What’s In Your Toolbox?

Hello. Hey, everyone. You know, we just ran a little Internet run speed test. The technical. The technical stuff. We're gonna wait for the app to tell people that we're live. Happy Valentine's Day. We're live. We're love. We're live. We're love. Oh, we are live. We are. Please be respectful and follow the rules when commenting. Yeah, yeah. Um, what's going on, everyone? Happy toolbox Tuesday. Oh, my gosh. February 14, the day of love. Valentine's Day. Happy Valentine's Day, everyone. Tuning in live.

Tuning in after our live. We have so much love for being able to be on this platform and be a voice in order to help you love yourself even more. And I was just gonna say, so, whether you are loving a partner or you're loving your girlfriends or your friends, most importantly, the most important love is self love. And today we're really excited to bring you a conversation that stacks on what we talked about last week around consistency. And the most common question we get around how to build your confidence.

So, last week was consistency, and today we want to talk about keeping the promises you make to yourself. Those two things can sound really similar, honestly, in terms of, well, consistency. I'm keeping promises. It's really easy to keep promises to other people and put yourself on the back burner. Anybody else in this room know from experience, I'm like, it's way easier to show up for people. It is. Than it is to show up for yourself. And a lot of that has to do with an internal dialogue, right?

You make a commitment to somebody else. You don't want them to think you're a flake. You don't want them to think whatever in your. In your mind, whatever story you create, you want to keep promises to other people because they know they are now holding you accountable. Whereas if you say something to yourself, just you, you're the only one who knows. If you break that promise, you're the only one holding you accountable. And it's very easy to let those promises go, boop, right out the window. Yeah.

And when. I mean, just this morning, truly, I am speaking from experience. This morning, I told Mary, I'm gonna go to the gym. I'm gonna get in a workout before our workday starts. And guess what? I didn't go because I wanted time alone. I had all of the excuses to tell me why I shouldn't go, and it was comfortable. Chris, what's up? We're just talking about keeping promises to ourselves, and it's Valentine's day, so we're looping it in with a little self love. And what's funny about that conversation is she text me and said, do you want to go to the gym?

And I said, no, I'll see you in a few hours. So if I would have said yes, guess who would have gotten her bust 100%? I mean, you guys, I'm in my gym clothes. I am ready to go. I had really no excuse. Besides, I want to get started on work. My family has. We've been a unit all weekend. It was nice to have a sliver of time to myself, which is okay, but that was really my time to go and do something hard so that it would set me up for the rest of my day. So what happens when we start to break promises to ourself, right?

Then we validate the story that, a, we're not enough, b, we don't deserve good things, c, we never follow through. You can go down the rabbit hole for miles on the stories you start to tell yourself when you don't keep promises to yourself. So how do we start keeping promises to ourself? 5. If we're gonna do it, we might as well go super gung ho. I come from a fitness background. I taught classes, owned a gym for the last 1012 years. And you see it in that environment a lot. Especially, obviously, around the new year.

When somebody sets a goal for themselves to get healthy, they want to do it in the biggest, best way possible, which typically means seven days a week. Well, maybe they hit that goal the first week. Then that second week pops up and something, something cropped up. It was a scheduled conflict. Maybe they were sore, maybe they were tired, and they decided to hit snooze one day. Guess what happens one day rolls into two days, rolls into three days. And your brain, as much, as much as it's your brain, you would think that it's like, on your side, and it would be like, let's go there.

Let's go there so much. You're gonna do it again like your biggest cheerleader. It's not. It's your worst enemy. It starts to tell you those, like those validating pieces of information. See, I told you you weren't good enough to do it seven days a week. See, I told you you weren't consistent enough to be able to get up and make this happen for yourself. See, you're going to be lazy and unhealthy for the rest of your life. And what happens is you start to believe that narrative over and over and over again.

I was just going to say your brain is going to seek its own answer. So if you've been telling yourself in other areas of your life that your not worthy or deserving, it's gonna validate that. It's gonna validate that through people. It's gonna validate that through experiences. You name it. You go to the grocery store, somebody jumps ahead of you in your checkout line, and you're like, of course, there it is. See, I'm always second best. I'm always second best. No one always taking advantage of me.

Everyone's always stepping on my toes. So you're going to create your own narrative if you're seeking it. So, okay. Mary said that you gotta start small. You gotta start small. Just like last week in the consistency piece, we really were talking broadly. But in terms of ourselves, we have to start small as well. We have to knock that one thing off the to do list to prove it to ourselves in order to continue to build on that foundation. So what does that look like? Let's continue with the workout example.

It's three days a week, right? A 30 minutes walk. Prove to yourself that you can do three days a week at a 30 minutes walk before you go. Buy a lifetime gym membership that costs you $250 a month and you're not going to use it, right? Because then that validation gets huge. You start to really go down a rabbit hole in self sabotage, and there's really no reason for it other than typical human nature. So it's starting small. It's asking yourself a ton of questions. You have to really put yourself in the shoes of your future self.

I love asking myself, would the healthiest version of Mary do that? So am I gonna just eat McDonald's and for breakfast and Wendy's for lunch and taco Bell for dinner? Probably not, because the healthiest version of myself wouldn't do that. But I have to be willing to ask myself those tough questions as well as build that base. Oh, I love that. Well, and I'm looking at my smoothie. I was just gonna take a drink. I'm looking at our smoothie. And same thing. Like, just because I didn't go to the gym doesn't mean that I need a con, that I need to ruin the rest of my day.

Right? It's one flat tire and then you pop the other. Yes. That doesn't work. Right. So if you do fall off track, don't self sabotage your entire day because you made one, you didn't keep one promise to yourself, you can get back on track. And that's the beauty of this practice. Every single day, you get to practice what you value and what matters to you. So do I value my health? Absolutely. Do I value my self care? Time to go to the gym and work out on my mind and my body and me physically getting stronger?

Absolutely. And it just wasn't in the cards today. Not to completely discount it off the table for the rest of the day, but I now can look at other choices in my life and have them align with whatever it is that I want to achieve. So I want to maintain good health. So as opposed to me going to the gym and eating right and doing all of the things, I didn't keep one promise to myself, but I'm not going to ruin that one choice for the rest of my day. Well, and how many of us do that, right? Well, I didn't get it done on Monday.

I guess we'll start next Monday because we like things to start uncertain. The beginning of the week, the beginning of the month, the beginning of the year. Honestly, the statistics for New Year's resolutions, goal setting in that way, it's about 70%. Today's the day. About 70% of people have completely abandoned their goals until next year. Right. February 14 is the marker where a lot of people are like, well, January's out, half of February's out. I might as well just throw the rest. 2023, we're throwing the towel in.

We're going to wait until 24, 24 to start. And the one thing that we will tell you is there's no time like the present to start. You just have to hit the start button and do it, and do it now. Right? Don't set yourself up for failure by setting these astronomical goals when you've never even taken one step towards that goal. Take the one step. It does not matter how small it is. You'll hear us say this time and time and time again, 1%. Get 1% better and do it for you. Yes. Be consistent in the rest of your life.

Show up for your family, show up at work. But if you're not showing up for you, you're building a house of cards. And your ability to show up for everyone else is going to fail at some point as well. So, self love edition. How are we keeping promises to ourselves? I was just gonna. I was gonna interject and say, you have to. Whatever you value has to come before anything else on your to do list. And I know that sounds wonky, so if you're sitting there listening to this message, and we're practicing it, too, 100%.

We're trying to figure out our new work schedule, and it's totally. We can feel that things are off, and it's because we're not prioritizing what we value in addition to our work schedule. And that's okay. We're ebbing and flowing, and we're gonna find a good groove, and we're extending and practicing grace on each other and ourselves. But we're also holding ourselves accountable. We're not letting ourselves off the line where we're like, well, we're gonna work like this until 2024. Yeah, we're gonna work like this until next year.

No. So, assess what you value. Assess what you value. And take action there. Well. And prioritize it. And prioritize it. Assess what you value. And assess where it is on your priority, correct? Yep. That's what. 100%. Figure it out. In. We like to say it's a wheel of life. Look at the areas of your life as a wheel, and, like, where are you spending most of your time? Color it in, put a percentage to it, and then you want to make sure that they're balanced. And I know we live in this world that says work life balance, but balance means balance to you, not balance to me, not balance to jill.

So if you're looking at that wheel and it's split up into to work, fun, personal, kids, and 90% of your time and energy spent on work, well, you have an answer right in front of you in terms of where you need to start keeping and making promises more to yourself on where you're spending your time, where you're spending your energy in order to fill back into your cup. So borrow our belief today. Today is Valentine's day. Love day. So if you are on the journey of loving yourself, please let us tell you how important and big you are in this world and how valuable you are.

You are worth it. You are enough. Exactly where you are today. So, from us to you, happy Valentine's Day. We love you guys, and we will see you next week on the next toolbox episode. Tuesday.