Willingness is something that a lot of us don’t really think about, but it is one of the best emotions that you can create for yourself. Today I’m sharing why being willing to see things differently can be life-changing and why you might want to consider moving toward willingness so you can leave the negativity behind.

Listen in as I explain why self-limiting beliefs often become our reality, as well as how EFT (also known as tapping) can help. You’ll learn how to make willingness a part of your life, why saying “yes” can help you open the door to the full human experience, and which app is a great addition to your toolkit for helping to reduce your stress—especially if you’re someone who has trouble meditating or feels the need to unwind with food or alcohol.


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In Today's Episode, You'll Learn:

  • What EFT, or tapping, is
  • What I love about tapping
  • Why being unwilling is a problem
  • How to become willing even when it’s uncomfortable
  • Why self-limiting beliefs often become reality
  • How saying “yes” is opening the door to the full human experience
  • Why we should embrace being wrong
  • How to create a feeling of willingness

Featured In This Episode

Willingness


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Read the Transcript Below:

Katrina Ubell: You are listening to the Weight Loss for Busy Physicians podcast with Katrina Ubell, MD, episode number 180.

Welcome to Weight Loss for Busy Physicians, the podcast where busy doctors like you get the practical solutions and support you need to permanently lose the weight, so you can feel better and have the life you want. If you're looking to overcome your stress eating and exhaustion and move into freedom around food, you're in the right place.

Hey there, my friend. Before we get started with this episode, I just wanted to let you know that this is another episode that I had recorded before the resurgence in our conversations about racism and police brutality in the U.S.—and really around the world.

I re-listened to it, and I think it’s actually more applicable than ever right now, and I think it’s still a really excellent episode, but I just did want to let you know that as I was recording it, I was definitely taking much more of a COVID slant on it because that was really what was at the height of our collective conscience at the time. So please listen of course for that, but then listen in terms of also what else you can get out of it with the current events that are happening in our country right now.

And with that, I will bring you the next episode.

Well, hey there, my friend. How are you? Welcome back to the podcast. So happy to have you here with me today. How is your June going? Are things starting to get back into shape for you? You're kind of starting to move yourself back in, to life as we now know it? I keep hearing people talking about it as the next normal, rather than going back to the way things were, because clearly that won't be happening.

I've actually heard from a lot of you that you miss hearing little updates about my family and things. I was thinking, I mean, what can I even share. There's not a lot going on. All my kids' camps and all their activities for the summer have been canceled. The trips that we had planned for the summer have been canceled, and we're just doing the same thing you guys are doing. My kids are still in school as I'm recording this. My kids’ school goes—they start pretty early and they go pretty late, which honestly is probably not the worst thing because it keeps some good stability and structure and routine to their day. Although sometimes I think, “Oh man, if they are already finished with their work by 10:00 AM, can we just be done for the day? Can they just go outside and play? Come on. Why do I have to get on these Zoom calls?”

Tomorrow is my youngest, my daughter's seventh birthday. She's very excited about it, as one is at that age, right. She would have loved to have a big birthday party, but obviously that is not a good idea right now. So we're just thinking of ways to make it extra special for her. I mean, for a month she's been counting down. She's so excited. We have some plans to make it special for her. I think that will be nice.

Then as far as summer goes, I mean, this is where I'm at with it. I don't know where you guys are, what you're thinking or how you're dealing with it. I know definitely some people are sending their kids to camps and things, if what they're planning for is open. For us, we're actually waiting to see if the border opens up to Canada. I've shared on the podcast before that my husband's family has a cabin up in Canada that his grandfather built when his mom was 16. So it's been in the family a really long time. He grew up going there every single summer. It was actually one of the first places that we traveled together when we first started dating. I remember on our first date, he even was telling me all about it and how much he loved it up there.

Typically my in-laws would go up there around 4th of July. And I had asked the kids, “Hey, listen, would you guys like to go up to Canada if possible, and we could leave you up there with your grandparents for a little while, just so you have something to do and something … You get to be on a lake and have a lot of fun.” And they were like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. We want to do that.” And then just recently Trudeau, the … Is he the prime minister of Canada? I think he is. I think that's his title. He announced that they were keeping the border closed down a bit longer.

So I'm really hoping fingers crossed that when the next kind of blockade or whatever expires, that they're going to decide to let people in and out. Because here's the thing, I am willing to go there with them, but I want to make sure I can get back in. You know? I'm kind of thinking about my husband, if it's like, “Yeah, you can leave the country. But when you come back, you need to quarantine for a couple of weeks.” I don't know if that's so good for his practice. So we're just going to figure it out like everybody else.

And listen, this is the way I've decided to think about it. And you're free to borrow this. Especially if you have children who are of an age where this is possible. If your kids are really young, it's probably going to be maybe a little harder to believe this, but my kids are 14 and a half, almost 15, and almost seven, and then almost nine. So I've been thinking, “You know what? If they have a summer where they have nothing to do and all they can do is ride their bikes around and entertain themselves and get bored and figure out new ways to play and get in fights and resolve those fights and just work it all out with each other, that's basically like the kind of summer that we used to have.” I don't think that that's really that bad.

And I do think that they might in the long run look back and go, “Remember that summer when it was the pandemic and we had no trips and nothing to do, and we just played all the time? Like wasn't that awesome?” So I'm just deciding that this is a really cool opportunity for them. Typically, I would have them in camps and things so that they would be away from the house so that I could work in quiet during the day. But now that I haven't been able to work in quiet by myself for months, what's the difference? I guess, it's kind of the same thing. So that's where I'm at with that. And I think that that's good.

My husband's back at work pretty much mostly full-time and they're doing it just like you're doing it. They're just doing what they can to get people working. He was supposed to operate today at their surgery center. And yesterday, I guess they had to cancel cases because the air conditioner broke or something. And my husband, as smart as he is, he right away was like, “Wait a minute. Call the hospital and see if that hospital can take these cases.” And so he got all his cases transitioned over to the hospital and he thought of it before other doctors did. So apparently there were other doctors who were like, “Wait a minute. I want a chance.” And he was kind of happy that he'd thought about it early and gotten all his people over. He's still able to operate on everybody. And I think all those people are grateful because they have gotten their COVID test. And now they're self-quarantining until their operation. Like it's a big deal for them as well. They're ready to get it done.

So that is that. That's what's happening with us. It's not that exciting. So nothing else to share, but you know, if something happens, I will share it with you.

Okay. So on this podcast, I'm going to talk to you about two different things. The first thing is an app that I think you really need to know about. I have no affiliation to this. I'm not an affiliate. I get $0 if you do anything with this. But I really do think you need to know about it. And those of you who are my clients right now, I want you to definitely listen up, because I want you guys to take advantage of this and then let me know what you think.

So there is a technique basically that I learned about, gosh, like four or five years ago for the first time. It was the first time I really heard about it. It's called EFT or Emotional Freedom Technique. And people also just call it tapping. And I'll explain more about it if you haven't heard about it. But I heard about it a number of years ago. Didn't really think anything of it, didn't ever explore it. And then it keeps coming up for me in my life, basically until I did decide to explore it.

I went to a conference. I ended up randomly sitting next to this woman who has a business that a huge part of her business involves teaching people how to tap and guiding them through tapping. So I check that out, with what she does. And I was like, “Oh, that's interesting.” Again, never really tried it. And then it was probably about a year ago. I even heard of other coaches who kind of used it with our clients. And about a year ago I was talking to a … I was just kind of at a gathering with a number of coaches. And I asked them, “Have any of you guys done the tapping thing? What are your thoughts about tapping? Is this like a thing I should look into? Or what do you think?”

And a number of them had some thoughts. A lot of them had never tried it, but interestingly, it was Krista St-Germain who I just had on the podcast as a guest a couple of weeks ago. She had said to me, “Yeah, you know, I totally use it with my widows that I work with. And they say that it really, really helps. A lot of people really like it.” I was like, “Okay, well, how do you even learn how to do this? What do you do?” She's like, “No, no, no, no. You just get this app and you just follow it and they just guide you through it. It's awesome.”

So the app is called Tapping Solution. I downloaded it right then. And of course took my sweet time to even open it and look at it, as I tend to do. And I tried it out a little bit and I did like it, but it just kind of never became something that I did more consistently. And I still get their emails. So over the course of the last number of months, I've gotten back to it again. And I really like it. And I think it might be a nice option, especially if you are someone who has trouble meditating, has trouble de-stressing, actively finds themselves pretty wound up at times and doesn't really know how to get themselves to unwind in a way that doesn't involve food and maybe alcohol. I think it's just a really nice option to have. And the cool thing is on this app right now, it's free for six months if you're a healthcare worker.

And so I was like, “Okay. I just have to tell them on the podcast,” to just let you guys know. I mean, it's free for six months. Now, they do have, even if you're not a healthcare worker, they do have some free tapping sessions I guess we'll call them. They're not really meditations. Some free tapping, guided tapping sessions on the app regardless. So you can get help and try it out without ever paying them any money, no matter who you are. But if you are a healthcare worker, you might as well just explore the whole thing for free for six months.

So I just want to tell you a little bit more about what tapping is. Like I said, I am not trained to teach this. I am not an expert at this in any way. It's just my knowledge of it. If you're interested in finding out more, then of course, please, spend some time investigating it further.

So basically what tapping is, is a combination of ancient Chinese acupressure and some modern psychology techniques. So it's been extensively researched over recent years. You can read up on all of it if you want to see that. This isn't just one of those like woo-woo things that everyone's just like, “Just believe it,” and that's it. There's actually research on this. It's been successfully used for stress and trauma relief with survivors of the Rwandan genocide. And they use it really successfully with war veterans who have PTSD. So this is like a legit thing. This isn't just like some kind of weirdo thing.

So basically what it does is you tap on different Meridian points and they guide you through all of them. They're all either on your head, your face, kind of right below your collarbone or sort of just under your armpit, kind of where your bra strap is. So it's not anything that you're like, head, shoulders, knees, and toes or anything like that. It's nothing crazy like that. You can do it without having to have access to your whole body necessarily.

So what you do is you tap on these points in a specific sort of order that they guide you through, while acknowledging and accepting the emotions that you're experiencing, and then moving toward resolving that emotion. So most of their sessions are about 10 minutes or so. Some are a little bit longer. I find them to be incredibly helpful. I think it's so helpful when, especially when you find that when you try to meditate, you just feel a lot of kind of pent-up energy. You feel kind of fidgety. You feel like you want to move. Your brain is like all over the place.

What I love about tapping is that, first of all, I just have to do what they say, which I love. And it's also active. There's something that I'm doing and I'm taking in this way of thinking. So basically they tell you some things to think, or you can say them out loud. I usually just say them to myself in my head, and it just kind of takes you through the process. And then some of them have in the middle part a time for you to think about a certain question. So they might ask you what the emotion is feeling like in your body right then, or what in particular is causing that emotion that you're experiencing or something like that.

I've found it to be actually really useful in helping me to be able to process the emotions that I'm feeling. I am somebody who I think I'm so skilled at stuffing my emotions because I've done it for so many years, like basically my whole entire life, not just even in medicine, that it can be hard for me to even know what I'm feeling. It's easy for me to just kind of continue to stuff or just kind of say, like, “It's not a big deal. I don't need to deal with that.”

And it is a big deal actually, because I end up having other manifestations of those unprocessed emotions. And that's something I can get into in another podcast. But for the time being, it's important for me to actually figure out what I'm feeling and to bring it up. It doesn't always come up very easily for me. And I find that these tapping sessions really help with that.

So what it does is you're tapping on these acupoints, thank you pressure points, and it sends signals then directly to the stress centers in the midbrain, like your amygdala. And it's not mediated by the frontal lobe. So the thinking part, right? That's the part that we have in talk therapy. So this is kind of a combo of thinking things and doing some guided thought work, but then also directly messaging the brain and going, “Hey, listen, you can chill out.”

And so they have data that it reduces cortisol levels. It really does kind of chill you out. One other thing I love about these sessions on this app is that you start off and the first thing they have you do is check in with your body and see, like basically rate the intensity of whatever it is that you're feeling. So they just have a scale of one to 10 and a little slider bar and you just let it know. You put it in the app what you're feeling. Then you do the whole session. At the end, they ask you to reassess and put that in. And what I love about that is just, it's kind of like this measure of like, “Did that work? I don't even really know.”

I find I've never done a session where the number didn't decrease at least by a point. Usually it's more than that. So I've just found it to be super helpful. So here's the other thing you need to know about this. So they have created a whole bunch of free sessions and help all surrounding COVID and the coronavirus. So this is all free to everybody right now. So I wanted to just let you know what some of them are titled, because I think once you hear what some of them are, you're going to be like, “Oh, I think I need that.” So here's one. It's called Before a Shift for healthcare providers. Hm, might be helpful, right? How about this one, Letting Go of the Day for healthcare providers? I mean those two alone, I think will be so helpful, especially for the frontliners.

Then here are a list of just some of the other ones. This isn't even all of them, Feeling Safe and Secure, Feeling Safe and Grounded in Your Body, Financial Uncertainty, From Fear and Worry to Peace, From Stress to Productivity, I'm Stressed About my Health, I'm Stressed About the World, I'm Stressed About Uncertainty, Instant Boost of Happiness. No, sorry. That's not what's called. Instant Boost of Healing, Pregnant During Pandemic. I think that's really useful for a lot of people. Quiet My Racing Mind, and that's a sleep support one. So you do that one to calm your brain down so you can get to sleep better if you're having trouble with that.

They have other ones too. They have different ones for kids, for anxiety relief. They have different age groups like ages 6 to 8, 9 to 12, 13 to 17. So it's more age-appropriate. So I think it's great.

So all of you who are my clients, I want you guys to go download this and use it for free. And then I want you to let me know what you think. If you're liking it. I think it's actually a really nice, just tool to have in your toolkit. I think it's something that people … I've seen people doing it just out in the open, but I think it's also easy to go into the bathroom really quick and do some tapping, right? And do a little session. It's easy to get away and do that really quickly as well. Easy to do in your car, on the way to work, on the way back. They have all kinds of things. I mean, this is just scraping the surface. They have all kinds of different sessions for all kinds of different issues. And they're adding more and more all the time.

So I want you guys to check it out. It's free right now. So like why not? And just let me know what you think. Very, very curious to see what you guys think about it.

Okay. Second thing we're going to talk about today is willingness. Willingness is something that I think a lot of us don't really think about or talk about very much. But I think the emotion of being willing is one of the best emotions that you can create for yourself. And many people right now are not doing this. They are not very willing at all in lots of areas. And I want to talk about why that's a problem and why you might want to consider moving toward willingness.

So what I'm finding right now is that many physicians are in a state of being unwilling. They are closed up. They are angry. They're defensive. They are very blaming and taking the victim role. There's a lot of self-pity. There's a ton of scarcity. There is believing all of those self-created limits, right? You believe there's a limit for yourself. That's literally just a construct in your mind, that's made up. But when you believe it to be true, it actually becomes a limit.

An example of that is believing that there's no way that you can be expected to control your eating or drinking right now. So many people believe that right now, that you can't be expected to manage your mind right now, you can't possibly be expected to show up as the best version of yourself. When you believe that, you make it so that it's impossible for you to show up as the best version of yourself. You make it impossible for you to manage your mind in an effective way. You make it impossible for you to manage your eating and drinking and get yourself in a place that actually supports you. Right?

When you think about being closed up and being unwilling, you are not interested in anything that is an option or a solution or a different way. I'm finding this with so many people right now, where they're just like, no, you're offering them the solution. You're like, “Listen, I'm giving you everything you want right here.” And they're like, “No, I don't want it.” It's like, “Whoa. Okay. All right.”

And here's the thing. I get it because I have been this person many, many times, wholly understand. A lot of people are not willing right now to give up their anger and defensiveness. They want to feel bad. They want to feel negative emotion. They want to blame other people. They don't want to take personal responsibility for the way that they're feeling. They are unwilling to do that. They want to feel sorry for themselves.

And I get that. I'm telling you, self-pity, it is something that my brain goes back to very often. It's very, very comfortable/uncomfortable for me to be in self-pity. It's comfortable because it's familiar. It's uncomfortable because it feels like crap. And it holds me back, right?

So many people are unwilling to see the abundance in the current situation. I'm seeing so much scarcity in some people that they will just use that filter to see everything in the world through scarcity, even when there's all this evidence in front of them, that what they believe isn't even true. They still believe it. This is how powerful our brains are. There'll be something right under our noses, and our eyeballs will not show it to us. We just won't even see it. We can't see it, because we're so committed to the scarcity. We're so unwilling to think about it in a different way.

So when you are in an unwilling state, this is basically saying no to feeling better. It's saying no to creating the results that you want for yourself. It's like, “No, thanks. I would prefer to suffer. This is where I should be right now.”

Now again, like I said, no judgment here. I've been here. Sometimes I've been coached and I am just clinging to my misery for dear life. Like, I don't want to give it up. I want to feel terrible about this. It feels true, and I don't want to give it up. So I get it.

But once you get some awareness of what you're doing, you can start to work on it. You can start to wiggle it a little bit and start to transition yourself out of this unwilling state.

So I looked up what the definition of willing is. And what I found was ready, eager or prepared to do something. Okay? So it doesn't mean that you're like super excited about it or loving it or confident for sure it's going to work. You're just prepared to do something, ready to do something else. You see what you've created right now, and you go, “You know what? I think I'd like to do something else.” And you're eager to change that, right? That's the state of willingness.

Willingness is, for me it is a positive emotion, but it's very close to neutral, but it's an incredibly powerful emotion. It sends you just forward in the right direction in incredible ways. So when you are willing, what you're saying is yes. When you're unwilling, you're saying no. No to all of it. Nothing is right. This shouldn't be the way it is. Resist, resist, resist. None of it's right. When you're saying yes, you're opening up to your full human experience.

This means the parts that are great and the parts that suck. This means saying yes to being scared at work. This means saying yes to figuring out how to get your practice back on track. This means saying yes to getting your food and possibly drinking under control when everybody else thinks it's ridiculous to do that. And there's so many reasons to think why you shouldn't have to do that right now and that you'll figure it out later. It's saying yes to the possibility that you can change for the better. Okay? You're just saying yes to the possibility. You're just opening yourself up to the option. I think of it as like cracking open the door and peeking through.

Have you ever had a toddler who was having like a crazy tantrum? Pretty much if you've had a toddler, I think the answer is yes. So I just want to share with you that I had to do this with all of my children, but more specifically with my first child. He would have these tantrums that were very age-appropriate. And as a pediatrician, I wasn't worried about them. But I knew how to handle them because I was asked to give advice on these kinds of things all the time.

And so one thing that we would often do if he was really just out of control is we'd give him a timeout. He had to go into his room and he had to stay in there until he could calm himself down. Or when it was earlier, we just did a minute for each year of age. But he really needed to be separated away. So what I would do is put him in his room. Well, of course, what he would do? He'd open the door and try to come out because he was crazy. Right?

And so what I had to do many times was I had to put him in there and then I had to hold the door shut. As he got bigger and stronger, and then we're doing this for like four minutes or something, four minutes is a long time when you're gripping a little door knob with all the strength you have in your hands and using the weight of your body to hold it shut. Right? I mean, honestly, I would usually be kind of laughing to myself because they're like still out of control. It's kind of funny, right? It's kind of ridiculous.

But I think about unwillingness as you knowing that the option to feel better, to get all the things that you want, to create the life experience that you want, they're in this room, but you're holding that door shut, like with all the strength that you have in your grip and all of your weight pulling against that door to keep it shut. That's your unwillingness, right? It's not just like, “Oh, the door's shut.” You're like, “The door is shut and it's not opening.” That's how committed we are when we're unwilling. Right? We're yanking that door shut. We're like, “No, I do not want to see what the solution is. Do not show me that. It's not going to work. And here's all the reasons why.” We have a whole litany of excuses and beliefs that we have about why it's not going to work.

So we're holding that door shut like crazy. And when you move to willingness, what willingness is, is just standing on your own feet and not leaning against the door anymore, leaning, pulling the door away and just cracking the door and peeking in. You're just going like, “What's in there? I'm just kind of curious. What you got in there? Anything good? What's happening in there?” That's what willingness is. This isn't like flinging the door open and going, “Oh, I'm here. I'm ready. Let's think all the positive thoughts. I'm ready to do it,” because you're not ready to do it. Right. Okay. Willingness is just opening it up a crack and peaking in. Are you willing to open the door a crack and peek in, just to see?

So what does willingness look like? Willingness I'm telling you, when you are willing to be willing, your whole life opens up for you. It's really remarkable. Let's talk about the willingness to be wrong. This is one that we have a hard time with often. You might've heard this quote by H. Jackson Brown Jr. Do you always want to be right or do you want to be happy? Because that's really what it comes down to. Right? If you're willing to be wrong, you're saying yes to your own happiness. When you're not willing to be wrong, when you only want to be right, you're also saying, “Okay, great. I'll be right, but I'm going to trade you my happiness. I'm going to intentionally make my life worse in order for me to be right.” What would it look like to be willing to be wrong?

So often I think when we are willing, we think being wrong means that there's something bad about us, that we failed. Being wrong is human. I always try to tell myself. I'm always like, “Listen, I love being wrong. Is someone going to show me that there's a better way or something is different? Awesome.” Is that always easy? Not always easy. But I tell myself that I love being wrong so that I'm not clinging so tightly to needing to be right.

Let's talk about the willingness to feel all the emotions. That is a big one right now. It is something that is so hard, right? We're thinking I don't want to feel all this stuff. I understand that I'm creating all these emotions. Yet I don't want to feel them. So food, alcohol, it's time for you to step up. Let's do this. Make it better, please.

A willingness to feel all the emotions, the willingness to just feel one emotion and not neutralize it away with something like food or alcohol or shopping or yelling at people or working too much or numbing out on social media or watching a show, feeling all the emotions. Let's talk about being willing to take control over yourself and your life. I see this so often. We want this so badly, right? We want control, right? We keep trying to control other people and outside circumstances so that we can feel in control. Yet we don't actually take control over the person we can control, ourselves. We don't take control over our lives. Instead, we try to control everybody else.

What if you could just be willing to take control over yourself and your life and be willing to let go of trying to control other people and outside circumstances? Just understanding that there's no utility to trying to control everybody else. And every time you notice yourself doing it, you bring yourself right back. What can I control? Myself. This is what I'm going to focus on controlling.

And willingness to work on your relationships. I see this so often that … We understand the concept that our relationships are created in our minds about the other person and that we can create an amazing relationship because it's our thoughts about the other person. Yet we're still like, “Listen, but if you could just be different, I think we could work on that. You think you could just be different because it's just would be so much easier.” When you're willing to let the other person be exactly who they are, because they're going to do it anyway, and work on your own thinking, it opens your whole life up.

I see a lot of people who are unwilling to question their thoughts that seem like fact or the truth. When you're willing to just look at them, maybe you still will decide that they're facts or the truth. But just curiously questioning, is this even true? What if this weren't true? What would that mean? Being willing to be wrong, right? When we think something's the truth or the facts, we're so committed to them that we don't want to be wrong about it. We don't want to question anything. We don't even want to look at any of it. What if you were willing to just look at the way that you're committed to thinking and believing about things and just questioning them, just deciding if you still want to think that way, if you still want to believe that.

I see a lot of people who are unwilling to really dig deep within themselves to find out the real reason that they overeat. And I want you to think about that for yourself as well. Are you willing to really figure this out for yourself? I think it's okay to not be willing. But if you really want to solve your overeating problem, your weight issue, your struggle around food, this is what's required. I promise you.

So I think you can be willing yet kind of dragging yourself through it, kicking and screaming. Right? I think it's normal to have thoughts of like, “I'm going to do this because I know it's what I need to do,” while another part of you is going, “Runaway, runaway. This sounds scary. This sounds hard.” Right? But you still, you allow that part of you that really knows what you need to move yourself forward. It has that willingness to figure it out once and for all.

You have to be willing to feel an urge and to eat and not eat. This is a big one, right? We're like, “How do I do that though? But like, how do I do it?” I hear that a lot. But literally how do I do it? You have to be willing to feel that. That's literally all it is. You have to be willing to have the urge and feel it.

Now here's what's interesting about urges. The urge itself is not a problem until you decide you're not going to meet it. If you have an urge to eat a cookie and you're like, “Yeah, I need to do this one thing real quick, I'm going to eat that cookie in 10 minutes,” it's not a problem at all to feel that urge. In fact, it's kind of exciting. “I won't eat that cookie.” Right? You're thinking in your brain, “Yeah, I'm going to meet that urge.”

The urge itself is not the problem. The problem is when you say, “I'm not going to have that. I wish I could. I really want that, but I shouldn't have it.” That's when the urge becomes a problem. That's when you're resisting the urge, and it becomes something that's so intolerable and then you meet it. You have to be willing to understand that an urge is totally harmless. It's a suggestion by your brain to eat some food. And you get to decide. Your brain suggests that you do all kinds of things all day long and you don't do it. This is really not any different. You got to be willing to feel the urge and to practice until you get it.

I see this often too. People are like, “Well, I tried feeling the urge, but I just can't figure it out.” “Well, how many times have you tried?” Oh like once, twice.” Yeah. How do we get better at things? We practice, right? You've got to keep going. I tell my clients, “Listen, you got to try 100 times. You work on feeling 100 urges. I guarantee you at the end of those 100 urges, your relationship with yourself and urges will be totally different.”

You got to be willing to stop at one glass of wine, even though you want more. Right? You've got to be willing to not drink if you know it's not going to be helpful for you, even when you'd like to have some. You've got to be willing to do what's in your higher interest, what your future self will be proud of, rather than just meeting the primitive brain and what it wants right now in the moment, and just give in.

You've got to be willing to not get it and to keep going until you figure it out. And that's with everything. That's with your weight loss. That's with figuring out how to manage your brain. I cannot even tell you. I just want to share with you. When I did my master coach training, it was a year long process. And I will tell you that for the vast majority of it, I was like, “I don't get it. I don't understand what's happening. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm very confused. This doesn't make sense.” Of course, my brain went into like, “This is stupid. Why am I even doing this?” You know? All the good ones. Right? They're all there.

But I was willing to not understand and to keep going. I had thoughts of like, “Why am I even doing this? I should just stop.” But I knew I never was going to stop because I wanted to keep going until I figured it out.

You have to be willing to not get it, to not get how you stop at one glass of wine, to not get how you feel an urge and not meet it, to not get how you get your food planned out and then follow it the next day. But to keep going and trying until you figure it out.

I find this so often that people will say, “Well, listen, like I tried that and it didn't work. And I didn't understand it. I couldn't make it work.” And then they quit. You got to keep going until you figure it out. That's the part that you're responsible for. Nobody else can do that for you. You've got to be willing to believe things you've never believed before. This is a new thing that a lot of people don't know how to do. They don't know how to intentionally believe something.

Wayne Dyer would say, “When you believe it, you'll see it.” We say, I got to see it to believe it. Right? I've got to have evidence that it's possible before I can believe that it's possible. I've got to create the result before I can believe that I can create the result. It's not how it works. You've got to believe 100% I am going to get this weight off. And then you create it.

I recently coached a woman on one of my free health care coaching calls. And she had lost a lot of weight, like lots and lots and lots of weight. And she said, “I'm just so afraid I'm going to gain it back again. There's all this data that says that most people gain it all back again.” And I was like, “Why would you ever think that thought? Why would you ever allow yourself to think that you're going to be one of those people? No, you believe that you are the person who's in that whatever 0.1% that doesn't gain the weight back again. Of course, you're not going to gain it back again. You have to believe that you're not going to gain it back again so that you create the result of you not gaining it back again. When you believe you're going to gain it back, you will create the result of you gaining it back. You have to believe things that are new for you and work on believing them so you can create the result.”

You have to be willing to trade vulnerability for deep connection. I find this so often. We want deeper connection in our intimate relationships, but we're not willing to really open up. We're not willing to really be vulnerable because that is scary, right? We might get hurt. But that's what's required to have that deep connection, being willing to be vulnerable, opening yourself up for that, and being willing to feel the emotions that come from that. Sometimes there's a payoff to being vulnerable, and you get this amazing deep connection. And sometimes that's not the case, and you have to be willing to take whatever comes.

You have to be willing to take ownership for your experience of your life. I see this so often, people just advocating that, just thinking, “You know what? Everybody else is to blame. If everything else in my life were better. If my job were better, if I had more money, if I had a different spouse, if my kids were different, if my house was different, if I lived in a different place, if my parents were different, then life would be better.” No, you've got to take ownership for you creating your experience of your life. They're not creating it. You are.

And along the same vein, you have to be willing to stop blaming others for how you feel. You have to take that emotional responsibility. Other people are not determining how you feel. You are determining how you feel with the way that you're thinking. This, I promise you is the best news ever when you really open up to it.

You have to be willing to think differently from anybody else that you know. So often we feel like, “Well, I don't want to be different. I don't want to be that person who is not eating the food, or not drinking, or is asking for accommodations, or things to be different to accommodate me.” You have to be willing to be different from anybody else you know to create a different result. You have to be willing to think differently than anyone else.

Everyone else has a terrible attitude. Everyone else is really bummed out. Everyone else thinks everything's awful. You have to be willing to be like, “I think actually things are good. I think we're going to be fine. I'm going to believe that because I'm going to create that result that we are going to be fine.”

You have to be willing to speak up for your ideas and for what you think is right. And then you have to be willing to feel any backlash that might come from doing that. This is a big one, right? So many women physicians don't want to say what they really think. They don't want to actually contribute in a meaningful way because they're afraid. “People might think something about me. People might judge me. People might think I'm too loud. People might think that I've got too many ideas.”

And then when sometimes … I mean, for sure they have thoughts about you, and sometimes they are judgemental. You have to be willing to feel whatever you feel from that backlash. It's not going to be rainbows and daisies, but you have to be willing to speak up for yourself because not speaking up for yourself and staying small is an unwillingness, right? It's staying closed. It's not actually contributing to your full potential to the world. That doesn't feel good, when you know you have more to contribute and you're not contributing it.

So I want you to think about where you can generate the feeling of willing, create that willingness to just peek inside the door. All the opportunities are there for you. Just stop pulling that door shut with all your might and just peek in. Have a look. What's in there? Let me just look. What might it be? Like if I were willing, if I were willing?

And on that note my friend, have a wonderful rest of your week. Oh, I should let you know. If you'd like some help losing some weight, I do have a new guide for you. It's called Six Steps to Jumpstart Your Weight Loss. It's totally amazing. You can just pick one thing, start applying it now. Right? Because you're willing to just pick one thing and start applying it to yourself. And then you can move on and pick up the rest of the five steps as you are able to.

And you can find all those on my website. You just go to katrinaubellmd.com/resources. You'll find that guide. You'll find a bunch of other things for free as well. And we'll get you moving in the right direction. Okay? Let's start with being willing. Have a wonderful week. I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Bye-bye.

Did you know that you can find a lot more help from me on my website? Go to katrinaubellmd.com and click on free resources.