You are listening to My Freedom Grove podcast with Gretchen Hernandez, episode 66.

Welcome to My Freedom Grove podcast. The all inclusive podcast that teaches mindset and business tools. We'll help you rise as your authentic self. Be unshakable with your emotional freedom and unstoppable in achieving any goal and living your purpose. I'm your host, Gretchen Hernandez. If you want to put your mental health first in life, relationships and business, you've come to the right place.

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Hi my strong friends. Happy March. We're getting close to April. Some of the spring is popping up, got some beautiful daffodils and stuff showing up. Grass is green everywhere. It's just, it's so pretty and beautiful.

At this time of the year, the part of my coaching certification program that I'm in... We're at the phase where we're doing the stop overeating and stop over drinking. Now as part of life coach certification, this is part of the program. It's not necessarily something that I intend to offer to my clients. But when I go all in on something, I go all in.

You might think that means I go all in on the certification. But in reality, three years ago, I started the stop overeating and stop over drinking (programs). And they kind of go hand in hand. It's a full on journey. Like you really have to understand yourself, understand your mindset, as to why you're overeating or why you're overdrinking in the first place. And so I have resolved so much of this stuff over the last three years. And now doing the certification it's like just going that extra little bit. And it's so much easier now because I've resolved so much stuff. I mean, three years is a long time to resolve all of the little process obstacles and the big process obstacles and the mindset ones, little ones and the big ones. Oh my gosh. Some of these mindset obstacles, whew took me like four months to resolve because they were big ones.

But now that I'm in it, I just wanted to share with you what it's like. So for the stop overdrinking, it's pretty easy. Just don't drink anymore. For some people, That might be easy. They might not have been drinking at all before. For other people, it might be really hard. For me, there was a time in my life where I never drank. And then there were times where I'd just drink a couple out of the year. And then somewhere I would drink considerably more. So to cut it out completely is totally different, right? Like, you know, if you want that Friday margarita, well, that's not part of the plan anymore. Because part of the stop overeating is to eliminate all flour and sugar from the food that we consume or the beverages we consume. That's why the stop over drinking is part of this. Because alcohol has a huge amount of sugar content.

As part of the stop overeating, we're trying to get our hormones back in balance. So by eliminating all flour and all sugar it helps our hormones get back in balance, helps insulin to be able to do its job the right way. It's the whole thing about honoring your word to yourself. Part of the stop overeating is actually having a food protocol. A protocol is like a plan. You make a decision ahead of time, and then you honor your decision.

That comes up in so many aspects of our life. We come up with a plan or goal, but do we actually honor our word to ourselves when we're doing it? So what do I mean by honoring your word? In this context, your word to yourself is the commitment that you've made. It's based on your self love. It's based on self value, respect and your own integrity. And all of this is for you and your benefit. That's why it's honoring your word to yourself. There's a whole other segment on honoring your word to other people. But if you haven't figured out how to honor your word to yourself, the rest of it's never going to work out.

What is your default routine? When it comes to honoring your word, if you're anything like me, it goes something like this first, you make a decision and you play out some of those scenarios in your head. You think about how the decision sucks. And then you're like, okay, okay, no, I'm going to make this decision for myself. So then in the moment that you're actually executing on your plan, some challenge comes up and your feelings just get so strong and overpowering that you start negotiating with yourself and trying to figure out, okay, how can I justify this to myself?

And so then you figure out a way to justify it to yourself. And then you don't honor your word. You actually go against your word. And then finally you have feelings of regret and possibly shame. At least that was my default process before. And it's no fun. It definitely contributes to depression. It contributes to anxiety, to frustration. Have you ever just been mad at yourself? Oh my gosh. There's so many times that I've just been mad at myself and like almost having like an internal yelling: "Bad Gretchen, how could you have done that !"

In addition to feeling incredibly awful. You don't ever achieve your goals, doing it that way. And you lose trust in yourself. And that's the most important thing. If you can't trust yourself to do things or to honor yourself, then who are you going to trust? You might be looking out to the world for everybody else to help you or to keep you safe. But if you're able to keep yourself safe and always have your own back, it doesn't matter if the other people around you are trustworthy or not. You have always got your own back on everything in life.

In today's episode, I want to go over four of the biggest reasons why we don't honor our own word to ourselves. In those, I'm going to give you some examples and a mindset shift that will be able to help you out. So those four reasons why we don't honor our word to ourselves.

1. You didn't pick a word

Number one, we didn't pick a word to actually honor. We didn't make a commitment to ourselves. Might've had like a vague idea, but we didn't actually commit to one.

2. Multiple words of competing priority.

Second reason is that you have multiple words that you've committed to and they're competing with each other.

3. No Contingency Plan.

Third one is you didn't come up with a contingency plan. Like you might've come up with an escape plan for not keeping your word to yourself, but a contingency plan is something completely different.

4. End goal as the word, instead of the journey.

And then finally you are focused so much on meeting it to a "T" that you missed the growth journey. Part of it, keeping your word to yourself, also involves a growth journey.

Be Intentional with Your Word

Most of our lives, we spend on autopilot. We're going about life. We might have an idea of what we find important to ourselves. Or what we want for ourselves in our lives. But we haven't been intentional. We didn't actually write it down. We didn't make it crystal clear what our word was to ourselves.

When we're functioning on autopilot, we're making our brain work extra hard. When we are faced with challenges in our life, that don't line up with what we feel is our word to ourselves, qur brain has to go into hyperdrive. Trying to assess the situation, trying to weigh out the different options. And our emotions start to take over. So in that moment, when we're faced with a decision point, because we have that challenge, it's going up against something we feel isn't right for us. And our brain, instead of coming up with a quick answer is spending all of this time, analyzing and overthinking through it.

Two quick examples. Things that I hear people say is.

• I don't want to work too much.

• I want to respect my values.

Now those sound really good in theory. But they're pretty vague. Like what exactly does it mean to work too much? How would you know? Yes or no? Is this working too much? So when we get really intentional with our word to ourselves, we're saying specifically what those rules are for us.

So for example, with the working, if you know what days you plan on working and you know, which hours you plan on working and someone comes up to and they ask you to work on a Saturday, and you've already decided ahead of time, you don't work on Saturdays, it's pretty easy to know for sure. Does the request that was presented, meet your word or not? So if Saturday- work? You check in with yourself, Nope. I already agreed that I was not going to work on Saturdays. So the answer is a clear, no. There's no gray area. There's no confusion.

Same thing with your personal values. Have you ever taken a moment to actually write down what your values? Are they crystal clear? What are they? Yeah, it's quite possible that on that list, you're going to have a lot of things that are nice to have, right? So when you get challenged with something, with values, yeah, you could go either way. What are the ones that are the must haves? The things that will help you figure out a go / no-go decision.

So for example, honesty- telling the truth. This is probably the biggest category of gray. We have things that we tell our kids to create magic. We consider other people's feelings a lot. Sometimes we might either hold back from saying something or we'll say something, but it won't be a hundred percent honest. So when you're figuring out your values, spread it out. Get really specific on what it is.

Because if you say yep, a hundred percent honesty all the time, then when you get challenged with something like creating magic for your kids, all of a sudden, you're going to start to feel a little wonky. Like you can't honor your word to yourself. If you're going to make exceptions right there on the fly. So when you decide ahead of time, you have it all flushed out. It's a really easy Go / No Go decision.

You can think of your word like the answer key to a true false quiz. The answer key will always just have one answer. It's super easy to know. Was this right? Was it wrong in keeping your word to yourself? If you haven't flushed out the details well enough, it's going to feel like a multiple choice answer key. Where the answer could be a single letter or it could be a combination of multiple letters.

If you're really vague with setting your word to yourself, then it's going to feel like the answer key to a long text answer. Or an essay. It's subjective. And if you remember back to when you were in school, how frequently did you get a 100% on your essay? Even if you got 99%, you might feel really, really great, but that 1% that's left is kind of nagging at you. Like, okay, well, what was it? What could I have done differently? And if you do that with honoring your word to yourself, if you leave any of that wiggle room, you're going to find your brain start going into overdrive and having all of the emotions and the regret and the shame over why you weren't at a hundred percent. But when you are super clear on what your word is to yourself, then it's really easy to know either you met it or you didn't.

Multiple Words with Competing Priority

I wish the world was so clear cut that we'd always just have one word to keep to ourselves. But we know that the world's not made up that way. We always have competing priorities. Now, each of those priorities is a word to honor for yourself. But when you have that arranged, as to what is the most important to you, then you'll understand how you would still honor the words for all of that without compromising that priority.

I've had friends that have multiple plans. Like a plan A, a plan B, a plan C. And it's different than how I set up my plans. Like I set up contingency plans and I'll talk about that in a few minutes. But some people, when they're coming up with their plan A, their plan B, their plan C, they're coming up with failure plans.

The weight loss one is the easiest one to talk about. If we have a protocol to follow, and we're saying, we're going to eat these specific foods between these specific hours. But then we go, well plan B is if I'm having a really rough day then, okay, I will allow myself to feel a little bit better and have this. And then if this other thing happens, then, okay, I'm allowed to eat this. So those are failure plans. You're already planning on failing.

If you have one where it's your complete success plan, it's your experiment that you're trying out to see - does this combination of food work for me? And then you have the other two (plans): if your emotions run high, you could do all these things. I won't achieve my goal. I won't have clear data for my experiment, but I'll feel better.

Now, I want you to feel good. That's why we have all of the mindset tools to help you through all of your emotions. So that you can find a way to think about things, so you can feel better. But compromising your word to yourself is self-sabotage. You're never going to feel better. So you might feel better momentarily. Just from having that food. Or having the escape plan to something that's not as scary. Or, you know, doesn't have that huge failure. Like you selected a different kind of failure instead of the big failure momentarily. You'll be like, ahh, I can relax. I can feel a little bit better. But you're going to have that regret and the shame, and that's going to be bigger. And it's going to hang over you for days, weeks, months, maybe even years. Whereas the relief that you felt in that moment, you might just feel for an hour at most, maybe a couple of days. Who knows.

But you're not gonna actually have your own back. You're not gonna have committed to keeping your main goal to yourself. Something else to consider is that if you give yourself too many words to honor, your brain's going to have all of that decision time to all of that extra processing in the moment. It's like, okay, even though I have plan A, well, I could go with plan B. I could go with plan C and then it's like that hamster wheel is just going. And we're thinking, and we're thinking, and meanwhile, if we had already committed to: here's one plan.

I'm going to do this one no matter what. Knowing that obstacles will come up. We know how to resolve those. We know that emotions...we can handle. Those are just mindset obstacles. We know how to resolve those with the mindset tools. We know that it could be struggle from process stuff, process obstacles. We have tools to resolve that too.

When you're committed to just that one plan, you know exactly what you're going to do. But if you're giving yourself multiple plans, all of a sudden your brain has to stop. Instead of executing easily on that plan, it's now weighing all the options. This is slowing you down, causing extra confusion, probably some extra stress for yourself.

Another example of how you may have multiple words that you want to honor for yourself that are competing involves money. Or like the making of money. But also how people are treating you. So my specific example comes with yelling. So people yelling at you may be a boundary thing. Like I have a boundary. I don't want anyone interacting with me, to yell at me. I'm more than willing to work with anybody. No matter what the conflict is, we can sit down and talk about things as rational people and figure out something that's going to work. But I draw the line at yelling.

Now where this can be a problem, or a competing priority, is when you're at work. If you have a customer that comes in and they're yelling, all of a sudden, you're going to have this competition in your brain happening. Like, okay, wait. I don't put up with people that yell, but I also have a job to keep. Or if you're a business owner, you want to stay in business and make a sale. So when you're looking at your priorities with your word, this becomes really important because if you're willing to put the money first, it might cause you to compromise on the second one.

Like in your brain, in the moment that that's happening, you're going to be having like this mental tug of war with yourself as to which one of these do you honor? Do you honor keeping a job? Do you honor keeping your word to yourself to not allow people to yell at you? So for me, yelling at me is a higher priority than the job. I know that I can go out and find another job somewhere else if I really needed to. And I also know that as a business owner, there's other customers out there for me. I don't have to put up with customers that have decided to yell at me.

This goes all the way back to when I was 19. I was working for the federal government in a division that took care of all of the federal buildings. If anything was broken inside these federal buildings, they would call me to say, Hey, this thing is broken. Can we make arrangements to get it fixed? And I would obviously help them.

There was a time that this man called me and he was obviously stressed out. And so, I mean, with anything that breaks in a building. that is bound to cause some stress. And if you have a bunch of other things that were already elevating your stress level, having to deal with something broken in a building might be the straw that breaks the camel's back. He calls me up, yelling through the telephone about this. I've already decided I'm not willing to be in a job where people are going to yell at me. I let him know, sir, I'd be more than happy to help you. But only if you can calm down and we can talk in a regular conversation. So of course he starts yelling again. He did not appreciate tha he was hearing this from me. I repeated it and he continued yelling. So I hung up the phone. So he calls back. I again, stayed totally calm and pleasant because all I was doing was holding my boundary.

I was letting him know he's important to me, that I want to help him, but I will not help him if he is yelling at me. And so again, it was... Sir, as soon as you can calm down and we can talk about this as a calm conversation, I'm more than happy to help you. So he's still like yelling and stuff. And so I said, okay, well, when you calm down, call me back and I would be more than happy to help you. And I hung up on him again. So a few minutes go by and then he calls back. And he's calm. He talks with me and I get all of his information, taken down, get everything, moving to get it working. And that's all it took. I did not end up losing my job. I held my boundary.

I found that to be true in other situations too. All of those times when I thought that I would lose favor with a friend or a relationship. Where they were yelling and it's like, Oh no, they could break up with me. If I stand my ground and say no yelling. Or if I'm in a business setting and someone's emotions are going off and I state my boundaries, there's always that little fear of, Oh no, you're going to lose something. But I know my priorities. And I put that one first every time. Because the other things, I can always find replacements. And so far, I haven't lost anyone. Ever. They have appreciated that I was willing to work with them. And eventually they all calmed down.

For my entrepreneur friends. I wanted to bring up another set of competing priorities. Because I think we can all relate to this one. So when you start off as an entrepreneur, you already know that it's going to be rough going for the first couple of months. Maybe even longer. Of trying to build all of the infrastructure and learn all of the things you need to know. Because most of us didn't learn this before we started. So there's this big learning curve and the big building phase. During that time revenue is going to be like next to nothing. That's all part of the process. In fact, the small business administration shares an interesting statistic that the majority of new businesses don't break even until the 18th month mark.

Now, that means that all of the money invested in learning and infrastructure in any of it, that full amount, the amount of revenue that we make won't match that until at least 18 months into our business. After the 18 months is when we actually start to see profit for the first time. Now that would have been so great if I had known that before I took the leap. Because in my mind, I thought, Oh, I'll be making money in four months.

Clearly I thought that I was so much more ahead of the curve. But I hadn't factored in the cost of everything and the learning curve and how long it takes to actually build everything. So the competing priority of course, is having money to keep a roof over your head. So when we're looking at these things of having your business up and running and eventually profitable versus having money so that you can keep a roof over your head. And at times it feels like it's the same exact thing. There will be a moment in time where it is the same thing. Your business will be providing enough money to keep a roof over your head, and eventually to have an even more amazing life than that. However, in that in-between phase, where is the priority for you? Is it on paying your bills, making money, or is it on growing your business?

Now we all need to keep a roof over our head. I know that. The distinction is if we see the making the money to pay the bills as second in priority to our business, it makes us come up with different choices for how we would get that money. Because we would never want to compromise the growing of the business. So we might go and get like a side hustle as opposed to a regular career job. We might go and find a job where it's not going to take much bandwidth for us to do it. It is part-time. Maybe it's something that we're not looking to advance and grow. We're just looking for a temporary time to earn some money so that we can keep going in our business.

Now, if we don't have our priorities very clearly defined in our brain, then we may end up with a really tough decision.

I had an opportunity presented. I found it. I saw it because I was considering supplementing the funds that I have right now and my revenue with a part-time job. Just a little something, just checking it out, just seeing what's out there. And what I came across was one of the very successful life coaches that's out there. She has a full-time job listed for a project manager to come and flush out all of her processes, build a lot of her systems, do a bunch of stuff for her. Now this is definitely in my wheelhouse. This is usually what I will coach people on. I'm helping to develop their capability on doing this. These are things that I did in biotech for a very long time. I'm very good at it. Project management is like way up there, high on my skillset, been doing that one for 25 years.

So this was a really easy thing if I wanted it. It was a full-time job, paid really well, had great benefits, insurance, all of that. But it said it's not appropriate for someone who is already a coach or wants to be a coach. So I realized then I was being presented with this opportunity, and the hours were great, and it sure would make life a lot easier. Like I wouldn't have to continue all of this stuff in my business. I could just go work for another coach doing stuff that I was really good at, but I'd have give up coaching. I'd have to give up my whole business and everything that I had worked on. Or I'd have to figure out some way of doing my business as a side hustle or just reformatting what my business was. It was tempting. Not from the giving everything up, but the tempting of to have a paycheck again. Just a regular steady stream and to work in your zone of genius. Man, your confidence level is just sky high.

Entrepreneurship has a lot of the job hats that are unfamiliar. They're pretty new. And so we're trying to figure all those out. So the confidence level is kind of low when you're first starting out. Of course, the things that you're good at, like coaching are zone of genius, right? Like you're in your zone, but the amount of time you actually get to spend doing that is so small compared to everything else. So I had my priorities straight on what was really important to me. I have definitely passed on the opportunity. I think it's a great opportunity, but it's not for me. I am on my own journey and developing my own thing. I want to be coaching. It was such a profound change in my life that I want to give back and keep doing that.

So entrepreneur friends, make sure that you have your priorities already defined for yourself. So that you know which word to keep first. Then you can still keep your word to yourself on the second priority.

It's just the way that you do that one. The experiments that you do are going to be a little bit different. Because it won't compromise your first priority thing.

Contingency Plans

The next way that we can honor our word to ourselves is by having contingency plans. Now I know that we just talked about plan A, plan B. Plan C. And you're like, Gretchen, you just told me that this was like setting yourself up for failure. So what the heck, why would you have a contingency plan?

Contingency plan is different than a failure plan. It is an obstacle resolution plan.

So the idea is that you always believe that you're going to hit your end goal. Contingency plans are saying we expect that a couple obstacles can pop up along the way. And this is what our plan is for resolving those obstacles. So that we can still honor our word and hit our end goal.

A very clear example of this is in real estate. When you buy a house, a bunch of stuff needs to happen. Like an inspection of the house to see if there are any repairs that need to be done or pests to clear out. A contingency plan has that already in there saying, this is one of the things we know happens. There's an inspection. We never know what's going to be found. So here's what our plan is based on what those different outcomes could be. And so main one of course is that the current homeowner is going to fix everything and then everything moves along smoothly. There can be a few other ones too. When is it not going to go through? So there are certain loan companies that will say, no, everything has to be fixed. Yet if the bill comes up to, you know, something astronomical, the current homeowner may not be able to cover all of those. So at that point that might become a deal breaker. Now this lays out exactly what you're going to do and how you're going to work through it so that you can still hit that end date. If there is that one little caveat for when it is a deal breaker, now that's not a failure plan. It's just the deal breaker. Then it's saying, okay, this is how much money would go to the seller for going through the process so far, this is what would happen with the buyer for going through the process for this long.

It's just a plan ahead of time, based on one thing that's unknown. Because they already know that can be an obstacle. So if you have a goal for yourself or you have your value list, and you know that there's going to be times that your values are going to get changed, or maybe you have a boundary plan for how people are going to treat you, a contingency plan is when things do not go as planned. So like all of the challenges that can come up, what are the actions or the words that you're going to take that you've decided ahead of time so that you're still keeping your word to yourself. And you're moving the needle forward.

Last month I had to do some car repairs. My Honda pilot was leaking water from all sorts of places. It was so weird. Now the repair place was an hour and a half away. An hour and a half there, hour and a half back. And I had another appointment in another town that was about an hour and a half away from that one, but still an hour from my house. I already had commitments.

I had some client calls that I had already committed to, but I needed to get this thing fixed because storms were coming. So my contingency plan was what could I do so that I could still get back here on time to honor my word to my clients? And how could I honor my word to myself of getting my car fixed and going to my other appointment. So I ended up getting really creative and I was able to get a rental car. I was able to drop off my car four hours before the appointment so that I had plenty of time to go from where the car dealership was, all the way over to the other appointment. and still get back in time to give myself an hour from when I got home before my first call. So that I wasn't all rushed, because I like to be calm and ready for any clients I talk with.

So that's an example of a contingency plan. Now that was a one-off contingency plan. I didn't have it built, you know, months back because I wasn't really planning on my car having these leaks. I mean, that's kind of weird. And I definitely wasn't planning on having a car appointment and another appointment at the exact same time. So I had to get really creative, but I still planned this about five days in advance. So I pulled up my Google calendar and I was doing my visioning board. So you've heard me mention that in a previous podcast about using your Google calendar as your vision board. I was creating my vision for how that day would go. How could I make all of this work so I could honor all of my words to myself.

I knew what my priority was. It was attending my client calls.

I always know that I can honor my own word to myself because I've always got my own back by having these contingency plans to resolve any obstacles that come up.

Growth Journey

The final topic that I want to go over is when you have your to-do list, ready to go for the day and you know this as a task that you want to do, and then you don't do it. You haven't been able to honor your word. Now that can be a big source of stress, depression, anxiety, self shame, like all of that stuff.

What is a way that we can think about our task lists? So that we are still moving towards the end goal and we are honoring our word to ourselves. This is just a slight little shift. This is when the due dates have a little bit more flexibility. It depends on what your setting is.

What I like to think about is that I am committed to the end goal. Like there's a whole bunch of tasks in between, but I am fully committed to the end goal and my own personal growth.

I have a lot of things that I want to do that I've never done before. And I've had some things that I've done before, but I stopped doing them because they were really, really hard. And I needed to do some other things first, or it was painful. And I wasn't able to do it.

Going full circle here. I mentioned about the weight loss. So I started that journey over three years ago. So you've heard me mention Brooke Castillo before. I found her the very first time because she had a Facebook ad for a book that she wrote and it's called "If I'm so smart, why can't I lose weight? " At the time I was at the worst emotional storm of my life. I was having my white light moment. You've probably heard that in my coming out of the darkness of depression podcast. Weight loss really wasn't the thing that I needed at the time. But I was really curious because that was such a compelling title. If I'm so smart, why can't I lose weight? And I was like, yeah, why is that? So I decided to go ahead and read it. So when I read it, that's where I was learning about the coaching model. I was learning the five step model where our circumstance triggers us to have a thought, which I was already familiar with because of Don Miguel Ruiz. And then from our thought, it generates our feelings. Every time it always comes from our thoughts and then our feelings always generate our actions. And then from our actions, of course, we get our results.

So when I read that book, it was like, Whoa, it was super helpful. And then I got into her programs and one of them was the stop overeating program. I started to do that one cause she's like, no, you gotta work on your mind. She's teaching a lot of stuff about all the (brain) chemicals, but it was a lot of the mind stuff.

This was three years ago when I started. When I started following all of the guidelines that she says, no flour, no sugar, have an eating window of only eight hours during the day. The rest of the time, you don't, that's called intermittent fasting. And always eating the same thing. You have a food protocol. So you stick to it, you honor your word and you stick to those exact things that you've already decided on.

So in the beginning, Holy cow, that was the hardest thing ever. I was just absolutely miserable the first couple of weeks. And it was so hard. I was still working in corporate environment. We still had five kids at home. We were going out to eat. We're doing fast food. We were doing restaurants. We were hitting up Costco and buying all sorts of pre-made meals and all of their boxes of snacks. Like everything was about convenience. So trying to wean myself off of all of that, because no flour, no sugar. Wow. I was looking at everything I was consuming. Everything had flower and sugar in it. It took me a while to figure out what I did enjoy eating that didn't have flour and sugar. And then I also wanted to incorporate some exercise. I've mentioned when I talk about The Clarity Steps that I had to use that to even be able to go out for a walk three times a week, because I was experiencing shin splints and feet pain and like all sorts of stuff.

So this journey, there were a lot of obstacles between when I started and where I'm at now. Now, if we focus just on the number on the scale, it's going to be ha you know, if we think, Oh, well honoring my word. If I say, I'm going to lose, let's say 25 pounds. If I didn't lose 25 pounds, I didn't honor my word. Well, not exactly. That can be the end goal. The honoring of your word to yourself is that you're willing to go on that personal journey, figure out all of the obstacles so that you can keep your word to yourself on the plan that you plan on having, so that you can do the experiments, figure out what it takes for you to actually lose weight. That's where you're honoring your word. And that's exactly what I've been doing. It's been three years.

And I'm now at the spot where I started that protocol again. And it was really easy this time, because I had already made most of those changes that eating window of eight hours. Yeah. I had kind of kept that the whole time and the eating on a protocol, I kind of was eating the same thing every day, but I did still have some of the flour and sugar that did come back in. Cause I was still trying to manage some of the mindset stuff and you can, you know, it's like I was being kind to myself, I guess that's a little bit of that failure plan. Right. We all go through it. So now I'm taking that failure plan out. I did have a ton of emotional discomfort. Because of all my mindset stuff. And some of my process obstacles... Now I've resolved a ton of those too. I still have a lot left. Heck yeah. But the amount that I got through was phenomenal. So when I went back to this of no flour, no sugar, no alcohol eating in eight hour window and the same exact food, it was like a cakewalk. It's like, okay, turn on the light switch, done. Like, there's nothing coming up for me. There was a little bit of discomfort in the evening time, because I'm so used to sitting on the couch with my husband, watching something on TV, having some snacks, maybe having a drink. It's like, okay, it's time for that to go. And so just taking that one part out, that was the only part where it's like, Oh, there's a little bit of urges there. The first, you know, four nights or something. And then after that I was like, okay, no big deal. And even those urges, they weren't that strong because I had done all of this work for the longest time. So emotionally it's feeling pretty good. And like the rest of it, it's all pretty natural.

Having that commitment to yourself for that end goal, no matter how long it's going to take you, and the personal growth that you need to do... That commitment to resolving your mindset, resolving your process obstacles so that you can do your thing easily. That's how you're going to keep your word to yourself. That's how you're going to have your own back.

Honoring your word to yourself is the highest form of trust that you can find in the whole world. When you can completely trust yourself and know that you have your own back, it's like you're flooded with the belief that you can do anything. And that you're always going to work it out in the end. Because you will. You're there for yourself. You don't have to worry about trusting other people to have your back or to stand up and protect you when it comes to boundaries. Because you're already doing it yourself and it's all working out and it gets really easy after awhile.

4 Beliefs to Help Honor Your Word to Yourself

4 beliefs that you can borrow from me as you're going through this.

1. I can easily honor my word to myself. When I have one distinct word.

2. I can honor my word to myself when I am clear on my priorities.

3. I can honor my word to myself because I have my own back with contingency plans to resolve obstacles.

      4. I can honor my own word to myself because I am committed to my own personal growth.

I can only imagine what you can do in this world and how great you can make your life when you are honoring your own word to yourself. My friends have an amazing week. I will talk to you next week. Bye-bye.

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Thank you for listening to My Freedom Grove podcast. I can't wait to work with you directly. I'll help you to be your authentic self, to have amazing relationships and to live your purpose. I invite you to check out unshakable men and unshakable women. The unshakable programs will give you all of the tools, the coaching and the community to help you rise in life, relationships, and business. To learn more, go to myfreedomgrove.com/work with me. I can't wait to see you there.