How NOT working harder finally worked
This month we've got a little vulnerability, a little coaching... and a BIG ANNOUNCEMENT about my business with a useful freebie for you!
First up...
For YEARS (about 45 of them) I thought eating healthy and staying lean needed to be hard.
Probably because it WAS for me. Hard, that is. But not because it needed to be.
A few months ago I went on my friend Colleen Odegaard’s podcast and we talked about how (and why) I finally went on a GLP-1 and some of the eye-opening insights that came along with that decision:
When my friend asked the question, "Is it discipline if it's not hard?" (go back and listen to the clip if you didn't yet. It's only about 1 minute long. It's pretty eye-opening.) ONE MILLION light bulbs went off for me.
For years I heard the same advice a lot of us who came of age in the ’90s and early 2000s heard:
Listen to your body.
Eat when you’re hungry.
Stop when you’re full.
Your body knows what it needs.
And that all sounds great if your brain and body are saying the same thing. Mine, however, was a bit more like:
Brain: We’ve had enough chips.
Body: MORE CHIPS GIVE ME ALL THE CHIPS ALWAYS HOW ARE WE NOT EATING RIGHT NOW THERE ARE CHIPS LEFT!!!! (also what is for dessert, and yay it’s a chocolate milkshake!)
For years, I thought the answer was that I needed more discipline. More willpower.
More ability to simply DO (or in this case not do) the thing I was SUPPOSED to do.
Until eventually I had to acknowledge something:
I had years of data about myself around food.
At some point, continuing to insist I should be able to do this differently stopped being admirable persistence and started becoming a refusal to learn from the evidence.
I joke that I lost my privileges with food. But it's kind of a true realization I had to come to, so I finally built myself a guardrail.
We do this kind of thing ALL THE TIME without considering it a character flaw.
If we repeatedly forget something, we put it on our calendar.
If we can’t remember 700 passwords, we use a password manager.
If we keep giving feedback that doesn’t change behavior, we change our feedback approach.
We create controls around our known weak spots and call it smart.
So why do we consider built-in boundaries cheating in the places where we think we should have more willpower? More “natural ability?”
Maybe discipline isn’t about choosing the hardest path. Maybe it’s about choosing the path that actually works.
The goal isn’t to become a person who never screws up.
It’s to become a person who learns from it when you do.
Maybe there’s a tool. Maybe there’s a guardrail. Maybe there’s an easier way. And maybe using it doesn’t mean you're cheating. Maybe it means you're finally learning from yourself.
I certainly have been...
The past few months, I’ve been working on something new within the work I already do around communication, leadership and how we show up with other humans.
Lately, I’ve been especially fascinated by mistakes: what they are, why we make them, what we do after we make them, and (most importantly) whether we actually change anything because of what we learned.
I’ve been building new content and frameworks around this idea, and I’m really excited about where it’s going. Because we’re all going to keep making mistakes. We're all going to experience failure. The interesting part is what we make of it.
Want to learn how you respond to failure? Or rather... fehlure 😉? Take the Fehling Assessment here.
If you and your team could use some help understanding each other better, understanding clients better, and communicating differently around all of the above (in ways that actually work… not just ways that are hard to try), let’s talk. Email me back, or... 👇
Until next time-
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