November Week 3: Connecting to Your Inner Coach

We will look at how we connect with others in our lives with an awareness on how they support or challenge our weight mastery. I invite you to observe these connections and use these observations to create more support based connections for your weight mastery.

We interact so habitually with people in our lives that we often don’t see how some interactions with loved ones, friends or co-workers are detrimental to our long term weight mastery. Once we are aware, we can strategize how to balance these relationships with our own health goals.

How do people challenge our weight mastery?

Their needs get in the way of our self care.
They bring unhealthy food into our environment.
Interacting with them stimulates us and creates emotion so we want to sedate ourselves with food.

How do we begin to move the equation to having more support in our lives?

1. MOST IMPORTANT: We must become conscious of the challenges. Who is a support and who is a challenge to our Weight Mastery? This is without judgement, without labeling “good” or “bad”.
2. Next, we connect with ourselves and our Inner Coach and think through a way to make our connections with the other person or people more supportive. The mind is a problem solving computer. If you put your self-care into the computer along with other’s needs and add a little flexibility, often you can find a great solution that will support you and the other person as well. No one wants you resenting them because they are sabotaging your weight!
3. Seek to create the win-win with the other person or people.

For Example:

The other day my husband sweetly begged me to skip my spin class in order to help him finish recording a piece of music by singing back up (I do this for him sometimes). I did not want to miss spin class, but I also did not want to miss out on the chance to support my husband.

1. I got clear on the challenge: I could have said ‘yes’ immediately and helped him, but then cut my own self care out of the equation. Instead, I made the conscious choice to find a win-win for both of us. I connected with him: “Honey, I want to help you but let me think for a moment, because I also want to get exercise in today and if I help you, I miss my spin class.”
2. I connected to myself and thought it through: “If I take an hour with him, there is still time for a quick run-walk for 40 minutes I could do that and I can get him to join me.”
3. I presented the win-win “I will help you with your project and then you can help me by running around the neighborhood before dinner, deal?” He smiled, “deal”.

I could have let my husband's needs overtake my need for self care but instead I paused, connected to myself, and used my inner coach to come up with a win-win for both of us. And I got to sing which was always fun :)