Why Plans & Goals BACKFIRE (and What You REALLY Need for Success)

In this bonus episode, I share a recent training I gave that underscores why it's NOT your fault that you fall short on your goals or can't seem to change your habits.

You'll learn: 

• Why all the standard productivity and personal development advice fails you
• 5 cutting-edge, neuroscience-backed truths that explain why you always revert back to your old ways
• The 6 simple things you must do differently if you really want to change your life 

FOR SO MUCH MORE:

Join my new 6-week program, Moms Made NewTM, to learn the six most fundamental life coaching skills EVERY mom needs so stress no longer sabotages you—or your relationships. First round starts Friday, January 16th; sign up at https://momsmadenew.com

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Transcript

0:00

How many times have you made plans or set goals only for things to fall through and not go as planned, for your goals to fail? How many times have you wanted to change your habits, but before long revert back to your same old ways? How many times have you had the dream and the desire, but then pull back when it gets hard? What you are about to hear is going to finally explain why. Spoiler alert, it has nothing to do with discipline. and everything to do with your nervous system. Welcome to More Time for Mom, where overwhelmed moms get science-backed strategies to overcome the hidden sources of stress stealing your time and joy. I'm your host, Dr. Amber Curtis. Ready to make more time for you? Let's dive in. I wanted to release this bonus recording because it's just so timely. Mainly because at the time of recording, it's the first week of January, and I have to imagine that your brain, like mine, wants to fill out your new planner and dive head first into New Year's resolutions and big annual goals. And yet, you have surely heard the statistics that 90 plus percent of resolutions fail by February. What you're about to hear is going to unpack exactly why. I am gifting you a special training I just gave that reveals why all the standard productivity and personal development advice fails you. 5 cutting-edge neuroscience-backed truths that explain why you've quote-unquote fail, and the simple things you must do differently if and when you really want to change your life. The second reason this episode is so timely is because we're about a week away from doors closing on the first round of my brand new six-week life coaching program called Moms Made New. where I'm going to teach you the six most powerful tools you need to get to the root of your stress so both you and your family can flourish. After years of working one-on-one with clients, I wanted to distill the best of the best of what I have seen get them incredible results into something that is accessible for every woman who is tired of living in chronic overwhelm and exhaustion. I'll talk more about Moms Made New at the end of this training, but you are so, so invited to check out the link in the description and come join me for the most transformational six weeks of your life. And if you're listening to this after registration has closed for the first round, don't worry, there will be many future rounds to come. Jump on the wait list and you will be the first to know the next time doors open. Here's the training. Welcome to the Backfire Masterclass. Why your habits, your goals, your best laid plans always seem to fail and what you really need for success in the year ahead, right? Really just in life in general. I am going to dispel some huge myths in today's webinar. and really share with you the cutting-edge neuroscience that it's not only taken me many, many years to figure out, but then it's like it puts everything in perspective to help me realize why I struggled so much in the past. And I want to save you all of that time, stress, effort. I want you to be able to leapfrog off of what I have learned both the hard way and through years of study. Years of these certifications. Years of delving into the cutting-edge research. And we're going to get into it. So lots to cover. If you have had a masterclass with me before, you know that I am a woman of too many words. I will do my best to keep this very succinct. And I guarantee it is going to be so powerful. These are the things that no one has told you. No one is speaking about. So I can't wait to be that person. I do want to preface that then with the very normal reality that when you encounter new information, when you hear something that counters traditional perspectives or what you have long believed, the methods and the processes that you have built your whole identity and your previous success around, of course that can feel triggering. I'm going to approach this so gently, and there is no definitive right or wrong way. I just want to invite you into, again, what I have learned and the difference it is making for me. So we are going to do some quick housekeeping here at the beginning. Then we are going to talk about how most people approach this New Year time period, how we get so crazy about setting goals and filling out our planners. I am still and always was that person. But we're going to talk about how that leads to a very vicious cycle that is probably what piqued your interest in this masterclass to begin with. We're going to get the obvious truth out of the way, really call out the standard advice and the limitations with it, and then get into the good stuff. Cover the neuroscience-backed reality of why your best-laid plans always fail and what you really need to do if you want to see real, lasting change moving forward. If you are here live, I'm so excited for you. You are going to get the most out of this masterclass and you will of course have the opportunity to enter all of your questions, comments in the chat. But then at the very end, you will get access to my special guided audio that I have prepared just for you, just for this training, and one lucky winner will win a free one-hour coaching call with me. So stay tuned to the very end there, and then lots of time for question and answer at the very end, but I am so open to questions any time throughout. I would invite you to really give this training your full attention. If you can't, that's okay. I get it. We all, many of us, have young kids or you might be trying to work at the same time. And, you know, I just, you will get the replay, so you will be able to come back and revisit this material if needed. But really do yourself the favor of listening and focusing and extracting as much value as you can out of this time. I think most of us have met, but if you are new to my world, I am Dr. Amber Curtis. I am a certified life coach, a neurosomatic expert, which is just fancy language for saying I have been certified in neurosomatics, which is applied neurology, how the brain works, but then also how the nervous system works in your body. And that's a lot of what we're going to cover today. I am also a behavioral science professor. My expertise is psychology and identity and attitudes, right? Why our beliefs affect how we act and don't act. And then I have four crazy rowdy boys that thankfully are at school today. But, you know, if you follow me on Instagram or you're on my email list, it is a wild ride. And so all of these tools that I teach my clients are things that I have so needed in my own life to not just try and keep up with it all, but to really be able to enjoy the gift of this season of life, right? Because it is stressful. It is challenging. It is wrought with a lot of I'm going to just say discontent, that gap between how you envision life is going to be and your everyday reality that can feel like you're stuck in the trenches. Whether you have kids, whether you have young kids or not, all of the tools and information I teach you is still going to apply equally. But I'm thrilled you are here. Tell me more about you in the chat. And I'm just going to take a quick moment to check the make sure everybody is in. There's nobody waiting. OK, excellent. Here we go. The standard mode of operation that I did for years, 42 years of my life to be exact, was look at the new year as this beautiful blank slate, a fresh start of how you were going to do a complete 180 and change your life drastically from all the things that you didn't like about the previous year, all the problems that were dragging you down. You just get so full of this beautiful desire to fix those problems. And you think that getting the perfect planner and really reflecting on your past and then applying the standard advice for planning out your year, setting big annual goals, dreaming really big, but then breaking that down into concrete atomic habits, right? That's what we have all done. And today, after this masterclass, you are going to understand why that is so appealing. And you are getting so much out of that process. But I don't have to tell you that over 90% of New Year's resolutions fail within the first month or so. Because we ultimately get what we want out of the planning process. And then when it comes to putting our money where our mouth is and actually doing the work to see the changes we want, it's uncomfortable. It's hard. It's anything but fun. And then we feel let down. So that's what we're really going to get into today. If you have already set New Year's goals, good for you, right? I'm not saying not to do that. Although I will say that this is the first year ever that I have not planned out my year or set specific SMART goals and broken them down into a quarterly roadmap and all these things that I used to do in the past. I truthfully blush and I won't say I regret or feel ashamed at the past content I put out because it was so in line with that old version of myself. But you can look back on my YouTube channel and you can see how many videos I made trying to help us set the best possible goals and trying to help you change your mindset and do all of the things that we were led to think were going to get us the results we want. They ultimately didn't work for me, but in this masterclass I am going to show you what did and invite you into an ongoing journey so that you can really change your life for good as well. Tell me in the chat if this vicious cycle resonates with you. But here's what tends to happen. we get frustrated with our current life or we have a moment like the New Year's window where we are drawn into the possibility of what could be and we let our minds get really creative about what amazing changes we could make and we look for solutions and we commit to changing. And we maybe even go as far as to list out the steps and have this blueprint for what the change is going to require. Maybe we even invest in some programs or some resources that we think are going to help us do that. But then a. The actual work is so hard that you quit and give up because it's so uncomfortable and maybe you don't feel like you're seeing the results that you want or you just again kind of default back to your old normal. Or the second scenario is that maybe you are successful and you do achieve the results temporarily but pretty soon you revert back to again your old existing way of being and your changes don't stick. You might have a good long streak for a while, but at some point you get thrown off and then the thought of having to start back up again is too much to bear. Let me know in the comments which of those resonates with you. I've definitely been through both, right? But regardless of which camp you fall into, Your brain loves to berate you for failing. It loves to point its finger and say, see, I told you you couldn't do that. Who were you to think that you could do X, Y, or Z? And isn't it so much nicer to just sit on the couch and eat our favorite chocolate, or drink wine, or scroll social media, do whatever it is that gives us momentary pleasure instead of The things that we know are really proven to help us be happier and healthier. You are not alone in this, okay? But it's that psychological discomfort then, the mental dialogue of feeling like you failed and your brain telling you you're a failure, that immediately makes you reach for something to take away that pain. Something to numb the emotional discomfort of feeling like you failed. And I'm using the air quotes because after today, if you didn't already know, there is no such thing as failure. All of this is completely understandable from a neurological perspective, but you've probably never been exposed to all of this before. So what we tend to do is then not just revert to our default patterns, but look for something else to make us feel good and distract us from the pain we were experiencing. And so again, this is why we shop. This is why we gamble. This is why we turn to any of our addictions. We all have them. We all have our addictions. And at the heart, all they are are the things that our brain has gotten pleasure out of in the past. which has then relieved the pain of something else. And so we have come to rely on those pleasure mechanisms to make us feel good. And as all addictions go, you ultimately need more and more of that thing to get the same high. So we self-sabotage and our coping mechanisms end up leading us to an even worse place where then we have proven to ourselves that we are not who we aspire to be. We are the opposite of that, right? When you don't believe that you can be the person you aspire to be, you just perpetually stay stuck. We rinse and repeat this vicious cycle over and over and over again. I absolutely did this in my physical health. Certainly in my parenting, a lot of relational and marital stress. There were some big, big underlying problems that I just could never seem to get over, never really solve until this past year. I will tell you maybe a little bit more about my personal situation later, but I want to keep this focused on you. So I'm going to jump ahead for now. The obvious truth as to why your plans and goals fail is not your fault. And in fact, that is the big message of this entire training. The reason you fail is never your fault. It is not anything that you are doing wrong. OK? But the obvious reason why we fall short of our goals and our plans don't come to fruition is because you can only plan for what you know. And life is always throwing these huge unexpected curveballs at us so that our plans have to shift and adjust. But that takes time and effort. And again, we are still trying to combat the emotional stress of whatever new thing has happened, along with the perceived failure of our plans not going according to plan. And so on the one hand, we have great voices telling us things like planning is everything. And I'm not discounting that. I do still plan. I do think it's necessary to try and figure out how you're going to fit the various pieces of your life together. But by the end of this masterclass, you're going to see a whole different approach to planning. And the reason this is necessary is because when, not if, but when life deviates from your plan, you are going to experience what is called relative deprivation. This is that sizable gap between your expectations and reality. And the wider that gap, the worse you feel. The worse you feel about yourself, the worse you feel about the future, and then cue the vicious cycle all over again. Even though you didn't do anything wrong, you had your plan, maybe you were even executing your plan, but some big curveball came up. If you've known me for long, you've known that I've had multiple years where I got thrown off big time, whether it was major postpartum depression that led me to be suicidal, whether it was losing my mom to cancer, whether it was unexpected financial difficulties. There's always something that takes you by surprise. And in those moments, our plans go out the window. So you can make your New Year's plans, but the obvious truth is that they are not going to fully come true the way you think they are when you make the plan. And that's gonna lead you to feel bad, and I wanna combat that. I wanna help you, okay? The standard advice that you hear from all the personal development gurus Choose your expert. Choose your voice of choice. They are all telling you the same philosophy that is grounded in what's known as positive psychology. The first thing you're going to hear, and let me know in the chat if you have heard this, how many times you have heard this, You're going to hear that you just need to change your mindset. You just need to think better thoughts. You just need to think positively. You just need to believe that you can do it. You just need to be firm and disciplined and committed to yourself. Soon you are going to see why that is not possible. Why that is not accessible to your current brain. Even when it sounds so good and appealing in theory. And even when it is proven true. There is a huge piece of the puzzle that you haven't been told that needs to happen first before your brain can actually change its mindset. Before you can truly internalize new thoughts and beliefs that lead you to take new actions. The other huge thing you hear all the time, and I've got a whole bunch of books up here that tell you this, it's all about just changing your identity, right? Let me know if you've heard of the be-do-have model, where first you need to really solidify the person you want to be, and then do the things that a person with that identity does, and then you will inevitably have the results that you want, right? Oh, that sounds so good. It's like, I mean, I'm almost salivating just thinking about it because that's what we want. We want it to be easy. We want it to be as simple as just changing our mindset, changing our identity. But if that were true, you would have done that by now, right? You've read the books. You've heard the positive thoughts. You've wanted to believe these things. And then somehow you've ended up back in the same old place. Yes or yes. Okay. The last thing that I think we hear over and over is that if you have a strong enough reason why your goals are important to you, then you will stick to it. Then you will make it happen. Then you will be pushed over the threshold from the comfort of where you are or maybe discomfort of where you are to then actually doing the uncomfortable work of changing. I'm here to tell you from personal experience and from lots of research as well as countless client testimonies that that also doesn't solve our problems. Yes, it is important to clarify why you want to change and what change you're actually aspiring towards. But the motivation that you need to change your life doesn't come from your brain in the cognitive rational sense. It doesn't come from even your conscious desires of what you want and what seems so appealing in front of you. Lots more on this coming in just a second. Let me take a minute and I always have to come back to be able to see the chat. Hi. Yes, Olivia says, the notebook that will change everything. I feel so seen. I mean, this is me. I wish I could get back all the money that I have spent on these beautiful notebooks that then I don't ever write in because I want what I put in them to be perfect. And it's a long story. I obviously have issues. But the extent to which I have overcome so many of those issues in the last year with the tools I'm going to teach you is incredible. Okay, so here's the deep neuroscientific truth that you likely have never been told. There are lots of truths that I want to bring to light today. Truth number one is that when you are starting your change from the pre-existing belief that something is wrong with you or that your life needs fixing, you will always set yourself up for failure because your sense of self, your sense of what is enough is a moving target. Maybe you think that if you lose, 20 pounds, then you will be the person you want to be, right? Then people will look at you in awe. They'll treat you better. Maybe your husband will be more attracted to you. You will feel better about yourself. And so you will show up differently in your life. It's not that simple. How many people lose the weight but then still realize that their inner struggles remain and that who they are goes so much deeper than how they look or even how they feel. Hey, your physical health is a super important layer to who you are. But, you know, we have countless people that lose weight and gain it back. Same thing with finances. You might think that if you just made X amount of money a year, then your life would be blissful. But how many lottery winners end up going bankrupt or getting into big financial trouble and being back at zero? There's so many versions of success stories that then end up failing all over again. Failing all over again. Because when you are starting your change, your desired change, from the belief that you are currently lacking something you need, you're never going to actually find it. I've got, of course, the antidotes to all of these coming up. Truth number two is that no matter how much you want to change, no matter how motivated you are to do the hard work it's going to take to change, your self-discipline is inevitably fickle and fleeting. You are not a machine. You are a human and you have ever fluctuating capacity, so energy, time, resources, mental clarity, cognitive ability. Your capacity is always fluctuating. I love to teach you about your body's five different energy rhythms, these biological processes that naturally govern how much energy you will have at different times of the day, week, month, year. and so forth, okay? But then even when you have the best of intentions, again, your circumstances are always changing. Life is a moving target. So at some point, you are not going to be able to hold your own feet to the fire. That doesn't mean anything is wrong with you. It means you are normal, okay? And that your brain is doing exactly what it was designed to do. Truth number three is that your brain doesn't actually want to achieve your goals. Your brain does not actually want to achieve your goals. Your brain, everyone's brain, is wired to seek pleasure and conserve energy and more things that I'll talk about on the next slide. But this is why you love dreaming, planning, goal setting. You love to envision what could be. This is what sets us humans apart from other animals, right? That we have the ability to situate ourselves past, present, and future, and dream about potentiality, all of these things that could be possible. That's amazing, okay? And your brain gets so much dopamine from that process. but it hates actually doing anything. Because doing things takes work, it takes effort, it takes resources, and it depletes you momentarily of what your brain and body are trying to conserve. Okay, this all goes back to that perceived lack again, that we've gotta hold on to what we have, and your brain doesn't wanna let those things go. So your brain is wired to get an overwhelming amount of pleasure from the process of dreaming, planning, and setting goals, but then it is actually displeasurable, it is uncomfortable, it is painful to do the work to fulfill your dreams and reach your goals. There is also a big social component here. You might know that I have the More Time for Mom podcast and I have several episodes talking about different hormones and specifically how they determine your goals. Oxytocin is the most important hormone governing female behavior. And so dopamine tends to be the primary motivator for male behavior, but women's behavior is more motivated by oxytocin, which is the love hormone, the bonding hormone. It's that sense of connection and connectedness, that sense of belonging that you matter and that people love you and you feel good about yourself because you know that others see you a positive way. So, so much of female behavior is done in aspiration of being who we think we need to be in order to earn love and belonging. And the reality is that going after your goals is inherently lonely. And oftentimes the people you want to love and approve of you the most are going to be the most skeptical, if not the most critical, of your dreams because they don't want you to change. They like how they feel around you as you are. And if you change, if you get better, then it's going to make them feel worse about themselves. They're not thinking this consciously, right? But that is a very real factor that often leads people to discount your goals and maybe offer unhelpful suggestions or make you think that, yeah, maybe I am crazy for wanting what I want. You might be around people that are a bad influence, not malintentioned, right? But they just might be engaged in habits that are counter to those that you would benefit from. And research shows that it is really, really hard to break free of your social circle, right? That the habits of those in your social circle become your habits as well. And then, even if you have amazing friends and relatives, an amazing spouse, okay? The reality is that your brain is still always going to protect your place in the tribe over whatever positive personal benefit you want out of your goals, out of the change. So your brain is always going to resist change because it will fear that changing will make you less lovable or less accepted. You'll belong less or you'll be fully kicked out of your tribe. This could sound really silly on the surface, but this is what all of these brain scans that neuroscientists have been doing now for the last decade, this is what the research shows. This is the underlying hormonal and neurochemical reaction that takes place in your brain when you try to change. Your brain hates doing hard things, and for very good reason. It's all natural because of dopamine and oxytocin. There's also the primal or lizard brain factor here. You probably know that your brain has multiple different parts. We often talk about it in terms of a singular thing, the brain, or we talk about left brain, right brain, cognitive, intellectual brain versus emotional brain, et cetera. But the reality is that it's very complicated. And at the heart of every decision-making process, all of your actions, all of your behavior, all of your even inner beliefs, they are all first and foremost governed by your amygdala and your limbic system, which is the innermost part of your brain that still retains the wiring that our ancestors cultivated and evolved into over years and years, centuries even, of trying to survive crazy horrible conditions way back when. So contentment would have killed your ancestors. Dissatisfaction is what kept them alive. Meaning that your brain is wired to be dissatisfied. You are wired to want to change. But then you will never be satisfied even if and when you achieve those changes. Because feeling content with what you have is unsafe. Your brain is wired to think you always need to be going after something else. And the going after, the dreaming and the planning feels amazing. That's how you get your dopamine. But the actual having and getting to where you want to go, being where you want to be, that doesn't give you any real pleasure. If anything, it feels bad. Truth number four is probably the most important. Okay, so I really, I know that we're, we've got a lot of big points here, and again, you'll have the replay, you can come listen to this again, watch this in greater depth, but I really, really want you to focus on this truth. Truth number four is the most important, and it ties onto what we just got done saying, but all new thoughts, all new habits will be subconsciously perceived as a threat to your nervous system. Just naturally, all of us. This is why you can't just change your mindset. Every new attempt to do something different, to do something other than what you have always done and what your brain was wired to believe is necessary for your very survival, is going to evoke an immediate stress response. Okay, you've probably heard me talk about these stress responses before, or you're familiar with them from other sources, but they are fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or fix. Those are the five default stress responses that your brain and body inevitably go into any time you perceive a threat. And you've heard it elsewhere, I'm sure, but your brain doesn't differentiate between running late with being chased by a saber-toothed tiger, or your toddler having a meltdown with not having enough food to survive the winter. Okay? Like all threats are responded to in the same way by the default wiring in your brain. And that is slightly different for each of us. We each, from the moment we're born, start having our nervous system wired to default into one of those stress responses more than maybe some of the others. They're not mutually exclusive, but this is why it's so important to know yourself, okay? Olivia confirms that, yes, my brain does not differentiate loud toddlers with saber-toothed tigers. This is all of us. It's rough, right? I'm right there with you. So your brain was designed for four things. And I've already alluded to this, but first and foremost, your brain was wired for survival. It will always, always keep you alive. First and foremost. Second thing it was wired for was to conserve energy. Back in the old saber-toothed tiger days, it was costly to expend energy because you never knew when you were going to need to run from the saber-toothed tiger. So you would spend as much time as you could being still and hanging out and not working, not doing until you absolutely needed to. And the other factor here was that you never knew when you were going to have your next meal, right? And so you wanted to gather all of the food you could and gorge yourself on that, but then keep that energy, keep that food in your body as long as possible because you didn't know when you'd find more. Third thing your brain was wired for was to i'm losing track third thing your brain was wired for was to seek pleasure okay this is that dopamine reward circuitry that we all have and we all get pleasure from various ways but i really want to cement for you that you get the most amount of pleasure from the anticipation of something not from actually having it And then the fourth thing your brain was designed for it was to avoid pain. But again, research is really underscoring that. We are willing to tolerate some pain if we think we will be rewarded and get enough pleasure out of it. It's pretty nuanced here and. Ultimately, we can just say that your brain loves to stay where you are at. No matter how much your rational intellectual brain wants to change, your emotional brain, your lizard brain, limbic system, okay, is always going to prioritize those four things, survival, energy, pleasure, and avoiding pain more than anything else, more than whatever you think you want instead. This is what someone named Gay Hendricks has termed the upper limit problem, where oftentimes we might venture out of the cave and we might try to do something different. We might even be willing to work hard and get something that we never had before. But like I was mentioning with people who lose weight and gain it back or win the lottery and then go bankrupt, there is this crazy phenomenon of reverting back to your default baseline. We all have essentially an inner thermostat in us, kind of like the thermostat you would have in your house, where you set it to a certain temperature in the summertime. And if it gets above that, your AC kicks on to cool it back down. And if it falls below that temperature in the winter, the heater kicks on to bring the temperature back up so that you can stay comfortable, right? This is exactly what is happening in your brain. So all change, even if it feels good momentarily when you get there, right? It's going to start to feel threatening and uncomfortable if it didn't already. And this is why, even if we change, we find ourselves right back inconsistent and starting all over again. Also, we've got these complementary and or dual processes of confirmation bias where the brain naturally looks for confirming evidence that makes or that reinforces what we think we already know as the truth. So we give greater weight to information that confirms what we believe. And then we have this disconfirmation bias where the brain inherently rejects anything that doesn't conform to your prior beliefs. This is why it's so hard to get people to change their minds. This is why we have so many different political battles. I could go on and on about this, but at a personal level, this is why you stay stuck. It's because anytime someone is offering you a solution that doesn't map onto your pre-existing beliefs, your excuses about why you can't have what you want, why you can't do what you want to do, or why it's too hard for you, why it's not possible. You are always going to reject that new solution and look for other evidence that confirms your pre-existing beliefs. And then, even if you want to believe the new thought, even if you consciously accept that, yes, I can do hard things and this is going to be worth it and all the positive psychology mantras you hear out there, okay? Even if your rational brain believes that thought to be true, Your body does not. Your nervous system has been wired to reject that information because it doesn't conform with what other beliefs, what excuses have always kept you safe up to this point. And we're not necessarily talking about safety in terms of existential survival. We're especially talking about your social safety here, right? What's going to keep you part of the tribe. This truth is the icing on the cake. I want you to read it a couple of times here because it's crazy, but it is true. Your brain will always prefer the certainty of failure to the uncertainty of success. Your brain will always prefer the certainty of failure to the uncertainty of success. Your brain hates pain, but it absolutely hates uncertainty even more. Your brain cannot tolerate the chance that something might or might not happen. It would rather know that it won't happen than live in the uncertainty for however long it takes to make it happen. Unless you have tools that I can't wait to share with you. All right, let me know some reactions in the chat. Those are the five crucial neuroscience truths that I have not heard being talked about enough, okay? And they are why we stay stuck, why we don't change, why our best laid plans backfire. So here is what you really need to do to set this coming year up for success. To set yourself up for success. Whatever that means to you, right? That's different for each of us. And all I want to do here is just offer you, again, those solutions that your brain might immediately want to reject, but that are proven. to actually help you overcome the default wiring that has kept you where you've been for however long. So when you want to change for good, The first thing you need to do is do your best to anticipate what obstacles are potentially going to arise. This is still a fallible exercise. We're never going to be perfect at this. We don't have a crystal ball. We can't predict with 100% accuracy what's going to come up. But we can and should let our brain go to the worst case scenarios and create some lists of what might happen, how we think we could prevent that thing, and what we could do to repair our situation, even if that thing did happen. When you go through this kind of exercise, Apart from the moment in which those terrible things are transpiring, it's really beneficial because then if and when those problems do arise, they won't catch you as off guard, right? Your brain will have mentally prepared for the possibility and you will already have some protocols in place that you can pull out to use in those moments so that your brain doesn't have to come up with an action plan in the high stress moment itself. This is so invaluable and I always recommend my clients do this. Anticipate your obstacles and really try and think about how you can prevent those things from happening or deal with them even if they do. Second big need ties back to the very beginning. We're never going to be able to strong arm ourselves into change. You're never going to out-discipline your true sense of self. So we have to start from self-love and sufficiency exactly as you are right this moment. whatever you think is wrong with you, whatever you wish was different, whatever you dislike about yourself. You need to get to the place where you not only accept those things, but you actually love yourself because of them. And you see yourself as so much exactly as you are. There's no need to change. We might just desire to see what else is possible. Third thing is, again, maybe the most important if we're to prioritize here. This is the work that I really, really am on a mission to help everyone do and get the tools you need to do this, because this is what's made the biggest difference for me. But it is learning to recognize how your brain got wired. what pre-existing patterns and default stress responses are governing your everyday reality now, and then be able to rewire your brain and rewire your entire nervous system. The brain is just part of your nervous system, right? You've got a whole body that goes along with it, and you have to be able to expand your sense of safety and capacity so that your nervous system can tolerate change. and tolerate the discomfort that comes with going after those changes. You have to be able to overcome that upper limit problem. And the only way we do that is by showing your nervous system that it is not a threat to change and that you really are that new version of yourself. But not out of necessity, not because something is wrong with the current version of you, but because You can, you are, and it's good. It is safe for you to be that person. Okay, so tacking on to that, I split these up into two, but they all tie together. The ultimate skill is expanding your emotional capacity. We wanna expand our safety, but also our sense of capacity, which comes down to being able to regulate your nervous system, regulate your emotions, and then also have resilience to not just hold space in your body for all the negative emotions that come at you, but then actually process them through and be able to then feel the full spectrum of all your emotions It's so incredible how this works, but all of us, right? We have been socially conditioned to think that we should only feel good feelings. And then we have spent our whole lives trying to shove away all negative emotions because other people couldn't handle us when we had them, which made us fear the feelings of those negative emotions in our body all the more, okay? And so no one has ever modeled for us what it is like to feel extremely angry or extreme grief or extreme humiliation, right? Shame, embarrassment, whatever it is. As soon as you start to feel those things now, you immediately turn to something to cope and make you feel better. No one has ever taught you how to actually sit with those emotions and be able to feel them and process them until they move through your nervous system so they don't get repressed and stuck and manifest in physical illness down the road. This is where research is so enlightening, right? All of this new research underscoring how your nervous system health affects your inflammation and your chance of disease like autoimmune disease or cancer. This is such, such, such important work that we all need to do. And then finally, what you really need to do as you are rewiring your nervous system and integrating the new beliefs and the new identity is build evidence that success is possible for you. You have to trust that you keep your word, that you can rely on yourself, even if you can't rely on anyone or anything around you. You have to show yourself that you love yourself enough to do hard things or to set and hold boundaries or to be around other people when they disprove of you or don't like your truth. That's not easy when we've spent our whole life doing the opposite. But when you do that, you will increase your sense of self-efficacy, your empowerment, your agency, your belief that you can do anything and therefore everything is figureoutable. Nothing is off limits. Nothing is unsafe. No, nothing good, nothing bad. You can do it all. You can hold it all and you are here for it. You are wanting to live life to the fullest, good and bad. And then as I am trying to do now, bring everyone along with you on the journey because it's so amazing. OK, last thing, I guess I was out of order, but The sixth thing you need to do to set this next year up for success is really reevaluate the beliefs your brain has offered you up to this point as to why you can't do something. Why you can't invest in that program. Why you won't give up that one food. Why you won't get up at a certain time. Whatever it is, okay? We all have lots of subconscious false beliefs that we take as legitimate reasons why we can't do something. But the reality is they are ultimately excuses. And there is always, always a counter belief that we could adopt if we wanted it, if we really want to change. But again, it's not your fault that you can't. Your nervous system will not be able to accept that new belief until you rewire it for safety and capacity. So it's a very virtuous cycle that I want to guide you through where you are recognizing how your nervous system got patterned from a young age and how that is affecting everything about your current reality. But then you are expanding your nervous system for greater safety and capacity so that you can fully believe what you want to believe and bring to fruition all the goals and dreams on your heart, whatever they may be. The punchline, okay? You've been troopers all this time. Let me put it very succinctly. You can't outthink your nervous system. You can set goals, you can make plans, but you can't ever outthink or outfeel your nervous system. Persistent stress, anxiety, or trauma, which spoiler alert, we all have, even if it's not big T trauma, we all have had our brains wired because of traumatic experiences. And they all create deep physiological patterns in your body that mindset shifts alone will never be able to fix. Similarly then, the solution is holistic neurosomatic techniques, which again is just fancy language for working with the brain and body and knowing how to work with, not against your nervous system, so that you can integrate the desired changes into your self-concept in ways that your nervous system won't automatically reject as unsafe. This is the deep, beautiful work that I really invite you into in this year ahead. And I want to just set your mind at ease that all the stuff I'm talking about is not out there. It's not New Age. It's not woo-woo manifestation stuff. I am not into that at all. This is cutting-edge neuroscience. And whether you get it from me, whether you get it from someone else, These are the tools that you really need for the life you dream of. I invite you to join me for so much more. Many of you have heard, and if this is the first time you're hearing about it, then yay. I am so excited to share with you that I am launching a brand new six-week life coaching program that distills down the six most important life skills that every woman needs in order to Live your best life in order to lead and parent from peace, not from pressure. In order to prevent stress from sabotaging you or your relationships. And in order to really become who you want to be, right? You can see on the slide here that every week has a different focus and an accompanying tool that, again, after years of working one-on-one with clients, I have really sifted through the six things that I am just so convicted every one of you needs in order to feel better about your life. And so, yes, there's so much more that I do with my one-on-one clients, and you are always invited to reach out schedule a free consult with me if you want to learn about working together one-on-one. But I recognize that that isn't always accessible for everyone. So I wanted to condense the best of the best into a group coaching program. that is going to start on Friday, January 16th. We are going to go through so much. It's going to be a really intimate group setting and we're going to meet to really break all of the things that I've mentioned and alluded to here today down in so much more detail. There are so many resources included and you're going to get lifetime access to the replays. Whether you can make the coaching calls live or not, you will always have the information at your disposal. Lots of very powerful resources so that you can apply these tools to your own life. And then you get two incredible bonuses that are my best-selling programs, the Happy Mom Protocol, as well as the Harness Your Energy program, which is where I go in depth into the five different energy rhythms that I mentioned. And this is always something that women are banging down my door for because no one teaches you about your body in the way that I do in that program. So I am including that for free. You can see that with the start date of January 16th, I really invite you to consider whether this is your next step because registration is happening now and it's closing very soon as we get started. Yes, I will be running this program again, likely in the fall, but I can guarantee that the price is never going to be what it is right now. It is $600 this first round. There are a variety of payment plans available to make it, again, accessible no matter what your financial situation is. And I'm happy to answer questions about this, but I really, really, really invite you to come and join me for this six-week luxurious retreat experience where you are getting the support you need and the tools you need to do life differently from here on out. These are exactly what has changed my life. And I know you can tell, but I will just not be quiet about this because I firmly believe that every mom needs these resources. Everyone, but especially if you are a mom. Shelly asks, looks like an awesome program. What time are the Friday calls? Great question. They are Fridays from 11 to 1 Eastern time. But again, all replays are included in the program portal and you've got lifetime access so that you can watch them as fits your schedule or revisit the material anytime in the future. Happy to answer other questions. What I especially want now, because you guys have been so amazing and so patient all this time, is I would love for you to please put the first prefix of your email address into the chat so that I can use that to then draw the winner of the random coaching, as well as know who was here live. And then I will send you my guided audio on how to really prepare your nervous system for success. your free bonuses that you all get for being here live today. And then I am happy to stay on as long as it takes to answer questions, talk about your personal situations a little bit more, you know, see how all of this fits in with your personal situation. I am here. Questions? Let me put this in the chat so everybody can see it, even if you didn't hear it. Drop the first part of your email in the chat to make sure I know you were here so that I can send you your live bonuses. Also let me know in the chat, what was the biggest, most surprising thing you learned today? What's one takeaway that you didn't know coming into this masterclass and that maybe is going to shift your perspective moving forward, whether you enroll in Moms Made New or not? Something you learned. Truth number one, that I was setting myself up for failure. That's all of us. It's all of us. We live and learn, right? And I love, love, love that we just get to keep learning. We're never done. And it's really easy once we learn some of these new things to then look back and feel or use it to feel worse about ourself. But that's not my goal at all. That's not how I want you to take any of this information. I want you to hear this and breathe such a deep sigh of relief. that now we get it, right? Now you know what might have been holding you back in the past or what explains why things were such a struggle. And again, it's not you personally. It's not your fault. This is all of us. Okay, so self-love and sufficiency. Yes, we have to start from self-love and sufficiency. Even if you don't take anything else away from this masterclass, I want you to try on that thought that you are so wonderful and worthy exactly as you are. When you listen to my podcast, you know the outgoing refrain is always that nothing you do changes how wonderful and worthy you are. And that's the truth that I have needed to repeat to myself over and over and over again because of my trauma and all these other things. I definitely internalized from a young age the subconscious belief that I had to earn my worth. then I achieved and performed and made other people happy. Then I got praised or I was liked more or good things happened and I felt better about myself and so I got addicted to achieving and performing but not in a healthy way, right? And so you've maybe heard me talk elsewhere about my journey with high functioning anxiety and all these things where all of those behaviors can seem really good on the outside and even get socially rewarded, but the reality is that they stem from deep neurological deficiencies where I did not believe that I was enough as I am. I thought I always needed to do more in order to be good enough. And so even saying that refrain and saying that message on my podcast wasn't enough for me to actually believe it until this past year when I got certified in neurosomatic intelligence and this whole new world was unlocked for me realizing, yeah, it's all built into the nervous system. It's wired into not just my brain, but my body that I have to earn worth and belonging. But when you do this work and you expand your sense of safety and capacity and your nervous system can then actually hold the truth that you are enough exactly as you are, then, you know, I don't know if you guys can tell a difference in me or not, but I sure can. My husband is the first to say how different I am and I want that for you. Amanda says that even knowing your why isn't enough. Oh, yes. That is the hard reality, right? We spend so much time going through what we want, why we want it, what it's going to take to get there. And the reality is that all those efforts are basically in vain until we do this deep inner work of understanding our nervous system, understanding our default stress responses, and expanding ourself for safety and capacity in order to be able to actually adopt the new beliefs, the new mindset, and engage in the behaviors that make our success inevitable. It's a virtuous cycle and It's the mission I am on. Would love for you to join me. So Betty's asking the link to the dashboard. I'm not sure if you meant the link to sign up for the program, Moms Made New, but I've put that in the chat. You will, of course, be getting all this information with the replay. And then I'm going to be sending a lot of emails, a lot of messages between now and January 16th when this program starts. All of my one-on-one clients get automatic access to this. So if you want personalized support, then reach out. Let's schedule a free consult because maybe you want to get this program as part of a larger package that is going to help take your transformation even further. But I promise you that this six-week group coaching program is going to fundamentally change your life. It is going to answer for you so many questions that you have had for so long that you have tried and tried and tried to solve yourself and you've not been able to effectively solve them because your brain can't outthink your nervous system. But I'm going to help you do that. I'm going to help you rewire your nervous system so that you can grow into that next version of yourself and be a whole new version at the end of just six weeks. Come and join me. Thank you so much for being here today. Make sure that you have entered the first part of your email in the chat and then look for those bonus resources and the replay to be emailed to you within the next 24 hours. Thank you again for being here. You guys are awesome. Do set goals, but do all these other things first, right? Do this deep inner work first so that your goals will actually come to fruition. I know more than anyone how precious your time is, so the fact that you spent it listening to this podcast means the world. Make sure to subscribe, and if you got value out of this show, I would be so honored if you'd leave a review and share this episode with another busy mama who needs to hear it. We've got this.