August is coming in HOT for me. I saw Pink and Brandi Carlile in concert with a best friend. It was a spiritual revival. I also tried and loved Pickleball! I get the hype.
And I had two incredible podcast conversations with the brilliant Elise Loehnen (former goop content manager). More on that below…
And the student in me feels those back to school vibes with two launches, Why Am I Eating This Now? (WAIETN) Live and the Truce Coaching Certification (TCC).
If you’re interested in WAIETN Live: Your Life and Eating Aligned, which opens for registration September 11-18, join my free A Cookie Isn’t Just A Cookie: Stop Stress Eating workshop on Wednesday, September 13. Click here to learn more and register.
In another seasonal shift, I’m experimenting with a new email format. As I grow my ICF and BCNS certified, trauma-informed TCC, I want space to educate change agents who are interested in sustainable change for complex behavior change like food, work, and healing.
If you’re a coach, health practitioner, or change agent, you’ll love my new “Change Agent” section.
Rooted in my Penn graduate work, 16 years of full-time coaching and entrepreneurship, and 30 years of mining the fall-out and gold from my cancer diagnosis, I’ll offer insight, wisdom, and paradigm-shifts for supporting sustainable change that can be applied to complex behavior change.
TCC is the entire blueprint of complex change. Complex change is when someone doesn’t have complete control over their time (and this control diminishes the more roles like parent, entrepreneur, caregiver they take on) and there’s difficult emotions involved with the change.
My approach honors the whole person, the complexity of the change, the times reality of the times we’re living in, and offers the status-quo value disruption that is needed in our personal lives and collective paradigms.
New Podcast
Annually, Elise Loehnen’s parents would weigh themselves in a vigilant effort to stay within five to ten pounds of their marriage weight. When Elise went away to boarding school, this culture further normalized eating vigilance and restriction as necessary.
Then in her early career at Lucky Magazine, where she was often photographed, restricting her food in attempts to be a sample size at 5 ‘10 seemed like the obvious choice to stay on the path of acceptance and “goodness”.
Then came a stint as goop’s content manager where she was immersed in the wellness industry’s gospel of “clean eating”, today’s socially acceptable term for restriction.
And now, in her instant New York Times’ best seller book, On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good(Dial Press/PRH), Elise brilliantly connects how the sin of gluttony – not science – forms a tapestry of misguided restriction norms that have serious consequences for our food, bodies, and health.
In our chat, we discuss:
- The meta-physical invitation in Elise’s breathlessness
- The placebo and nocebo influence of the BMI, exercise that counts, and thinking about your weight
- The difference between hunger instincts and intuition to more clearly hear your appetite
- How the cultural “good” body story creates blindspots and accompanying health risks for all body sizes (and how to think differently to see these blindspots)
- What’s up with wanting to look disciplined yet effortless with your food and physique (asking for myself after not effortlessly losing my pregnancy weight)?
For Change Agents
In coaching, it’s common to get clients clear on their values. Intrinsic motivation as they say in the biz…
That is a great start. And we need to go deeper for sustainable change. Especially during a time so many people are re-assessing their values.
In my podcast with Elise, we discuss patriarchy’s influence on how our values get defined.
While no one would say, “I value the patriarchy”, a client might for example, say they value discipline.
Yet for women in patriarchy, discipline usually means restricting oneself. Not just with food. But our anger, rest, our needs, etc.
And for men in patriarchy, discipline usually means repressing feelings and pursuing more power.
(And of course, most people will have a mix of both discipline definitions. Because #nuance. Many women want thinness to secure thin privilege, which is a more accessible form of power than the other forms of power women have historically been locked out from. Don’t hate the player hate the game.)
Often your clients are operating with (unknowingly) unhealthy and unrealistic value definitions. And this is actually what leads to the very problem – whether it’s food, money, or burn-out, that your client is partnering with you to resolve.
Discipline in this example or the values clients identify are worthy values. Yet their ideas of these values are often unsustainable.
In TCC, we support clients to live a healthier, more sustainable ideas of their values.
We call these value definitions Option C, which frees clients from the rigidity of being all-or-nothing.
This Option C values will be the topic of our next Change Agent Disruption Hour (previously called Health Coaching Disruption Hour).
I’ll share my personal re-imagining of my value of discipline in my life to much better results and some client examples of how redefining responsibility and integrity transformed their lives and coaching results. I’ll also share a powerful question you can instantly use in your client sessions to begin to support highly impactful client results.
Learn more and register here.
This Option C values approach is the heart and soul of TCC, which opens for registration on September 19.
Receive a free TCC sneak peak. More details coming soon.
Next week I’ll share the other problem with traditional value exercises (and we will discuss in the Change Agent Disruption Hour call)!
Be Well,
P.S. Book your calendars now for a free sneak peak of my WAIETN Live: Your Life and Eating Aligned program with my free, A Cookie Isn’t Just A Cookie: Stop Stress Eating workshop on Wednesday, September 13. Get all the deets here.
P.P.S. If you’re a change agent and want to discover how traditional values exercises are sabotaging your clients sustainable change with complex behaviors like food, money, and work, we’ll discuss Option C values at my next free, Change Agent Disruption Hour next Tuesday, August 22 at 2 pm EST (previously called Health Coaching Disruption Hour). Learn more and register here.
Want more content like this where we get to the roots of your sustainable change battle like food, exercise, and overworking?
Sign up for my list here
Leave a Reply