What is it that you would like to transform about your life? Instead of indulging in a helpless victim mindset, we have the power to coach ourselves through an issue we would like to solve. In this episode, I walk us through a breakdown of the steps it takes to make real change happen in our lives, using my own experience as an example.

The biggest lesson I have learned so far in my transformation is to just keep going. In this episode, we discuss the dangers of black and white (all or nothing) thinking and that the gray area is where I find success.

Are you your own best friend? In this episode, we spend some time working through our relationships with ourselves and realizing our worth. We explore the power of both positive and negative self-talk.

In this episode, we get down to the nitty gritty of the practical actions that I take to change my life. Whether you are going through a big transformation or just interested in some tweeks to improve your routine, this is probably the episode for you. The biggest habit that I have formed is what I call Building your Week. This involves sitting with your calendar, visioning out your week, meal planning and preparation, and the practice of a Miracle Morning. I go into detail about the process I use each week and every morning to set myself up for success.

Referenced links for things that have helped me:

Panda Planner

Miracle Morning

In this episode, I tell the whole story of how I started the transformation of my life and body. It was quite cathartic to map it out and share it with you all. The story started in October of 2016 when a tiny voice was whispering that I should think about my health. I was very out of shape and unhealthy, eating and drinking too much, without much care for what I was doing to my body. I was so disconnected, 250 lbs, and always exhausted. So I decided to make one little move in the right direction. I went to the gym that I was already a member of but never went to. That one move, that tiny decision, started the long path to transforming my entire life.

If I asked you to stand in front of a full length mirror right now and take a good long look at yourself, what are the thoughts that would be going through your head? My guess is that there would be some negativity sprouting up. Low body image, especially in women, is at an all time high. We are bombarded with media images that project one kind of unattainable beauty. In my experience leading body image workshops, I’ve seen girls, women, and gender non-conforming folks from ages 7 to 77 discuss how this is affecting them on a day-to-day basis. We are facing an epidemic of depression and poor body image in this group and I want us to fight back! You see, when the media, and more specifically advertisements, use marketing tricks to make us feel inadequate, the effects are real. Women are made to feel like their bodies are the only thing worthy about them and when we don’t measure up, we internalize these messages as meaning that we simply are not enough all around. It’s time for us to become aware of how much we are exposing ourselves to these messages. In this episode, we explore practical first steps to fight against the mainstream media for ourselves.

Most of us will do anything to avoid negative feelings (disappointment, embarrassment, anger, etc). Much of our behavior is driven by this desire to distract ourselves away from these negative feelings. Instead of being in tune with what is coming up as feeling in our bodies, we are eating too much, working too much, worrying too much, gossiping too much, shopping too much, or are nose down in our devices and all the distraction that brings. There are a 100 ways we can distract and buffer ourselves from uncomfortable feelings. These distractions can get out of control and become a way of life. How are you distracting yourself? What is the price you pay for keeping that as a way of navigating your life? We can do better. We deserve better. Lean into the hard work it takes to be aware. Wake up and be conscious of our natural desire to keep things easy in the moment, ignoring the long term effects in our lives.

Well hi, friends! Here we are, this is the first episode of the Fight for Yourself podcast. Today is my 45th birthday! I decided to celebrate by, you know, doing one of the most vulnerable things that I have done to date. That’s what I have been doing the last few years. Every birthday, I’ve been doing a stretch goal so I can challenge myself, and celebrate not only where I’m at, but where I want to be in the next year. Many years, this has looked like going to a cabin, doing a solo retreat, doing art and visioning out the next year, just spending time in thought. Another year, I was crowned a Queen. So “Queen” is a status that you move into when your children have moved out of the home and you no longer have active day to day parenting duties. Rather than being sad about that, I decided to be crowned a Queen and celebrate this new phase in life. So, I went to a retreat center where there was a lot of drumming and a lot of dancing and storytelling to celebrate this phase that I was going into. I’ll probably tell you more about that later, but it was an awesome experience. One year I even travelled alone to Spain. I did a crowdfunding campaign to prove to myself, and to everyone else, that women travelling alone is something we all should do and that it is something that is safe. I wanted to celebrate that and it was quite a learning experience. I spent two weeks in Spain alone on my birthday and learned a lot about myself.

Last year, I decided I was going to run my first 5k. Now, this was a huge goal for me because I was out of shape. Many years of mistreating my body left me to a point where walking was even difficult. So, I decided to make one good choice. The one good choice was, “Let’s make a goal to run a 5k.” I didn’t love running at the time, but I was mad that I thought I couldn’t do it. And so, I made the goal, and I worked really hard to achieve that goal last year. In the 16 months since I started making those life changes and made that one good choice, I’ve lost 85 lbs and more importantly, I have changed my mindset. I’m still changing my mindset and am in the process of constantly learning, keeping an open mind, and blooming into the person that I was meant to be. It just feels like peeling away layers of an onion, and so that’s what I wanted to share with you all today.

My birthday challenge this year is this podcast project. I wanted to tell you, what I feel like is one on one, about the gems I’m learning along my journey to wellness and empowered living. I want this to be a call to wake up and work every day to squeeze the joy and meaning out of life. All of that might sound pretty cliche, but that is what I’m working so hard to do and I want to inspire you to do the same. Hopefully, I can.

A little backstory on me. I have been obsessed with self-help since I was a teen. I am blessed to come from a super resilient mother who models this behavior and kept all kinds of incredible self-help books in our bookshelf. She is a great example of always striving to be better. Both of us are not fiction readers really, we have always read self-help books that are going to progress us into the next phase of life. I was taught from a very young age that it was my mother’s job to be a little better than her mother, it’s my job to be a little better than her, and my daughter Una’s job to be a little better than me. It has really been instilled in me to progress us down the road to greatness.

So, that is what this podcast is about. It’s about working towards a better me and all of the tiny and big ways that shows up in my life.

Professionally, I am a certified Life Coach with a degree in Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies from the University of Washington. I work at a non-profit in Seattle that empowers girls and women on a daily basis, and through that work, I became a body image activist. I have taught hundreds of girls and women about the relationship between their mind and their body and ...