Every one of us has done it: known exactly what we want, even known how to do it, and then somehow not done it. Corinne Crabtree has spent a career figuring out why. She’s a coach, entrepreneur, and host of the Losing 100 Pounds with Corinne podcast, and while she’s best known for helping women lose weight, what fascinates Angie is what Corinne has learned about changing behavior, and about the way we talk to ourselves, because that voice can be the most dangerous one we’ve got.
Weight loss, Corinne says, is just a vehicle for changing the relationship you have with yourself, and the lessons are universal, whether you’re overhauling your health, your career, a relationship, or a stubborn habit. Her big idea is that knowing isn’t the same as doing (you can own the IKEA manual and still not build the thing), because between the planner part of your brain and the doer sit your habit brain and your reward brain, and until they’re on board, nothing gets handed off. The relief, she says, comes from realizing you’re not broken, you just didn’t know all the things that have to happen in between.
Picking up right where last week’s conversation with Ebony McNeil left off, Corinne and Angie dig into why it’s not about the cake, how to coach yourself once the coach is gone, why old thinking never fully disappears, and why small, boring changes beat dramatic 180s every time. Press play, and go close the gap between knowing and doing.
Corinne Crabtree is a master-certified life coach, entrepreneur, and the host of the Losing 100 Pounds with Corinne podcast, one of the most popular weight-loss shows around. Best known for helping women lose weight (she lost 100 pounds herself and has kept it off), her real work is teaching people to change their behavior by changing the way they talk to themselves. Through her No BS Weight Loss program, she tackles emotional eating and the mindset underneath it, on the conviction that most of what we’re really carrying is emotional weight, that it’s never about the cake, and that lasting change comes from small, repeated wins rather than dramatic overhauls. Refreshingly blunt and profanity-friendly, she teaches self-coaching, the difference between hard and simply different, and the power of pre-deciding to beat decision fatigue. Her lessons reach far beyond food, into careers, relationships, and leadership, because they’re really about the six inches between your ears. Find her, her free video series, and her podcast at nobsweightloss.com.
Angie Good Monday morning, everyone, and welcome to No More Mondays, the podcast where we believe that humans still matter, mediocrity is expensive, and I don’t mean money, and ownership will change everything. As always, I am your host, Angie Callen, and today we are talking about something every single one of us has experienced, knowing what we want to do, maybe even knowing how to do it, and then somehow not doing it. My guest is Corinne Crabtree, a coach, entrepreneur, and host of the Losing 100 Pounds with Corinne podcast. She’s best known for helping women lose weight, which might sound like an unusual topic for No More Mondays, but what fascinates me about her work isn’t just weight loss, it’s what she’s learned from helping thousands of people, and doing this for herself, to change behaviors, and specifically the way we talk to ourselves, because we all know how dangerous that voice can be. Because whether you’re trying to overhaul your health, change your career, be a better leader, overhaul a relationship, or change a stubborn habit, there’s this universal problem of knowing what you want, knowing what to do, and then having to contend with yourself and the willpower to do it. So today, Corinne and I are going to use her area as a jumping-off point into a bigger conversation about change and self-coaching, and how we can learn to notice our patterns, challenge our own thinking, hold ourselves accountable, and get better at helping ourselves get better. Corinne, welcome to No More Mondays.
Corinne Hey, thanks for having me, I’m excited.
Angie Corinne and I, this is our first conversation, which is always interesting, hey, want to get to know each other and record it and have people listen in? But it comes through a trusted network, and just in the few minutes we were chatting behind the scenes, I think we’re going to have fun and give you all some good food for thought, pun intended. Because last week I talked with Ebony McNeil, and if you haven’t listened to that episode, I encourage you to, because it dovetails really well into this conversation. He and I talked about character and this idea that we actually get to participate in deciding who we want to become, and this is that next chapter, where Corinne and I get to talk about not just choosing, but actually putting things into action to become that person. Your work really is in this area, so where I want to kick things off is, why isn’t knowing enough to make us do better? Why do we self-sabotage, is probably the easier way to ask that question.
Corinne It’s a good question, and it’s funny you’re asking, because I’m currently, as always, trying to rewrite my content to my latest thinking. One of the things that comes up in weight loss all the time, and I’ve heard so many clients say it over and over, is, I know what to do, I don’t know why I’m not doing it. And I kept hearing it and thought, there’s got to be an explanation, I need to figure this out. There actually is one, and the reason we don’t end up doing things is a lot of times we don’t really understand how the brain works. Logic says, if I got instructions, I should just be able to do it. But if you’ve ever bought anything from IKEA, that will immediately tell you that just because you have an instruction manual in front of you does not mean you can do it. There are things that always happen between instruction and doing, and if you don’t know what those things are, then especially as women, we tend to go, oh, I’m a screw-up, I’m a failure, there must be something wrong with me. Our brain likes to quickly explain away why things are happening, and like the person you talked about last week, you get to choose the story you tell, but the brain wants a story and it wants it fast, it’s a story-making machine. So if it thinks you should just be able to do something because you watched a video, somebody told you, you set a goal, it comes up with the fastest, easiest definition, usually through the lens of how you normally think about yourself. So if you have mediocre self-esteem, your brain explains why you’re not doing it through that lens, but that’s not what’s really happening. So I’m always big on, when a woman knows what actually has to happen in order for the doing to happen, number one, we feel so much relief, oh, I didn’t realize all these things needed to happen, and now I have something I can go work on, and you get relief from just knowing you’re not broken. It’s pretty crappy to go through life always feeling like you’re broken in some way. Everybody thinks, if I know, I should be able to do, but the knowing is what’s called the planner part of your brain. The planner is like, okay, I’m going to listen to a video, think about this, set a goal, off to the races. The doer is over here going, okay planner, you told me all the things, except it didn’t go through the other two people who make the decision, and that’s our habit brain, the person who’s like, look, planner, I know you want to change everything we’ve been doing, but I’ve been doing this for 50 years, and I’m not going to get on board for any willy-nilly reason. And then you have your reward brain, who in weight loss is having a damn good time, she’s like, what do you mean we’re not going to eat Oreos anymore, what do you mean we’re not going to drown our sorrows in ice cream, I’ve been having a party. So these two people who live in your brain, the planner has to learn how to talk to them before it can ever hand anything off to the doer, because they all better be getting along, or you’re not going to get anything done. When you start realizing that, it’s a lot easier to go, oh, there’s more to this than just learning and doing, there are all these other little things that have to happen.
Angie Corinne just gave you all a different version of what I mean when I say mediocrity is expensive. I’m just going to do the thing, stay the same, not reach my potential, I’ll just eat the Oreos, whatever your version of that is. I love this idea of the pass-through between plan and do, and we tend to simplify it as if those are the only two components, when really there are these two little competing angels on our shoulders in between that can make that wiring hard, especially because, as you said, we like stories, and we like them to come fast. Unfortunately, when you’re trying to change the story, things don’t happen as quickly as that whole communication channel wants them to, and that’s where we get resistance and give up.
Corinne Yes, and speaking just in weight loss, that’s why I always think weight loss is such a wonderful vehicle to change the relationship you have with yourself. Because the way I teach it, we tackle emotional eating. I firmly believe if you’re a woman who has a weight issue, 70% of what you need to lose is emotional weight, it’s the emotional eating you’re doing, and most women don’t even realize what emotional eating is. They think it’s binging or something along those lines, and I’m like, no, emotional eating is, oh my god, this is a rough day, hey Linda, do you want to go out for lunch? That’s emotional eating. It’s not always I come home and eat in a dark closet all by myself.
Angie Or throw away the empty package so no one knows you ate the entire bag.
Corinne A lot of emotional eating happens right in front of everybody. If I go to a weekend dinner with my friends and I don’t want to feel left out because everybody else is ordering margaritas, chips, and salsa, and I don’t want to feel left out, I’m now emotionally eating, I’m eating because if I don’t, I’m going to feel weird or odd. So I always tell women, when you realize how much of it’s emotional, we want to be working on what goes on there, and that’s not something that changes overnight, those are coping mechanisms. That’s why I always tell people weight loss is the best way to develop a good relationship with yourself, because so much of your eating is tied up in not feeling good enough, worrying what other people think, people-pleasing yourself to burnout. We fix the stuff that right now you eat over, so you don’t have a reason to keep eating like you do now. I tell women all the time, cake is not your issue, cake is not an addiction. If you didn’t eat cake every time you were mad at your boss, every time you were worried about your kids, every time you worked too much for two weeks and didn’t take care of yourself, if you only ate cake when you truly were going to enjoy it, you would not be having a cake problem at all.
Angie Metaphor city, because this is really where the conversation is much bigger than just weight, but it’s such a great example, especially for women, because we identify directly with it. But even the men out there, there are a ton of correlations behind this idea that it’s not about the cake, which is an amazing book title, by the way, so anyone out there, look for it when Corinne writes it. We do it with eating, we do it with exercise, but we also do it with money, with our careers. We know we need to have this conversation with ourselves to set boundaries, we know we need to level up, change jobs because something’s making us miserable, ask for help, or otherwise stop doing the thing that is essentially eating cake anytime we’re miserable, whether it’s cake or not. But we don’t actually do it, which brings me to something I’m really interested in, I love talking about the brain, by the way. Clearly we’re coaches, clearly we believe in having another human who can help us through the stuff we can’t see when we’re lost in the middle of our own life. But you can’t have a coach around forever or all the time. So at some point, how can we begin recognizing our own patterns, catching ourselves in the bullshit, and helping ourselves become accountable? In your world, you get somebody through that emotional heavy lifting, they see it’s not about the cake, but how do they actually begin to believe that, own it, and act like it every day, whether you’re around or not?
Corinne That’s really important. Whenever you’re working on things, one of the things I instruct people, like when they first want to lift weights, is to hire a trainer at first, and you need to be really clear with them. I’m going to be working out at home, using dumbbells, by myself, I just want to be able to get up and down off the floor so I can play with my grandkids, and I need one routine I can do over and over and never worry I’m going to get hurt. If you tell a trainer that, they’ll teach you that one routine and eventually you can wean yourself off of them. It’s the same with a coach. Some of us, myself, I don’t know that I’ll ever not have a coach, I find it so valuable, I can coach myself, but it’s so much faster and easier when somebody else does it, and I learn a lot getting coached. So I’ve hired a coach, and literally the relationship is, I’ll let you know when I’m done, but until then, you’re in charge of my brain, don’t spend time teaching me how to do it, spend time unraveling me, because I’m willing to stay here. But the vast majority of people are not in that boat, so when you work with a coach, I think it’s really important to tell them, I don’t want you to just coach me, I want you to make sure I know how to coach myself, so that by the time I leave you, I know how to do this too. So that’s step one, working with a professional first is always helpful. The second thing, and this is what I do with my clients, I teach them all about repetition. The second you learn how powerful your thinking is, it’s like, oh shit, this explains everything, that light bulb goes on. But there’s a secondary switch that gets flipped that’s not true, once I know this, why would I ever think crappy thoughts again, why do these thoughts keep coming back? We think something must be wrong, because we have an aha, and we assume from that moment on our brain will only think the aha and immediately release the rest. That is not how your brain works. It’s not a sad truth to me, but for a lot of people it feels sad at first, you’re going to think like you do right now, no matter how many ahas you get, for a while. You do not need your old thinking to go away to do great things. You’ve got to get so good at practicing the new stuff, so good at catching old thoughts and pivoting them to where you want to go, over and over, that eventually, when your brain is ready to let it go, it will. I always tell my people, what if the habit becomes that every time you have a crappy thought, your brain now comes in with a better one? If you got there, your life 100% improves.
Angie That one tiny thing you actually have complete control and ownership of. The one thing we do have complete ownership of is the voice in our heads and how we talk to ourselves, which goes back to that earlier point. Imagine if all you did was say, sorry scarcity, here comes abundance, or sorry negativity, here comes your positive antidote.
Corinne Yeah, and my clients are not coaches, so they’re like, oh, it’s so hard, I get so worn out doing that, and I’m like, girl, you’re worn out every night going to bed thinking like you do now. If we’re going to go to bed tired, let’s go to bed tired because we’re working so hard to be happy. Right now, you’re going to bed tired because you ain’t working at being happy, you’re working at being miserable.
Angie Isn’t it amazing what people will think? Sorry, everyone, we’re going to shame you for five seconds, but that’s kind of the point, because we want to help you get out of the comfort zone, and we know growth doesn’t happen in it. It’s amazing what people will label hard, and ultimately, you choose your hard. I’m a CrossFitter, and for a while there was a CrossFit campaign, easy choices, hard life, hard choices, easy life. Because you know it’s not about the cake, so if you do that hard now, how incrementally, or even exponentially, better does everything come behind it? It just takes that ownership in a moment, so you make the choice to not be mediocre. How’s that for tying it back into the theme of the show?
Corinne And if you think about it, I’m working hard at something that’s going to really grow my life, that’s not a weird thing, that’s not your thorny cross to bear, it’s a good choice, and it’s only hard because it’s different.
Angie It’s just not the thing most people do, so it gets the label of, this is hard. No, it’s different. I love that.
Corinne I tell my people all the time, I don’t care if they’re just getting used to eating a little differently, it’s only hard because you’re not used to it, and when it’s different, your brain’s job is to put up a fight. It knows when you’re trying to change what it worked so hard to make a routine, and it’s like, don’t destroy my hard work. But your brain can change, so I remind them, keep reminding yourself, this is different, I will get used to this. One of the things we teach is, before you put anything in your mouth, you just ask, am I hungry, the most basic question of all time, and you would not believe how many women in their 50s and 60s told me, I’ve never thought to ask, am I hungry, because they’ve dieted so much in their life they’ve always eaten based on what the diet told them. It didn’t matter if they were hungry, you followed the plan. You go back to childhood, it didn’t matter if you were hungry at dinner, you were supposed to eat, it didn’t matter if you were hungry at school lunch, this is when we eat. We learn from an early age to stop using our body as a gauge and start using everything outside of us. So when you start doing it, it feels weird, my women say, but what if I’m not hungry and I still want it, and I’m like, well, isn’t it good to know? Because if you’re not actually hungry and you want to eat, there’s probably a really good reason happening there that needs to get fixed in your life. If I’m hungry after my husband and I have words over the dishwasher, and I want to eat, and I ask, am I hungry, and the answer is no, but if I don’t eat right now, I’m going to yell at him and ruin our whole night, I would want to know that the only way I know how to have a disagreement is to have a World War Three. Maybe I could work on that, maybe there’s something easier.
Angie Powerful. Awareness is a powerful thing, and you can’t unknow it, which is a lot of what your work is, bringing these things to light. We could have an entire episode about the harm the diet culture of the 80s and 90s has done on the female psyche and healthy eating, but to avoid that rabbit hole, what I’ll say is, in a lot of ways that’s similar to any belief system we carry, because it was instilled somewhere. Whether it’s lunch and you eat, or I have to do this job I went to college for for the rest of my life, or I have to be a micromanaging leader because that’s all that was modeled for me, those are all the same as, I’m eating because it’s time to eat, versus, am I hungry. The food thing becomes such a simplistic way to look at parallels. And you brought up something I want to ask, because I’m curious how we challenge ourselves without being hard on ourselves, because there’s an interesting tension here, we’ve created two extremes, push harder, no excuses, discipline, do hard things, and on the flip side, give yourself grace, self-compassion, don’t be so hard on yourself. How do we reconcile that?
Corinne There are several pieces to it. One is just realizing that so many of us never figure out that life is not so black and white. It’s not discipline or free-for-all, there’s a middle ground, and a lot of times we don’t even try to think, well, if I wasn’t going to be so disciplined that I’m miserable, but also not so much freedom that I’m careless, what would the middle look like? For me, discipline is more about certain guardrails I put around myself in certain areas, and in these areas I feel like I own it, so I’m going to be an owner there. Start looking for what areas of your life need guardrails. For a lot of my clients, ordering Uber Eats needs guardrails. My people tend to be big-time emotional eaters, usually women with a lot of responsibility, kids, families, demanding jobs, they’re nurses, teachers, they’ve got people pulling at them, and they tend to be caregivers for everyone in their life whether the person asks or not. So when six o’clock hits, the last thing they want to do is cook, they’ve made every decision for everybody all day long, they don’t even want to decide their own food. So I tell them, we’re going to make a plan in the morning of what we’re going to eat for the day, just for today, we don’t worry about the rest of the week, and we look at today and decide what kind of day this is going to be. If it’s going to be a really hard day, the last thing I expect is for the tired person to come home and be Martha Stewart, she needs to go to Uber Eats, but what she can’t do is sit down with an app and scroll through 40 restaurants, because that’s overwhelming and she’ll always go to what feels good. So she needs three or four places where she knows what she’s going to get, locked in her notes app, and she can tell her family, pick between these four, and if somebody else is ordering, screenshot what to order me. As few decisions as possible, but we make the decisions ahead of time that help us. So many women think it’s either I eat like a perfect nun every night, or I eat my ass off, and it’s like, no, if we’re going to become someone who’s not living in the extremes, we have to think about what support systems I need, and we find them by first finding out where are all the places that right now are kind of a shit show. In weight loss, where are all the places that it breaks, and what kinds of supports do I need? This is why working with coaches who know more about this side of weight loss, and not just a boring plan of chicken and broccoli, can help, because so much of what you think you should do is based in a lot of horse crap you’ve learned through the years that, when we look back, is asinine, science now says. Just like our whole low-fat craze.
Angie That’s exactly what I was thinking, it’s basically how we were taught in the early 90s that low fat is the way of the future, that was the exact example that came to mind.
Corinne Yes, and then you have the low-carb phase. Nowadays, for women, especially if you’re in the menopause years, and I’m menopausal, that’s one of the worst things you can be doing, it’ll just make your hormones more jacked. So sometimes you just need, I think there’s a beautiful blend, we do have to understand the power of our thinking, but there are also skill gaps and knowledge gaps, and no amount of positive thinking can overcome if you just don’t know how to do something or you’re missing pieces of components. Most diets focus on either exercise or food, here’s your strict set of food, here’s your macros, here’s your calories. It’s like you’ve got a 10-piece puzzle and somebody says, I’ll give you all the weight loss in the world if you can put it together, and you’re like, damn, I can do 10 pieces, but if they withhold one piece, it doesn’t matter how hard you try or how bad you want it, if that piece is missing, you can’t do it. That’s what diets have been. When you blend coaching and emotional eating and all the things, now you have the 10-piece puzzle and you’re like, oh, this all makes sense now, I actually can do this.
Angie A lot of times that missing piece is more about the mindset and the ability to create lasting change than any individual thing, because this isn’t just about stitching together a bunch of individual decisions. By the time you doom-scrolled Uber Eats for 40 minutes, you could have just cooked a healthy dinner, and also, we live in a place where there’s no Uber Eats, that’s us. But you get to this point where you’re not just trying to do something differently, you’re trying to operate differently, and that’s fundamentally where that last piece brings everything together, and that’s a really hard thing to do yourself, at least to start. Just like you said, when you start a new gym routine, you’re likely going to see a trainer and get the skills first, because positive thinking about the skills doesn’t do anything, but skills without the mindset, you’re going to find too many pieces. So I’d love to give everybody some advice about what it means to make lasting change, what you’ve learned about it, and what you’d tell somebody out there who this is really resonating with, whether it’s weight loss or otherwise. What are some practical steps they can take to look at that missing piece?
Corinne When I started, I didn’t have a me, there was no No BS Weight Loss out there, I just had Corinne. So when people ask me this, if I had to strip it all the way down to, you’re going to be doing this all by yourself, no one’s going to support you but you, that’s kind of where I was. My husband was great, he wasn’t actively sabotaging or standing in my way, but he didn’t know crap about what I was going through, so he was like, you can do whatever you want, and that was about the level of support I got. Him and my son were going to keep eating the same, they weren’t going to change for me. And I remember, when I was first losing weight, thinking for the first time, I really don’t want them to change how they eat, this is my thing to fix, not theirs. My husband and son don’t have a McDonald’s problem, I have a McDonald’s problem, they only want McDonald’s when it’s fun, I wanted it every day because I didn’t like my life. There’s a big difference. So the first thing to do is you really have to listen to what you think about all day long, and it will be disarming at first. Most people do not listen to how they think, they hear their thoughts and think they’re just the truth being spoken. If you really listened to how often you sit in a meeting and read between the lines, I remember sitting in meetings thinking, if my boss said, next time I need you to do it this way, I heard it as, you didn’t do a good job, I’m going to need you to change it or I’m going to fire you. That’s what I would hear in my mind. So I spent a lot of time in the beginning identifying what I called old-Corinne thinking, I went on the hunt for anything I could label, old Corinne thinks that way, and when she thinks that way, she quits, she gives up, she feels terrible, that was the big three for me. If it was going to make me feel bad, I knew I would eat, and if it was fatalistic or catastrophic, I was going to quit.
Angie Really good at that one.
Corinne Yes, and if it was too big of a leap to do in the beginning, I knew I’d give up on it. I knew one of my fatal flaws was I did not have a way to talk to myself when things went wrong, well, I did have a way, and it was terrible, it was a beatdown for days. So when I first started, I said, everything you do has to be almost foolproof, you cannot do things too hard for you. So I went on a mission of listening to how I talked, identifying old-Corinne stuff, and asking, all right, what does new Corinne need to do, and what does new Corinne have to think in order to do that? I lost so much weight just doing that. When people ask what I did to lose weight, it’s like, I changed literally how I was thinking about myself, because that led me to make smaller changes, and I got really good at my small changes, and I built momentum. Once I saw myself doing some things right and consistently, suddenly I was willing to try harder things, because my brain thought, well, if you can do that, maybe you can do this. So I set myself up for a lot of easy wins. Listen to how you’re thinking, and if you can identify it as, ooh, that’s probably not a great way to think about this, come up with another way to think about it. When you’re trying to change anything, unless you’re really good at making 180s, and most people aren’t, most brains are not designed to change on a dime, you can sneak up on change, and before your brain knows it, oh my god, we’re like somebody else, what happened, that’s how you want it to go. What you don’t want is to change everything so drastically in one day that for months you’re forcing yourself, because most people don’t have the resiliency for that anymore. It’s not like 200 years ago when we were pioneers and really resilient, nowadays if my phone takes more than two seconds to load a video, I’m out of here, what kind of crap website is this?
Angie Broken, yeah.
Corinne So if you don’t have that capacity anymore, and we’re kind of trained that way, smaller changes than you think are going to be good enough, do those first, earn your way into the big ones, don’t try to start with the big ones. I just tell people that’s probably the secret to everybody’s success.
Angie Pretty much any arena.
Corinne Yeah, it’s kind of boring, but I don’t think people like boring, and I’m like, I don’t know, I’ve changed my entire life on a lot of boring little things.
Angie I’d say the same, although maybe some people wouldn’t think they’re boring. It’s so weird that small boring things actually make a big change, but at the same time, we think change needs to be exciting, so we set ourselves up to fail from the start. And if you’re on the 180 train, you’re not even going to make it months, you’ll fight through it for maybe days at the most before you give up. There’s a reason we use the analogy that most people don’t quit smoking cold turkey, because it’s just hard if you don’t incrementally get your nervous system to adjust. And I love what you talk about with, you do some small things and you realize you can do the next level of hard, and the next. For those of you who’ve read, shameless plug, my book, Scary Good: Discovering Life Beyond the Sunday Scaries, I talk about the exact same concept using type-two fun as the mechanism. Learn to ski at 42, learn to mountain bike at almost 44, and it started helping me build confidence to take that other places in my life, because I was able to change how I thought about myself, change how I talked about myself, and start making small changes that led elsewhere. Which is exactly what you talked about with these boring things that eventually add up.
Corinne Yes, and one thing my people do a lot with the boring things is they don’t realize it’s a boring thing until they hear these awful words, that’s not good enough. It’s like the four words that just kill it. I got so mad on a coaching call with my whole group, they’re used to me just losing my shit, so I had four different people come on, and every one was like, yeah, but my brain thinks that’s not good enough. And I said, all right, everybody, for the next 30 days, we’re having the not-good-enough challenge. I dared anyone, I was going to give them one-on-one coaching with me or $1,000 or something, if you take me up on it and for 30 days you swear you did every single thing your brain said isn’t good enough, and you don’t lose weight this month, I’ll basically kiss your butt. Every person who took me up on it lost weight, and they’re like, I can’t believe it, and I’m like, I believe it, because you spent 30 days doing things instead of 30 days talking yourself out of doing anything. So I always tell people, if it’s not good enough, number one, that’s your green light, do it anyway, and number two, you have to earn the right to know if it’s not good enough. Give it 30 days, and if after 30 days it’s not working, it wasn’t that it wasn’t good enough, it was the wrong thing, so go try something else, and earn the right to your stupid beliefs.
Angie And stop shoulding all over yourselves, because that’s a woman thing, big time. You should all over yourself, I should do the thing, I’m not doing the thing, oh I should do it better than I’m doing the thing. Allow yourself to go through the steps, because whether it’s changing your eating or changing how you lead, Corinne said it really well, nobody’s going to do it for you, but trying to change it all in one fell swoop isn’t going to be sustainable. Growth is a tricky thing, we know it doesn’t happen in the comfort zone, but that’s exactly where you’re going to stay if you don’t get intentional about who you want to become and how you talk to yourself as you undergo the much less glamorous process of becoming that person. I love this conversation that had this undercurrent of weight loss, but I hope those of you out there, whether you’ve struggled with the weight-loss journey or not, know this isn’t really about weight loss, it’s about tuning into our inner voice and thoughts to learn more about ourselves than we maybe ever imagined, and that’s a pretty good place to start if you want to close the gap between knowing what you want and actually getting there. This has been super fun, so as we wind down, I want to know how people find you, because Corinne and I, shameless plug, are here if you feel like you need the intervention to get started, we can help get you the perspective and set you up to start thinking on your own. So where do people find you, and what have you got coming up that’s new and exciting?
Corinne They can find me at nobsweightloss.com, that’s probably the best way, because if you go there, I’ve got a little three-video series where you can learn the three things that I did. One of them is the mindset piece, you’ll get introduced to some of the mindset work I did, because I don’t think it’s fair to women to snow them that they’re going to lose weight by just doing certain things. I always say the six inches between your ears controls what goes in your mouth, so you’ve got to work on that.
Angie You want that change to last, versus yo-yoing 20 pounds back.
Corinne Exactly. And once you get that free course, then I’ll invite you to listen to my podcast. I send two to three emails every single week, all about weight loss and your mindset, it’s very mindset-focused, so if that’s the kind of thing you’re into, you’ll love it. My podcast is Losing 100 Pounds with Corinne, but I always tell people, get on my mailing list, because there’s a lot of stuff I email people every week that helps a lot of people, whether they work with me or not. I get at least three or four messages a week of somebody saying, I’m down 65 pounds, I’m down 100 pounds. I met a lady in the airport yesterday, I was standing in line at Southwest trying to come home from Vegas, and a woman walks up and goes, are you Corinne, I listen to your podcast. So a lot of people never work with me, but they get plenty of help anyway.
Angie She’s airport famous, y’all. You can find all of those links she just mentioned, we’ll put them at nomoremondays.info so you can grab the show notes and tune into what I’m guessing is a lot of good weight-loss advice, but a lot of good life advice, if you’re trying to change the six inches between the ears. This has been amazing, and I have one last little challenge question for you before we say goodbye. I’m curious, as you’ve gone through this journey, what is something you know about yourself that you feel like you still have to keep relearning, even after all these years of doing the things and coaching other people?
Corinne Oh gosh, probably that I am stronger than I give myself credit for. I’m a pretty tough person, but it’s amazing to me how often I can talk myself out of doing things because I think I can’t do it, and it’s dumb stuff. I can be at the gym and not get the next set of dumbbells because I’m sitting there like, I don’t know, are we sure? There’s just something in me that still doubts my capabilities, even though, if you know any of my history, I have overcome so much. I didn’t go to college, I run three very successful businesses, I’ve lived with and worked through depression my entire life and come through some very dark chapters, I’m a master-level coach, and I lost 100 pounds and kept it off after being overweight my entire life. There are so many things I’ve done, and yet whenever I want to go for the next thing, I’m just like everybody else, I think I can’t do it. It’s not automatic for me to think of my capabilities and my past, so I have to really work on it. I would love for there to be a day where I just naturally felt capable, like this is just going to happen. I have friends who are like that, I am not one, and I’d love to be in that crowd one day.
Angie We’ll get there one day. But until then, you have your own advice to take, which is, the thought comes, and you prove it wrong, because you have the evidence to do so. That’s a pesky little imposter that tells us we can’t do the thing and aren’t capable of it, but the only way to get that little guy off your shoulder is to keep proving it wrong.
Corinne Keep plugging.
Angie This has been so awesome, Corinne, thank you so much for joining me.
Corinne Well, thank you.
Angie This is an excellent conversation to kick off an amazing new season, as we think about how to level ourselves up, whether there’s somebody helping us or not. I want to remind you all that humans still matter, and that starts with you, you still matter, mediocrity is expensive and you don’t have to take it, and ownership will change that. So I challenge you, maybe even to do the 30-day thing Corinne mentioned, but at the very least, take stock and think about what thoughts you can take ownership over this week, because change isn’t just about knowing the answer, it’s learning how to work with yourself to actually make it happen. Corinne is a great example of how to do that and what happens when you’ve achieved it, so thank you so much for joining us and giving your wisdom and inspiration to everybody out there.
Corinne Well, I appreciate you having me, thank you.
Angie And to all of you out there, thank you for tuning in. I hope this gave you some, again, pun intended, food for thought. And until next time, here’s to fewer Sunday Scaries and no more Mondays. I’ll see you next week.
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