to make in order to help your body lose weight. You just aren't a hundred percent sure what those changes are. But mindset is still going to help you get there because number one, you need to be able to see the changes.

If you can't see the changes, it's very difficult to be able to make the changes. Self awareness really is the key. And yeah, sometimes there are a little bit of nutritional things that you need to think about too. , I'm going to give you a totally different example. I'm going to introduce you to my children, Celeste and Sebastian, who are 11 years old.

They are twins, and oh my goodness, we're going through what I call teenage brain at the moment. And teenage brain looks a little bit like this. You wake up in the morning. And mummy is six minutes late coming downstairs to help you get your breakfast. Why you can't get your breakfast by yourself at 11 years old, I'm not 100 percent sure.

But, you know, this is somebody who suffers from a bit of anxiety. But, instead of just going, Mum, you're a bit late. My kids have loads of time in the morning. There is this, like, knock on effect of oh my goodness it's a total disaster and everything is bad and I hate my life and blah blah blah total total what I'm just going to call negative brain and I said to my son oh can you just remember please to pick up your clothes that are in your room oh my goodness no I couldn't possibly do that because I'm totally late now there's absolutely no way that this is going to to happen.

Obviously, of course, he had plenty of time to pick up his clothes, he just didn't want to. But this is a recurring theme, particularly with, well, all of my kids, but particularly this one at the moment. And you know, it's this, a negative thought. turns into an avalanche of negative thoughts. One thing is wrong and then there is a knock on effect of, you know, something else is wrong and something else is wrong.

And my kids are sitting there going, Oh my goodness, I hate my life. Oh, poor me. And I'm, here's me thinking, Oh my goodness, my children are so privileged. We have everything that we need. They have, they don't even know what hunger is. Okay, I'm digressing slightly. But the point is they are so entrenched in their negative brain.

Now, as we were walking to school today, I was trying to talk to them a little bit about this idea of being stuck in your negative brain. And the problem with being stuck in your negative brain is being stuck in your negative brain sees problem after problem after problem. My son often says to me, I say to him, what's wrong?

And he's like, everything. Of course, everything is wrong because you've had one thing, then another thing, then another thing until you get to everything. But you know what? Everything is amazing too. He just doesn't see any of the good things. Why? Because his brain is hijacked by negative brain. But he doesn't see things like, oh my goodness, I have enough food to eat, and I have a lovely warm house, and I have a lovely bedroom and clothes, and oh my goodness, you could go on and on and on.

And yes, it's not saying that some of the things that he's saying aren't true. Yes. They are true in the same way that I'm sure a lot of the things that your brain is saying are actually true. Struggle, difficult, this thing didn't work. But that doesn't mean that the positive things aren't true either.

Both of them can be true. It's just where do you focus your brain? Going back to my kids, what I said to them was, you know, okay, What you really need to do is imagine yourself as an alien. And this obviously led to lots of, you know, being aliens as we walk to school. But the idea is this, you become curious about what is going on in your life.

For example, for my son, he wakes up, he's probably hungry. And he comes downstairs, something isn't quite right, and that throws him off kilter into stress brain or negative brain. And he stays in that stress brain, negative brain, until he's eaten his breakfast. Or until things have resolved himself, themselves.

And that is a really good piece of self awareness. Now, quite often, it is much easier to see this in other people. before you can see it in yourself. It's easier for my daughter to sit there going, Yep, he's totally a negative brain. Or the other way around, my son to say to my daughter, Yep, she's totally a negative brain.

I can see this really, really clear. Now, it's a useful tool to be able to see it in other people, but you need to be careful not to sort of poke them with it. The question really is, okay, if I can see it in them, can I also see it in myself? And as a side note, this is one of the reasons why actually group coaching is an amazing tool for coaching because sometimes it is easier to see what's going on in our own life as we can see it unfold as a story that somebody else is telling as opposed to actually You know opening our eyes and being totally honest with ourselves and sort of going, oh my goodness I could change the way I'm thinking about this So being that alien and getting that self awareness and thinking, oh my goodness, it's not about blame, it's about understanding how does my human brain work in this particular instance and how can I change it a little bit.

Now, as I was talking to my son, he was talking about how he had made progress. He finds doing homework Really, really hard. It's 30 minutes of his life that he really doesn't want to be doing homework. He doesn't like doing hard things. He doesn't enjoy it. It's all a total disaster. Now the knock on effect of this is not only does he have to do 30 minutes of homework, but he has to spend another 30 minutes getting really upset about his homework.

30 minutes of stressing and Upset, and obviously this has a knock on effect because I try and help him and that makes it even worse. , instead of taking 30 minutes to do his homework, it takes 60 minutes, 30 minutes to not do his homework, and 30 minutes to do his homework. And he said to me, but you know what mummy, at the weekend I sat down and I did my homework without you talking to me and I just did it.

And that is an amazing win. He just managed to do his homework in 30 minutes. But the way we make changes is that, that is fabulous, you do it once, that doesn't mean it is going to resolve itself forever and ever. Now it might do, it might happen like that, but more often than not, it doesn't happen like that.

It happens like, okay, I do my homework really well one time, the next time I have a little bit of a stress, the next time I have less of a stress, the next time I do it again well. Etc, etc. If you look at your own life and think okay what is going on in my life that I wish I could change. Take for example turning to food for comfort.

And you might find okay I've resolved turning to food for comfort. I've found a tool, a way of being such that when I feel a big emotion instead of turning to the fridge I actually have found something else that I'm going to do. And I did it once and it was amazing and I feel so proud of myself. But the next time.

I turned to food for comfort again. That's okay. That's part of the journey. Most people don't turn it off instantly. They don't go, okay, yep, I turned to food for comfort for 20 years and now suddenly I've stopped doing it. No. You reduce it, you reduce it, you reduce it. And what you're actually doing is building up your strength of being able to make changes, of doing something else.

It's partly habit and it's partly mental strength. So mental fitness, as we could call it. , I hope that has just given you a little insight into why I think that mindset is the foundation of any change that you make. When you're on your health, getting to healthy amazing you journey, most people that I talk to or work with are wanting to lose weight and wherever you are, whatever your struggles are, and there are many different struggles and they're individual to each people, but how do you change them?

You change them by changing your mindset about it first. And that changing your mindset allows you to change your actions. And then you get those results. And it all just unfolds. And you create what I call a virtuous circle. You build on one thing, and then you build on another thing, and then you build on another thing.

And another way of looking at that is you're building up a habit. You're building up another habit. You're building up another habit. Until you get to this place where Oh my goodness, Healthy Amazing You, you are leading a healthy life that you love, your energy levels have gone up, your weight levels have gone down, that wobble has gone, you're feeling strong and toned, and you're feeling like, yeah, you know what, I'm leading the life that I want, I'm doing the things that I need to look after myself, to look after my body and my mind and keep myself healthy.

So my friends, you can do it. If you are sitting there thinking, Yep, yep, yep, this all sounds like stuff I want to do. I've struggled for too long and I want some support. Then feel free to book a call. The call is totally free. No obligation to join my amazing program, Positively Healthy You. But, if you are interested, the first step is booking the call and finding out about it.

Have a fabulous week and I will be back again next week. Bye bye.