380: How to Break the Cycle of Failure and Start Fresh

Introduction 

You're listening to Biceps After Babies Radio Episode 380.

Hello and welcome to Biceps After Babies Radio. A podcast for ladies who know that fitness is about so much more than pounds lost or PR's. It's about feeling confident in your skin and empowered in your life. I'm your host Amber Brueseke, a registered nurse, personal trainer, wife and mom of four. Each week my guests and I will excite and motivate you to take action in your own personal fitness as we talk about nutrition, exercise, mindset, personal development and executing life with conscious intention. If your goal is to look, feel and be strong and experience transformation from the inside out, you my friend are in the right place. Thank you for tuning in. Now, let's jump into today's episode.

Hey, hey, hey, welcome back to another episode of Biceps After Babies Radio. I'm your host, Amber Brueseke, and in today's episode, I'm going to be diving into a pattern that, well, unfortunately, many of us are very, very familiar with, and that is this pattern of starting, getting really excited, feeling really motivated, and then crashing and burning, and then restarting all over again. So maybe it looks like you starting fresh on Monday saying, this week I'm going to be all in. You plan out your meals, you stock your fridge over the weekend, you open up your tracking app, and you're feeling really good, and this week is going to be different, and Monday and Tuesday are. You hit your protein, you close your rings, and you're feeling super, super proud, but then Wednesday hits, and gosh, wouldn't you know it? You forgot to thaw the chicken, so you don't have anything for dinner, so you grab takeout, and then, I mean, who knows how to track takeout? So you don't even track it at all, and because you haven't been tracking, you feel like you can sneak a few handful of snacks in before bed, and by this point, you feel like you blew it, so then Thursday, you're off your game. You're behind on sleep. You haven't logged anything since Wednesday afternoon, and you kind of just get to that point where you're like, oh, gosh, I've messed it all up. I'm just going to start again next week, and I'm going to really do it right next week, and the weekend comes, and you have an outing with friends, have a few drinks, order a burger, and you have that mindset of like, I'm going to get back on track on Monday. I'm going to finish out this weekend, and then I'll get back on track, but the kicker is you've lived this same week or some version of this same week over and over and over again, and sometimes, there will be weeks in between restarting, but it always goes the same way. You get excited. You feel motivated. You start, and then you stop, and then you feel like you have to start all over again, and on some level, you know what to do. I think all of us, I mean, everybody in the world knows that you need to eat healthy and exercise. I don't think anybody's like, oh, that's the secret, Amber? Wow, where have you been keeping that, right? We all know what to do. We all know we need to exercise. Our bodies need to exercise, and we all know we need to eat healthy food. There's not a lack of information in a lot of these areas, but the pattern still continues. Even though you know what to do, you just can't execute it consistently, so what the heck is going on, and how do we stop this cycle, this roller coaster? How do I get off this roller coaster? How do I get on a different roller coaster that's a whole lot more fun, and that's what I'm going to be diving into today because there is a secret here. There is a way to break this cycle. You just, no one's ever taught you how to do it. No one's ever taught you how to break it and get out of the cycle so that you can build some consistency. You can build some momentum and stop the starting and stopping and restarting again, and here is the first secret.

It’s Not Stopping, It’s Slowing Down 04:02

The first secret is that you call it stopping. That's the first secret. I want you to think about it this way. I live in Southern California. There is a lot of traffic. I drive in traffic quite frequently, and when I'm going 65 miles down the freeway, and there's this certain exit that I always get to. It's very near my house, and so I drive it very frequently, and it's like even if the freeway, it's on the 5, even if on the 5 is super, super clear, I hit this one junction point where two freeways meet, and it's like inevitably there's always traffic there, and when I'm going 65 miles down the freeway, and I hit this point where I have to slow down and even stop my car sometimes, what I do not do in those moments is say, oh my gosh, I stopped, and I gotta restart, and I gotta turn around, and I gotta go all the way back to the beginning, and I have to restart my drive and drive all the way home, right? I would never do that. That's super silly, and we know that there's gonna be places on our journey where we're going faster and where I'm going slower on the freeway and even stopped on the freeway, but what I'm not ever doing is going backwards, and that is the key metaphor that I want you to think about in your journey. One of the biggest mistakes that I see people making is that they are using terminology around their journey that is self-defeating. So you do things like, I failed that diet, or I am stopping right now, and I'm gonna restart on Monday, and even this verbiage and this terminology is part of the problem because when we call something a failure, or we say we've stopped, or we say we weren't successful, that terminology is a way to shut our brain down to where it doesn't keep looking for answers. 

So when you call something a failure, you don't look any further. It's like, that's done, that's closed, the book is closed, that's a failure, and we're gonna move forward, and I get why this happens. I mean, there is some element of like, we don't want to ruminate on things that we didn't do well. We don't want to sit there and pick them apart. Like, it doesn't make us feel really good. So there is some value in just like closing something that didn't work and like moving forward. I think there is value in that. The problem becomes if this is always how you deal with “failure”, you never are going to grab and learn the lessons from that experience. And if you don't learn the lessons from that experience, guess what? You're going to keep repeating it. This is not because you can't succeed. This is not because you don't have enough motivation. This is not because you don't have enough willpower, or you aren't strong enough, or your body is broken. It is because you're trying to play a game without learning the rules. Okay? I mean, imagine you are playing a game, and those of you who have kids, maybe you don't even have to imagine, maybe you've done this, where you're like playing a game, but there's no rule book. Like, the kid doesn't tell you the rules of the game that you're playing. And so you're just thrown into this game, and balls are flying around you, and there's people running around, and you're just expected to figure it out as you go. 

So maybe you pick up the ball with your hands, and the ref blows the whistle. And it's wrong, right? You can't do that. Okay? So then you try kicking it with your foot, and something else, it goes, it's wrong again. Right? Over and over and over, it feels like every movement that you're making in this game is wrong. But if you just keep saying, oh, that's a failure, what do you end up doing? You end up sitting down on the ground and not playing the game. The only way to learn the rules, honestly, is to break them and realize, I can't do that. I can't touch the ball with my hands. Okay, that must be a rule. Okay, now I know, moving forward, that I can't touch the ball with my hands. Or I can't kick the ball out. Or, hey, you score a point, not by putting it in that basket, that actually gets you negative points, but that basket gets you positive points. So when you can change the way that you approach the game, and you realize every time you do something wrong, every misstep is actually a message. It's a message on what not to do, which also leads you to what to do. Okay? But because we focus so much on what went wrong, how you messed up, what you didn't do, what ends up happening is you miss the most important part. You miss the lesson. 

Learn the Lesson, Don’t Repeat the Cycle 08:48

So this isn't about beating yourself up, right? Like I said before, I understand why people kind of want to close the book and just move forward. I think that there is so much value in spending a little time in dissecting what happened. And again, this is not about beating yourself up. It's not about making you feel worse about yourself. It's about shifting the focus. Instead of asking, why do I keep messing this up? You can start asking the question, what is this experience trying to teach me? Because friend, if you don't learn the lesson, you'll keep repeating the same cycle. And that is the cycle that so many of you are in. And you're sitting here wondering, why can't I get out of the cycle? Why can't I get out of the cycle? The reason is you haven't learned the lesson. And when you learn the lesson, now you can move forward and you can get out of that painful cycle that you're in. So make learning the rules, make learning the lesson, the whole goal of your experience.Because once you do that, everything changes. You stop playing blind. You get out of this patterns that you keep repeating over and over and over. You build awareness and you finally start playing to win. Okay. So that sounds really great on paper. Yeah, Amber, that sounds really great. Just learn the lesson. Super easy. Ding. In reality, it can be feel a lot harder to learn the lesson. And so I have, I have some steps that I go through with my clients to help them effectively learn the lesson.

Now, before I teach you these steps, I want to couch this a little bit and help you recognize that you are not trying to learn the lesson. You are trying to learn a lesson. What's the difference? Well, when we get into this mindset that there is the lesson that we need to learn, a lot of us get really uptight with, it's like the perfectionistic mindset of like, what is the lesson that I'm supposed to learn? There's a right lesson and I have to figure it out and have to get it right. And I have to get the one lesson that is here to learn. It's a lot of pressure. Instead, if we just approach it with what is a lesson that I can learn from this, you can already feel how your mind starts to expand instead of contract. How your brain starts to look for answers, not getting bogged down by the fact that maybe there's just one right answer. Because the honest truth is there probably isn't just one right answer. There probably are many lessons that you're needing to learn. 

The Road Trip Metaphor: Lessons Are Milestones 11:27

I find with a lot of my students, there are multiple lessons that you probably need to learn. The way that I kind of approach it and teach it to my clients, and maybe this will be helpful for you as you're thinking about it, is if you imagine like a road trip, right? And there's a starting point and there's a stopping point of the road trip, right? The destination that you're trying to get to. And if you imagine that there are certain like mile markers along the way, and we think about those mile markers as just the number of lessons that you need to learn. So between where you are now, what happens is you are where you are now. You say, I want to create XYZ result. I want to lose 20 pounds. I want to look good in a bikini. I want to lift, have a 200 pound deadlift, whatever that goal is. Where you are now, the goal is not where you are now, right? Otherwise you wouldn't set it. So the goal is somewhere else. It's the destination. Now, between where you are now and where you want to go, there are a number of lessons that you have to learn in order to get you to where you want to go. And let's just pretend there are 20 lessons. It's kind of like the 20 rules. Maybe there's 20 rules in the game that you have to learn.

If you knew that there were 20 lessons that you had to learn, aka 20 failures, 20 starts, restops that you had to do, what would be your approach to that? My approach would be, let's get this over with. Let's learn those lessons as fast as humanly possible because every time I get to go through a checkpoint and I get a little closer to my goal. And so now failures or setbacks don't become annoying. They become, yes, I learned another lesson. I learned, now I'm down to 19 lessons to learn. And now I'm down to 18 lessons to learn. And now I'm down to 17 lessons to learn. And you would approach it much differently. You would approach it with a, almost like an excitement to get things wrong so that you can learn the lesson and keep moving forward to the destination. But what ends up happening is we say, I'm here. I want to go there. There's 20 lessons that you have to learn. And the first lesson is presented the first failure, the first setback, the first thing that didn't go the way that you wanted to go. And what do we do? We throw up our hands. And we say, oh, I can't do this. I'm broken. I'm such a failure. I'm such a mess. And then what happens? Well, you got to learn that lesson. Whatever that lesson is, you got to learn it. So then what does life do? It gives you the lesson again. And you do the same thing. Oh, I'm the worst. I can't do this. It's too hard. I'm such failure. And so life's like, okay, but you said you want to get the goal. So I'm going to give you the lesson again. And this is when things show up multiple times in your life, you got to listen, because that means that's something there for you to learn. I'm always looking for what is showing up over and over and over again. What are patterns that I see in my life over and over and over again? Because that tells me where I need to be focusing, because there's a lesson there that if I want to get the goal, if I want to hit the result that I said I wanted to, I got to learn this lesson. Okay. So then how do we do this? So the first thing I said was, it's not the lesson. It's a lesson. There's probably multiple lessons that you need to learn. So don't let your brain tell you there is one right and only lesson that you're supposed to learn from this experience. The question is, what is a lesson I can learn from this experience? But most of us aren't even doing that. Most of us are just trying to move forward. 

Look at the Experience 14:52

Okay.  So how, let me give you some steps that can help you to effectively figure out what one of the lessons may be that you need to be learning in this experience that will get you out of that pattern of starting, stopping and restarting. Number one, we got to look at the experience. Now, the reason that most of us don't want to go back and look at the experience is because it brings up a lot of feelings of guilt and shame. We're really good at going back and saying, well, I did that wrong and that sucked. And I shouldn't have made that choice. And that makes us feel bad. And we don't want to do things that make us feel bad. So we close the book and we step away. So when I say we need to go open that book, we need to look at it. We need to analyze the situation. How I want you to think about it is I want you to think about how can I go back and state what happened in factual, emotionless language. Meaning when I'm having walking clients experience, I want them to give me the facts of the experience, not the emotion that it generated, not the story that they're telling themselves. So an example, maybe like we can go back to the example that I gave at the very beginning of the episode, you know, where you tell yourself you're all in, you planned your meals, stocked your fridge, and then you're doing really good hitting your protein, closing your rings. And then Wednesday hits and you forgot to thaw the chicken. So then you go grab takeout.

So if I was having a client repeat that to me, or they were going to do this reflection themselves, they would say something like, you know, Monday, I hit my protein goal. I got my workout in Tuesday, the same thing. Wednesday came and I forgot to thaw the chicken. So because I didn't have any chicken for dinner, I went and grabbed takeout. And I, you know, thought, I don't know how to track this because it's not something I can find in MacrosFirst. And so I just didn't track it. And then we could go and we could tell the story. But notice how none of that was like emotion language. It wasn't like, I forgot the chicken. I was so stupid. And so I just went and grabbed takeout. And then I didn't know how to track it. And I was just like, I was like, this is the worst. Like, I just, I don't know how to do this. It's so frustrating. It's so confusing. And so then I just like closed my tracking app and so then that night I felt bad about myself, right? Like, do you see how there's so much more emotional language with this? 

Step 1: State the Facts Without Emotion 17:19

So one cue that I like to give my clients is when you're stating the facts, I want you to pretend like you're a newspaper reporter. You're just reporting the things that you can see, touch, feel, not what's going on inside of you, not any judgment around it, right? It's like, I got takeout on Wednesday. That is nonjudgmental. It is fact-based, instead of I got takeout and I'm the worst person in the world. And I can't believe that I did that. And you know, whatever, right? Like going into like all the emotion around it. Okay. So the first step in effectively learning the lesson is to one state the facts, what happened? We have to look at what happened if you want to learn a lesson from it.

Step 2: Analyze the Trigger and Identify a Lesson 18:06

Step number two is to then look for, you can ask yourself questions like, you know, what caused this to happen? What was the trigger that created this outcome? So if we go back to our example, we said, I forgot to take out the chicken in the morning that I was going to eat that night. And because I did not have the chicken, then I ended up going out to take out. So we can kind of start to link, what was the trigger for that decision? What was the trigger for that choice? And then we can ask, well, what, what lesson is there to learn from that? And maybe a really easy lesson would be, just don't forget to take the chicken out. But I don't think that's a really great lesson because you're going to forget. We are all going to forget. So the question isn't, can I just never forget anything else for the rest of my life? The question is, how am I going to handle things when a curve ball gets thrown my way? When I do forget to take out the chicken, what other choices could I have made in that moment? What choice, if I could go back and redo it, what choice do I wish that I had made in that moment? And a really great question, why didn't I do that? What was going on inside of my head? Maybe you say, well, what I wish that I would have done is I wish that I would have just pivoted and ate some of my leftovers that were in the fridge. That's what I wish that I would have done. And then you can ask yourself the question, well, why didn't I do that? And I don't know what's going to come up for you. Maybe it's something around, well, I, it didn't taste good to me, or I hate eating leftovers, or I really just wanted to have an excuse to eat out. And this gave me the perfect excuse to be able to do it, right? That's being honest with yourself. But this is the moment where doing a lot of personal digging around what that experience was like, how were you speaking to yourself? What justification did you use in the moment? This is a great question I ask a lot of my clients is like, how are you self-justifying this? Because that self-justification is going to give you a lot of insights as to ways that we can make improvements in the future.

Okay, so we state the facts, and then we utilize questions and reflection to pinpoint what a lesson could be. So maybe the lesson is, I want to have more things prepared for days that I forget. I want to have more things. Maybe you have some freezer meals or whatever prepared. Or maybe the lesson is learning how to pivot when things go wrong. That's a lesson that I need to learn, and here's how I'm going to handle it next time, right?

Step 3: Create a Strategy for Next Time 20:50

Whatever you come up with, what is the lesson? And then how are you going to then, this is the next, the third step, how are you then going to implement that moving forward? So with the lesson in mind, you can kind of consider strategies you might use the next time you face a similar situation. And again, you may not ever have that exact same scenario of like, it's a Wednesday, you forgot to take out the chicken and then you ought to, you know, out to eat. But you're going to be faced with a situation where you had a plan and something happened that interrupted that plan. What strategies are you going to use in that situation moving forward? Now, one technique that I like to utilize with clients is when you're coming up with these strategies, brainstorm at least 10 possible approaches, 10, like literally 10 ways that you could deal with this next time. The first couple will be very easy. And then it will get hard. The goal is for it to get hard. Because when you start to run out of all of the easy ideas, that is when you start to tap into creativity. And then you come up with the creative ideas. So the whole goal with like doing 10 of them is to force you into creativity, force you not just into the easy things your brain can think of, but force your brain into coming up with creative solutions. So challenge yourself to brainstorm at least 10 possible approaches of how you could handle this situation differently. What strategy could you use in the future? 

Step 4: Move On 22:24

Okay, so we stated the facts, we pinpointed the lesson, we created a strategy for the future. And now number four is to move on. Okay, so this is where you close the book and you leave it, right? We don't have to ruminate on it. We don't have to feel bad about it. We don't have to sit there and all the guilt and the shame and like the emotional experience of it. We've done what we needed to do. We went to the experience, we learned the lessons, we created a strategy for how we're going to do it differently moving forward. And now we can move on and go and implement those strategies. 

That my friends is how you break out of the cycle of starting and stopping. That is how you reframe things. You learn the lesson and you apply it moving forward. And that is how you get 1% better every single day. That is how you learn the rules of the game. You break the rule, you learn it and then you don't ever do that again. That is the cycle to improvement, to progress and to hitting the goals that you have set for yourself. So if you feel caught in this cycle of starting, stopping and then restarting again, your takeaway from this is to take maybe the most fresh experience of failure, the most fresh experience of crashing and burning and walking through this process. What happened? Just like a reporter would say it. What actually happened? Not how you felt, not all the emotions, not the judgment around it, but what actually happened? What lesson could you pull from this? How can you create a strategy that will apply that lesson moving forward? And then how can you leave that in the past, leave the past in the past and move forward with a new strategy to be successful in the future? That my friends is how you succeed. 

Coaching Support Through MACROS 101 24:18

Now, of course, it sounds really easy to listen to on a podcast. It probably makes a lot of logical sense. I know that sometimes applying these things in your own journey can be challenging. This is the kind of stuff that I help walk you through inside of MACROS 101. I give you techniques, I give you tools, but then I also help you process and utilize the tools because you may come up with roadblocks. It's sometimes hard to see your own crap yourself, kind of like how you can't see the back of your head. We all have blind spots and that's where MACROS 101 can not only give you the tools, but I can give you the coaching to help you see those blind spots, help you see the back of your head. You can't see the back of your head, but I can see the back of your head. I can see your blind spots. And that's what coaching does for you is be able to, yes, give you tools, give you ways to be able to move through things, but also help call you out on your crap, help you see the ways that you are sabotaging yourself that you probably can't even see yourself. That is what is beautiful about coaching. And that's what we do a lot of inside of MACROS 101. 

So if you are interested, get on the waitlist. We will be opening doors this fall on September 5th. So you can go to bicepsafterbabies.com/waitlist to make sure that you don't miss enrollment. If you're listening to this after we've opened up doors to MACROS 101, we open up doors twice a year. So you can go ahead and still get on the waitlist, bicepsafterbabies.com/waitlist. And you'll just know the next time we open up doors to MACROS 101. That wraps up this episode of Biceps After Babies Radio. I'm Amber. Now go out and be strong because remember my friend, you can do anything. 

Outro

If you've ever wondered what it actually looks like for me to coach you through your weight loss journey, here's your answer. Some of my most powerful podcast episodes aren't interviews or my solo rants. They're real raw coaching calls straight from inside MACROS 101. You'll hear women just like you working through plateaus, perfectionism, and the I'm doing everything but nothing's working spiral. These live coaching shows show you exactly what it sounds like to break through the mental junk that's been keeping you stuck.

So if you're even a little bit curious about what it would be like to be coached by me, or if you're thinking about joining MACROS 101, these episodes are a must listen. So here's your next move. Scroll back through the podcast feed and look for titles that end in live coaching session. Start there. You'll walk away with more clarity, more strategy, and maybe even that one mindset shift you didn't even know that you needed. All right, I'll see you in the next episode.