START TODAY The DANGER of Complacency EP#81

It was a beautiful, absolutely gorgeous day on the water. My family and I went whitewater rafting for probably the hundredth time down the Hoback. It's a stretch, eight mile stretch of the Snake River in Wyoming, and it is absolutely beautiful. There's class four and five rapids and it's a really fun whitewater experience.

We were there with our family. We had brought some extra friends with us and we had two boats. Like I say, my family has done this for years and years to this point. We have a lot of experience going down this river and we know how to run this river well. We bring these extra friends in and we're going along down the river doing the same thing we're always doing.

Doing the same thing that we have been doing that has been working in the past. And as we come around this one big bend right before the two biggest rapids on the spot, things go awry. Our front paddler falls out of the boat, so our other front paddler has to pull him back in. And as our two lead paddlers are distracted, the boat starts to turn and we smash into this big rock wall right before the biggest rapid.

So we get these two back in the boat, but as we're flipping these two back in the boat and we hit that wall, the entire boat flips over. Everybody in the boat goes underwater and we're all submerged. The boat is completely upside down. This has never happened before. Lots of people will talk about how this has happened to them before, but we have run this river well, we are very focused, we are very specific about the lines that we do, but this just happened to be a perfect storm of right at the wrong time, the wrong people fell out and had to be adjusted.

And everything just went wrong right in that moment. This happens so often in our lives. I should wrap up the story and let you know that everybody was perfectly fine. Nobody got hurt, nobody drowned. We all got back in the boat, pulled the boat to the side, flipped it back over. Everybody jumped back in and we finished the river run.

Everything was fine. I know that's not always the case with a lot of people, but we lucked out that day. Today, I want to talk about the danger of complacency. I don't know if that was the problem that day, but I have to think that it's a possibility where we had run this thing so many times. We just thought, Oh, we got this.

We were just overconfident in our ability to just relax a little bit, to just do the things that have been working all along. Same process. It's going to be fine. Everything will be the same. And then something goes wrong and it all goes to pot. This has happened to you at some point in your life. Maybe it's with your kids.

Maybe it's with your business. Maybe it's with your family. Maybe it's with your health, whatever it is. At some point, everything felt like it went to pot. And you might be able to ask the question, was I being complacent? Was I expecting the same system to work because it had worked before? This happens so often in, especially in the world of health.

People will come to me and be like, we hit a plateau. That plateau phrase that people talk about all the time. That simply is this experience where you've been doing the same process and it's been working and all of a sudden it doesn't work anymore. You're doing the same things. You're eating the same foods.

You're doing the same workouts. And all of a sudden something stops. It's not working anymore. There's something that fell out of the boat that you don't know. There's a missing piece. There's a missing paddler. We've got to pull that paddler back in the boat and get you back in place and not be complacent.

We've got to be able to see things coming or be able to deal with things that have already happened in a different way. The danger of complacency is that we're expecting because something has been working, it will always work. And that is untrue. If what you're doing no longer works, it does not mean that you have done something wrong.

It does not mean that you are to blame. It does not mean that you need to be really hard on yourself or frustrated or want to give up or quit the process that has been working. It simply means we need to adapt. Make some small shifts, make some small changes, flip that boat back upright and get back in.

And the next time we round that corner, hit it a little differently. We're going to see things a little differently now. You're going to do the same thing with your body. So let's say that maybe you've been doing, 1400 calorie diet and HIIT workouts. And those two things for six months made you lose a lot of weight.

Awesome. Fabulous. Phenomenal. But now you're getting some knee pain and those HIIT workouts are becoming a problem. Or maybe you're just not losing weight anymore. You've hit a stopping point where you want to keep going, but you can't. I had a client come to me just recently and she said, I've been working with a nutritionist for six months and it worked really well.

And now I've hit a block for six months. I worked with her for six months and then the past six months I've made no progress at all. And her advice was you just have to accept where you're at and this is it. This is the best you can get. She wasn't satisfied with that answer. You don't need to be satisfied with that answer either.

Doing something consistently, maybe even those habits that you've set for yourself. Maybe you've been through my program and you've set your 10 healthy habits or your nine or your three, whatever you've been working on, whichever level you've worked with me. And they're just not working anymore. Listen, don't quit on the habits, adapt them.

Let's take a look back at those habits and see what's different. I'll tell you a personal experience from my life. I dealt, or I was a sugar addict for many years. I was huge. I, we'll start at the beginning here. In college, I had to gain about 15 pounds in a very short period of time. And I was not trained on nutrition.

And so I just started eating tons of calories. I was told you need 3, 500 calories. When you're a college student, you have no money and you're supposed to eat 3, 500 calories a day. There's a lot of mac and cheese that goes into that equation. So I started consuming carbs like a crazy person. I happened to work at a bagelry.

Bagels are super calorie dense. So I, super calorie high. So I started eating a ton of bagels and a ton of mac and cheese and all this garbage food and got myself addicted to carbs. Then I quit doing college sports and I just was still addicted to carbs. So I just had this sugar addiction where I just wanted sugar all the time.

So I went through my own programming and realized, all right, I got to get this under wraps. So I went to my two servings per week model. And this worked really well for quite a few, quite a while, probably two or three years. I was doing two servings a week and it was working really well. And then, it wasn't.

It wasn't working very well again, and my brain just craved carbs all the time again, and I was just wanting sugar. Actually, I wasn't craving carbs, I was craving sugar. I wanted treats and candy all the time. So I thought this didn't work, so I jumped, or I fell off the wagon a little bit and started eating a ton of sugar again.

But the problem wasn't that the two servings wasn't working anymore. The problem was a little bit of the psychology of how I felt about the two servings. I felt restricted. I felt like I couldn't eat sugar except those two times. So instead of changing the habit, I just changed the way I looked at the habit.

And I thought, you know what? I'm going to shift this. So about five years ago, I shifted my sugar habit from only two servings a week to the best two servings a week. Now I'm looking forward to these things. I love hot chocolate on a Sunday in the wintertime. So that became, I would set sugar. Every Sunday I would have my cup of hot chocolate.

And then I get to be variable with it throughout the week. This completely shifted. It was the same habit. It was the same river rafting trip. It was the same thing I had been doing, but just thinking about it a little bit differently made a huge difference. So now I wasn't feeling restricted anymore. I was now looking forward to having my sugar doses.

I would get to have, these two sugar servings a week, and the anticipation of looking forward to it, of planning ahead for it. It became a super fun aspect of my health. For the years prior, I had felt really restricted and oh, I can't have that and I shouldn't have that. But I really want it and I can't, so now I feel sad.

This way, it was like, I deserve better than that one, so I'm going to wait until Thursday when I'm going to have, like last night we had a ward party. Oh my gosh, the cakes there were so good. So I definitely had my sugar yesterday. It was great. Big fan of it. I look forward to it for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, indulged and enjoyed it on a Wednesday.

And then I'm good. I'm good. I got the experience. I had a positive experience with sugar. I don't have to feel restricted by it. Fast forward another year or two. I guess it was last year. Last year I got to the point where two sugars just didn't feel right. Like I needed more progress than that.

It was too... Complacent. It was getting too easy. So I thought I'm going to push myself again. And so I started instead of looking at, okay, I'm going to go to one sugar per week. That didn't seem to jive with me. It was like I feel restricted again. So instead I shifted to, I'm going to say no to anything that is not awesome.

Started saying no to any sugar that wasn't super exciting. So if I was offered a piece of candy by my kids, candy, not. Sure, but maybe not, not today. So I started saying, no, that's not good enough. I want a lava cake. I want a cheesecake. I want something really top shelf. I want to look forward to, and I deserve the best.

And one of my podcast guests recently, she said, become a sugar snob. Last year, I became a sugar snob. And I started saying no to any of the sugars that didn't really make me excited. This was huge. Once again, I'm still on the two servings a week. Sometimes it's one, sometimes it's two. It doesn't really matter how many servants a week I am.

I'm in a psychological place where I look forward to this. Makes me happy. It makes me excited. And I'm able to indulge without feeling restricted or overdoing it. It's a beautiful place of feeling in control and enjoying life at the same time. You can apply this to any habit, anything in your life. Just look at your actions and see if there's a place where you are being complacent.

The danger of complacency is this. It may have worked for a little while, but are you about to flip your boat? Is your boat about to flip and knock everybody out and throw everything off and make you doubt and question and wonder? Or is there just a little bit of a shift that you can make psychologically, mentally, physically action taking fully?

Is there a little shift that you can take that will make all the difference to help you overcome that plateau? Just change the way you see the actions that you're taking, or maybe change the actions themselves. The HIIT example that I gave earlier, if you're doing HIIT workouts and you super love them, but they're starting to hurt your knees, let's see what adjustments we can make.

This doesn't mean you can never do that action and that workout again. It just means we need to make some adjustments. I got a client who came maybe in May, a couple of months ago. And she's I used to be a runner, but I can't anymore because of my feet. I'm like, Oh, that breaks my, it breaks my heart.

It breaks your heart. She's I really love to run. And now I can't, it makes me sad. I'm like, let's see what we can do with that. So we started her walking and I watched her form really closely. And then we started her doing some physical therapy type stuff on her feet. She would do these PT exercises on her feet every day before and after walking.

And then she started to pace up the walk and pace and increase the distance a little bit. And her feet were getting less and less sore. So then we started adding resistance to the walk and we started having her carry weights and do some hills and things like that, where you'd get more flexion in your feet and they would start to prepare a little bit more.

Then we checked out her shoes and we saw, okay, what kind of shoes should you be wearing? What kind of shoes should you not be wearing? What effect are these having, again, we're adapting this same habit. It's the same habit of movement. She was running, then she was walking, then she was walking on hills, then she was walking in different shoes.

It's the same habit. But we've just adapted it over time, just shifted it and changed it a little bit. We're still running the same part of the river. We're still in the same raft, but we're just going to take a different line to make sure that we're safe, to make sure that we're doing it right, making sure that we're making progress.

We keep moving down that river in the top of the boat, not upside down underneath it so we can shift things a little bit. And that client now she is running three to four miles now when she goes on her runs and she is competing in a race in two weeks or last week, it was last week, her race was last weekend.

You can get back to the thing, but it might just look a little bit different. If you want to get back to some level of fitness that you already had, maybe getting back to that place looks a little bit different. I know a lot of people want to get back to the same weight they were before they had a baby.

Listen, let me tell you about my getting back to the same weight that I was before I had a baby. My hips are three sizes different post baby number one than they were pre baby number one. Three sizes. I could get down to the exact same pound, but I will never be the same size. Things change. You guys, things change.

Be okay with things looking a little different, things being a little different, but you don't also have to accept somewhere that you don't want to be. Like I talked about earlier, when she was like, my client was told you just have to accept where you're at, but she knows there's more for her. Then you can make some change.

I know that I can't change the size of my hips. This is the, now, this is the pants size that I wear now because my hips had some things happen when I had those babies and I can be proud of that. You don't have to be ashamed by things being different. You don't have to be stressed out by it, not being able to get back to where you once were.

Your body's different now. Your life is different now. It's okay if you do things differently now. I have lots of people that talk to me about their sleep. Oh man, I just really want to get back to eight hours of sleep, but my newborn keeps me up at night. Okay, so before you had a baby, you could sleep eight hours of sleep in a row at night.

Now that you have a baby, you probably sleep about three hours and then about three hours. Let's find two more spots throughout the day that you can sleep a couple of hours, one, two, or three hours. Let's get you nine hours of sleep within a 24 hour period. It's okay to do things a little bit differently.

That kind of sleep is still super effective. If you're there, maybe you work the night shift. I've got a couple of nurses that work overnight that I work with. Same thing. It's okay to do, Benjamin Franklin did this for years. I did this in college. You can sleep three hours at a time, three times during the day, and it will still give you the rest and the recovery you need.

It's not ideal, but it definitely works. Be open to shifting things around a little bit. Even if it's the same habit, you're still doing nine hours of sleep. Just not doing nine hours in a row. You're still doing two sugars a week. Just not doing it the same way. You're still running, just running a little differently.

Different shoes, different movements, different training, different prep, different things you do before and after. Just a little bit different. Small simple changes will keep you from complacency holding you back. You guys can do this. One of the things that I am trying to not be complacent about is offering of information to you.

The huge feedback from you guys is that the podcast is a great resource, but the free challenges in the Facebook group are a phenomenal resource. So we're going to take a brief hiatus from the podcast. I thank all of you guys for listening and for being here. Such a beautiful experience. I have absolutely loved the feedback, the messages I've received.

If you've gotten something out of this podcast, send me a message. I absolutely love hearing about it. So we're going to take a brief break from the podcast. Podcast for a while. I don't know when we'll be coming back, but the 80 something episodes that we have, 81, 85, I don't know, 80 something episodes that we have will remain up here on all of the podcast platforms.

So you're feel free to keep listening and re listen and go back and listen to them again if you wish. The podcast will stay up here, but I just won't be giving new episodes for a while. Because we're going to go full into the healthy habits challenges. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I need you to go to group.

susybhabits. com and join my healthy habits Facebook group. Every month we do one healthy habit. So many people come to me and say, I'm overwhelmed by all of the things I need to change. So I do nothing. We're going to eliminate that. We're going to change one thing at a time. And over the next 12 months, you're going to have 12 healthy habits.

Do you see the progress we're making here? It is phenomenal how small, simple changes Can absolutely make a huge difference. So we're going to do one healthy habit per month in this Facebook group. It's all housed in the Facebook group. There's no, and it's free. It's a hundred percent free. There's no charges or there's no hidden fees.

There's no events that you're going to sign up for or whatever. If you want reminders about the events, I can email you reminders. So go to challenge. susybehabits. com drop in your email address there. And I will send you reminders when the next challenge starts. If you're like, I am in so many Facebook groups and I don't see anything, let me do this for you as well.

And you'll get the email reminders as well. And then you also get the email replays on there too. So challenge. susybehabits. com to sign up for reminders, get in the healthy habits, Facebook group. That is where I will be spending a huge amount of my time for the next. I don't know. Foreseeable future.

We'll see how long and how much of a difference these challenges can make. So come in here and join us in the Healthy Habits Facebook group. This is where we're going to be making a difference. Last month we did Meals and Move. This is for people who needed to balance their blood sugar and stop snacking between meals.

If you feel like you're overcome by grazing and snacking, and you feel like you just are stressed out all the time, have no energy, that could absolutely be a habit that changes your life. Reach out to me and I can send you the information on that one. This next month is going to be sweet freedom, which is just what I talked about today.

How you can indulge in sweets and still achieve your goals. How you can see sugar differently so that you don't feel restricted and you can both enjoy your sugar and enjoy your health at the same time. You don't have to go no sugar to be healthy and you don't have to go all sugar to be happy. You can be healthy and happy.

It can be done. From personal experience and hundreds of clients that I've helped do the same thing. So we're going to shift your mentality towards sugar in our next challenge. Again, if you want to join this challenge, go to challenge. SuziBHabits. com and we'll get you in here. Then in the next month, we're going to do a portion control challenge.

And then the next month we will do a stress management challenge. These challenges are a hundred percent free. They're five days long and they give you one simple habit that can change your life. The feedback from these challenges, like I said, has been astronomical. It's been such a privilege to work with you guys and see immediate progress.

The healthy or the Habitize Health program that I do is a supercharged version of these healthy habits. So in healthy habits, we're going to do one per month. In Habitize Health, you do three at a time. So you're just getting three times the results and you get way more personal coaching. So if you're like, I want to get into this habit stuff, come to the challenges, get a preview there, and then you're like, all right, I got to take this to the next level.

This is what I need. Get into Habitize Health and let's get you Let's get you to superspeed. Let's take you to the next level. Let's make sure that complacency is not an issue. Sometimes we can't see what's going wrong. Sometimes we can't see it within ourselves. And we're like, I know I've hit a plateau and I don't know what to shift.

I can help you. This group of ladies in here can help you. You're going to get a whole room full of support, but you definitely get the in person coaching as well. It's done a hundred percent online, so you can do this from anywhere. I have a lot of clients that are like, Oh, I wish I was closer. You could, we've worked with people in Australia.

We've worked with people in London, all over the map. Doesn't matter where you are. If you have internet, you can do this program, healthy habits, Facebook group or free habits or Habitize Health for all the support you need and 10 times the results. All right, you guys, thank you so much for being here.

Such a beautiful experience. But in order to avoid the danger of complacency, we're going to shift the model a little bit. Join us in the Healthy Habits Facebook group, and I will see you there. Thank you so much for your support. Please send me a message of whatever you have gotten out of this podcast, how this has affected you or helped you in any way.

I would absolutely love to hear from you. Thanks everybody. I'm Suzi B and this has been Habits and Humor. Come to laugh, stay to learn, choose to live.