Hello, how are you doing today? I hope your day is going fabulous. I'm having one of those mornings where my throat just has a continuous frog in it, so I will attempt to make it through this podcast with minimal frog-age. I'll do my best. I have my tea here. I'm ready to go. But what I want to share with you today is really important and it took me some time to learn this. So I would like to help you learn this now rather than taking forever to learn it. I want to share with you the mindset behind creating change and this process.

It really did take some time for me to learn. Creating the mindset to change our behavior is a process, but if we want to create a better life, they're worth developing and these mindsets are not something that we're taught. It's not as if we're pulled aside in high school and told, Hey, this is how you do this. This is how you design the life you love. This is how you become really intentional with your life. And I came by these by chance, through accidental experiment rather than through intention. Now that I can create change intentionally, it comes much more easily. It comes when I want it much more often. I'm not saying that it doesn't take work, that there's not sometimes when you have a hiccup, but it still requires awareness and constantly questioning why we do what we do and maybe you're looking to change your diet, your workout routines, your business planning, or maybe do something else entirely.

Whatever your goal is, these mindset shifts will serve you well. What I want to do today is share with you how I intentionally create change in my life and how I can make change much easier now with what I'm going to share with you then I could even just a few years ago and once you apply what I'm sharing today in any area of your life, you can make the change you want to as well. I'm going to share with you both the right way, aka the easier way and the wrong way, also known as the hard, almost impossible way to make change and I'm going to share some examples with you of both of those paths that I've been down so you don't have to make the same mistakes I did. It's going to be so much easier. You, I'm really excited for you because once you know these, it's like having the keys to the castle before we get started.

If you are a lawyer and this kind of work intrigues you. If you love working on yourself and you know this is what you need to do. If you're interested in performing better in every area of your life, then I invite you to join me for my free masterclass for lawyers. It's called seven non-techie secrets for a smoother legal practice and finally banishing that overwhelmed, anxious feeling. You can join me for that for a limited time at dinacataldo.com.masterclass and if you are listening to this podcast after the masterclass has already passed, I want you to know that if you go to that link, you will find a special gift there for you and you can make sure that you are on the list to get notified. The next time I do a free masterclass, but come to this one if you can, it's gonna be awesome.

Go to Dina cataldo.com forward slash masterclass I will see you there. Alright, let's dive into this topic. The topic of the mindset behind creating change. I want to clear up with mindset. This is not, it's not about willpower. It's not about puffing it out or fighting through urges. It's not about creating friction between the life you have right now and the life you want. That is traditionally how we think about creating change, right? We think about [inaudible] pushing through the hard parts and making it to the other side, achieving something that's not what permanent change is about, and it took a lot of trial and error for me to really understand this, but once I did, it has made my life so much easier. That is the goal today. It's to help you make your life easier, to create change in the areas that you need it most.

My students in the Lawyers' Soul Roadmap know this already, so I'm going to give them a shout out. But if you're not a student, I want you to hear this too. What creating change really looks like is connecting with yourself. It's understanding why you feel what you feel when you have urges and knowing what is most important to you. It's really acting in alignment with what you believe most and when you really understand this, when you really understand how you're connecting with yourself, whether you're connecting with yourself and understand what's really important to you, that is going to make all the difference in creating change in your life today. I'm going to share a couple examples with you to demonstrate the difference between the hard way and the easy way and I'm going to break down the five mindset shifts we must make to create the that we want in our lives.

The first mindset shift is moving away from the toughing it out mentality and towards acceptance. The reason the toughing it out mentality is so tempting to us. High achievers, it's because we've had huge successes by toughing things out by working hard, by working through pain, to get to the other side of a project to get to the other side of the goal and we very much associate that painful grind, those long hours to the success and achievement we've created in our lives, but that success is very short lived and we can maybe sustain that for a short amount of time to finish a project. Maybe we can even grind through when we have an assignment that takes longer, but we're creating a lot of pain for ourselves in the long run. If we want to do something longterm in our life, the grinding isn't going to work.

If we want to create long term success in any area of our life, we first must learn acceptance and I don't mean acceptance as a type of giving in. It's acceptance in the sense that you are willing to accept and sit with your feelings. This is accepting that you will feel discomfort. Our brain actually sets us up for this. Its job is to create easy habits. Do you use less energy? Even if those habits aren't what's best for us in the long term. The trick is using our more developed part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex to tell the rest of our brain what to do and this is going to bring us to our second shit. The second mindset shift to make for ourselves is to get curious. Once we're ready to feel instead of push through, then we can get curious. Getting curious means that instead of judging ourselves for feeling to go to the gym, failing to plan out our week, feeling to stick to our diet, that we ask ourselves why we did what we did in a compassionate way.

We say something like, that's interesting and we sit with that feeling. We don't yell at ourselves. We don't beat ourselves up. We just look at it. We're very objective about it. I want to look at this practice as a very much rounding practice, a practice of connecting with ourselves and really caring about ourselves. We're having compassion for ourselves because instead of toughing it out, instead of pushing through, we're going to ask ourselves why we feel what we feel. In the first place and how many of us have really done that in our lives. How many of us have been taught to really think about our feelings and how we feel and how we're creating those feelings in our lives. Right now I'm on day 11 of a no sugar, no flour, no dairy food plan. I've watched my mood swings, I've watched my headaches as I withdraw from the easy energy source my brain has been relying on.

I've watched as I've had cravings to eat when I wasn't really hungry and I've been curious about all of it. I knew ahead of time that these reactions would happen in my body, so I asked myself what I was feeling in the moments I was having those feelings and I sat with it and then the urge would pass and I'd be on to the next thing. I wouldn't be thinking about the food, the donut, whatever it is that I was craving in that moment, I would just move on because I had processed those feelings that I had and I understood I was having a craving. Not because I really wanted that donut, but because I had trained my brain to rely on this easy energy source and I wanted to have an energy source that wasn't so temporary that didn't put me in these mood swings that allowed me to have sustained energy.

When we tough through our feelings, when we don't allow ourselves to feel what's happening in our body, we don't allow those feelings to come up and instead we push them away. We can't process these feelings unless we allow ourselves to feel them and pushing them down, suppressing them with snacking for me has been habit. And so my shift has been in this area of my life to get really curious about why I feel what I feel. Why do I eat when I eat? Really just watching, being the Washer, creating awareness around my eating habits. And this can be challenging for us when we're not taught how to process our feelings. I've been doing this in different areas of my life and so now I'm transferring it to this food area of my life, which I have never put this kind of sustained awareness on before.

And so that's why this is so fresh for me is to be able to kind of show you my thought processes because this is what happens when we're going through change, when we're creating change in our life is these feelings come up and when we don't take those opportunities to recognize them and really sit with them to feel the discomfort, we're never going to make the change that we want. We reached for those easy fixes to push down our feelings is usually what happens. So I would usually reach for a snack to suppress my feelings rather than letting them happen after we allow ourselves to really get curious. Mindset number three, that shift is treating everything like an experiment. It makes everything easier. What do scientists do? They notate everything. Everything is controlled for this lets them know in the future what did and did not work.

It allows them to see where there was a hiccup in their experiment and where they can make tweaks. This has come up a lot for me recently as I keep my food log, so it's really, really fresh. But I also did it when I turned myself into a morning person. I share exactly how I implemented that in another podcast. I'll share that in the show notes, but when I changed my mornings, I with what worked and what didn't work, what worked to help me wake up early and what didn't. I kept a log and it kept me aware of what was going on in my life. It kept me aware of what was working and what wasn't working and treating everything as an experiment helps keep this very nonjudgmental, right? Most importantly builds that awareness of what we're doing and how we're feeling.

In my recent change and my food plan, keeping a log of what I'm eating helps me keep track of everything, but at the same time I'm also logging how I'm feeling each day and when it allows me to look back and see the progress that I've made and I can also look back and see what worked and what didn't in terms of when I ate what I ate. It also helps me create that distance between my thoughts and my feelings so I can see them more clearly. A lot of times we're just way too close to everything and that's why having a coach is so awesome. They help you create that distance that you can do that yourself. You can create this awareness yourself by doing something simple like a journal for whatever it is that you're doing. So if your goal is to reach certain fitness goals, you'd keep a log, right?

If your goal is to begin planning your day well, do you have a calendar and are you using that calendar? You can keep track of that. When you decide you want to use that calendar, why aren't you using that calendar? What feelings come up when you open up that calendar and then you can start building awareness around it. If you're interested in productivity and creating a life where you feel more ease. This is a mindset shift that is a must. All five of these are really, but you've got to keep it going. So for instance, there was on day, I don't know, I think it was day three or four, I came to work and there were donuts out on the counter. There's always someone bringing food in my unit. Food is everywhere. Everybody's pushing food on you. It's really sweet. And at the same time, the only thing that is ever brought is donuts and breakfast pizza.

And if you haven't had breakfast pizza, it's absolutely delicious. It's cheesy goodness with eggs on bread. I mean how can you resist that? Right? Well first of all, on that day I was really excited cause I didn't really crave the donuts. That was my little celebration and I wrote that down in my food blog. I saw them, I didn't crave and that was amazing and part of this is due to the next mindset shifts I'm going to share with you, but also I was implementing what I had been implementing for days, which was objective. Really looking at my thoughts like a scientist. I wasn't really hungry. I knew that any feeling that I had to reach for a donut was more of an old habit then that I really wanted a donut. I've tried this food plan before, but I didn't get past day three. I really think that the big reason I didn't succeed, it's because I didn't treat it like an experiment.

Another reason that I didn't succeed is because I didn't do mindset shift number four, deciding ahead of time. I've heard this before and I've applied it to my life in different ways, but for some reason I couldn't hear it around this food experiments until I heard it the way that Brooke Castillo explained it, and if you haven't heard of Brooke Castillo, I highly recommend listening to the life coach school podcast. Sometimes we need to hear things said in a different way or just at the right time, and that's what her explanation did for me around this whole new food plan that I was making for myself. What deciding ahead of time means is to commit, but actually you're making a plan. In terms of my food plan, I decide the night before what I'm going to eat and when I'm going to eat. In terms of my yoga practice, I decided the week before when I'm going to yoga, when a temptation comes up, it could be donuts or a task at the office that I could get done.

Instead of going to yoga, I recognize that I'm sabotaging myself if I indulge in those temptations, rather than stick to my plan, I allow myself to feel the urges and creating awareness around the habits that I have, right? Reaching for the donut or doing work instead of taking care of myself and then it create a new habit because the more you do this, the more you watch your feelings, you create this awareness, you act in the way that you want to act. You make those decisions ahead of time, the more your brain is going to create the neuropathways that you need to create a habit. It's much more effective than willpower because well, power is us pushing against ourselves, but when we are allowing for our feelings, when we are allowing ourselves to have compassion and really look at this from a scientific level, then we're actually letting our brain create these new neuropathways that are making it easier and easier for us to follow through on what we want and that is creating a habit.

Now it's important to recognize what I'm not doing too, right? I'm not beating myself up for having thoughts. I'm not yelling at myself for thinking about donuts. I take a breath and I notice my thoughts. Then I do the fifth mindset shift. I reconnect with my why. I reconnect with the feeling that I desire most. I have a whole module on how to connect with your why and the lawyers' soul roadmap, and I think that it's probably the most important mindset shift we can make. Taking moments to remind yourself why you're doing what you're doing, scheduling those moments. I do it first thing in the morning, right before I go to bed. Maybe you schedule a little reminder in your phone to beep so you can remind yourself why you're committed to the goals you've set for yourself. If you're trying to get more done in your work life, then maybe you're setting reminders that you need to be done with a task by 9:00 AM so that way you have the ability to keep yourself on track.

Maybe you're setting little reminders to go into your scheduling book every Sunday night so that you plan your week ahead of time. That's something that I'm committed to doing is making sure I'm planning my week ahead of time so I am not making any excuses for not getting things done. And then also just going through all these other mindset shifts, right? Like really recognizing why am I not doing what I want to be doing. Recognizing the feelings that come up when you're avoiding those things, right? Or recognizing the feelings that you have when you see that don't, which is been my case right now, so just schedule it however you do it. Do it and really feel that feeling that you want to have right now. We think that the key to achieving something is feeling something later, like we achieved something and then we'll feel that feeling.

The really the key is this feeling that feeling right now and living into the goal you've set up for yourself. You're living into the person that you want to become. Whatever your goal is. I hope you take all of these words to heart by implementing these mindset shifts in each area of my life, I've noticed a tremendous impact my wellbeing on my relationships, on moving forward, on my goals, and I just can't say enough about this. I hope that maybe I've said it in a way that really clicks for you, and if I'm not the person who clicks for you, I hope you find this somewhere else because this information is something that I wish I had known when I was younger. Just like a lot of the things that I share here on the podcast. Now, a couple reminders before I leave you this week. Number One, lawyers. Be sure to join this month's masterclass for lawyers at dinacataldo.Com/Masterclass two if you haven't already subscribed, rated and reviewed so roadmap podcast on iTunes, I would very much appreciate it. You can go to Dinacataldo.com/iTunes and click on listen on apple podcasts and then hit the ratings and reviews tab. I hope you have a wonderful week and I will talk to you soon.