Ep. 153 Why Knowing What To Do Isn't Enough with Courtney Townley

[00:00:06] I'm Michele Simms and this is The Beauty in the Mess, a community where people who crave a shift in mindset, personal growth, and connection to like-minded people come together to start rewriting their stories. Through engaging, honest, and insightful conversations, the show will help you embrace the mess to recognize the meanings and the lessons it holds and discover its hidden treasures to help you start making a mindset shift. Let's listen, learn, and reclaim who we were meant to be.

[00:00:35] Hi friend, welcome to The Beauty in the Mess. Have you ever felt like you know exactly what you should be doing to take better care of yourself, but for some reason you just can't seem to stay consistent? Maybe you've started over more times than you can count. Maybe you've tried the diets, the workout plans, the supplements, the challenges, and all the advice flooding your social media feeds. And yet somehow you always seem to end up right back where you started.

[00:01:00] My guest today says the problem isn't your discipline, your motivation, or even your body. It's your life. Today I'm joined by Courtney Townley, health and self-leadership coach, host of the Grace and Grit podcast, and author of The Consistency Code. With nearly three decades in the wellness industry, Courtney has helped countless women discover that lasting health isn't about perfection, willpower, or following someone else's plan.

[00:01:26] It's about learning to trust yourself, manage stress, honor your needs, and lead your family in a way that actually supports your well-being. In this conversation, we talk about why so many women struggle with consistency, how stress quietly sabotages our health, and the importance of boundaries, even self-boundaries, self-worth, self-care, and why health is so much bigger than a number on the scale. If you've ever felt stuck in the cycle of starting over, this episode is for you.

[00:01:55] Hi, I'm Michele Simms, your host. I'm just a regular person who, like so many others, has faced my fair share of messes. Life hasn't always been neat or easy, but it's taught me a lot, and somewhere along the way I got deeply curious. How do other people make it through their messes and not just survive, but thrive? That started my pursuit. I started searching for stories, wisdom, and real strategies, not only for myself, but for anyone looking for a better way forward.

[00:02:22] Maybe there's a faster way, a softer way, a more human way, and maybe we don't have to figure it out alone. I believe we grow through shared stories, lived wisdom, and the beautiful mess of being human. So welcome to the conversation. I'm so glad you're here. Please join me for episode 153 of The Beauty in the Mess called Why Knowing What to Do Isn't Enough with Courtney Townley. So without further ado, let's get into it.

[00:02:50] Hi, Courtney. Welcome to The Beauty and the Mess. I'm so glad to have you with me today. Thanks so much for having me. I'm happy to be here. Awesome. Now, I know you're a health and self-leadership coach, a speaker, author, podcast host, but before we kind of dig into some of that, I was wondering if you would give us some of your own personal story, like what part of your life forced you to look at health differently, or was it your life? Was it just working with clients? Yeah, it was a little bit of both. Okay.

[00:03:17] I always like to say I came into the world dancing, like literally. I think I came dancing out of the womb, and I was in the professional dance world for many years. And part of our dance training, of course, was fitness and different modes of movement. And so it made a lot of sense when I was exiting the dance world to get involved in the health and wellness industry, especially through the movement doorway. So I became a personal trainer. I studied Pilates, all the things. And that was awesome.

[00:03:45] Like I was making a living doing what I loved. But I very quickly realized that people weren't coming to me to actually move better. They were coming because they wanted to feel better. And there was a lot more to that equation than movement. And so I was really young. I didn't know anything. But I did realize that there was a lot that I needed to learn. So I went on to study behavior change science, and I went to study nutrition and how lifestyle influences our health.

[00:04:15] And for about a decade, I got really rooted in the fat loss industry. So I helped a lot of people lose a lot of weight through measures that I think are actually pretty healthy for the right person. We just paid very close attention to nutrition. We combined that with a certain exercise protocol. So they were basically reshaping their physiology, and it worked really well.

[00:04:41] But what I noticed was that clients would reach their goal, and then they would start down this slippery slope back to where they started. And so I always joke that my career has been like this proverbial onion of just peeling back the layers of everything I don't know. And I'm sure we're not done yet. I'm sure there's more layers to be revealed. But that phase of my life really started to show me that, okay, hang on a second.

[00:05:06] Like there's something about this health and wellness conversation that we aren't getting as professionals. It's not just diet and exercise. Because if it was just that, people would reach their goal and maintain it no problem. But that's not what was happening. And then around the same time, I became a mom. I had my first child when I was about 34. And I always say that some women kind of waltz into motherhood, but I kind of entered like a tsunami. I didn't know what I was doing.

[00:05:36] I was so stressed out. Physically, I lost my weight very quickly. And people would come over to visit the baby. And the comment would be, oh, you lost the baby weight so fast. Like that was something to be celebrated. But meanwhile, I was imploding on the inside. I mean, I was just, I was struggling on every level. And I didn't even care about my physiology at that point. I just wanted to feel like I wasn't drowning.

[00:06:01] And so I think those two things, becoming a mother and also having worked with a lot of midlife women in the fat loss world, it just really started to highlight that, man, we are kind of sold this false bill of goods on what health is and how to attain it. And so over the last 15, 20 years, I've really been working a lot on helping women to understand how self-image work,

[00:06:28] how they see themselves, what they believe about themselves, how that influences their behavior. I've done a deep dive into mindset work and how being with emotion and feeling emotion is really important to our health. And also just stabilizing the nervous system, not living in this heightened state of stress all the time is really powerful. So my entire approach to health and wellness has done a 180. Like it's really changed so much.

[00:06:57] And I don't think any of that would have been possible if I didn't go through my own mess. Right. In terms of thinking that it was one thing and realizing, oh, hang on a second. This isn't it. I think almost every woman has gone down the lose weight, gain it back, lose weight, gain it back, at least most of us. So is that why we gain it back? It's more about our self-image? Well, I think it's a lot of it. I think it's a big reason because here's the thing.

[00:07:25] Anyone can follow a list of instructions for a period of time. Right. So if someone gives you a protocol, which is what a lot of diets are, eat this way, but they don't really take into consideration who you are as a person, what your history is, what you actually like or don't like, how stressful your life is. Eventually that protocol starts to fall flat because it's not really addressing the wholeness of your humanity. And so I think there's a few things going on.

[00:07:52] I think that, number one, as humans, we don't like to be told what to do all the time. We think we do. We think we always want the person to follow. But it's like there's this inner toddler that eventually comes out and starts pushing back. So we really want to be self-led. But nowhere in the wellness industry do we really learn how to do that. We're just learning how to follow protocols. We're not learning skills of self-leadership.

[00:08:16] So I think that's really what I teach now that's so different is I really teach skill sets of self-leadership so a woman can really advocate for her own process and make decisions that feel right based on the season of her life and not always feel like she has to be doing this strict protocol. And if she doesn't follow through with it perfectly, she somehow failed.

[00:08:38] Yeah, because I think a lot of it, too, is nowadays we get so flooded from social media everywhere of do this, no, eat this way, no, eat that, eat plants, no, eat meat. It's constantly changing. And you don't know who's right and who's wrong. And you kind of know what you think would work for you. But then you talk yourself out of it. You know what I'm saying? Oh, totally. There's a neuroscientist out of Australia. Her name's, what is it? Christy Goodwin, I believe is her name.

[00:09:06] But she wrote a book called Dear Digital, We Need to Talk. And anyway, I interviewed her years ago on my show and she had a word for this called infobesity. And I think that's such a great word. It's like we're so inundated with information, we just become paralyzed to take action. And my argument has long been in almost 30 years in the industry, aside from like certain things, like yes, some women need to learn better movement technique.

[00:09:33] And some women really don't understand the difference between a protein and a fat, right? Like there is education involved. But I've never in 30 years worked with a woman who didn't know at least one and probably a dozen things she could be doing to improve her health and happiness. The reality is she just doesn't trust herself enough to do them because she's either always putting herself on the back burner or she's always talking herself out of it. Or she thinks that there's someone out there who just knows better than she does.

[00:10:01] So we outsource the information to someone else and we stop insourcing. And that's a huge mistake because it just disconnects us from ourselves. So if those things are so ingrained in us, which as you're talking, I know for me, a lot of them are. Yeah. Where you question yourself or the minute you start sliding backwards, you're like, ah, it's all or nothing, right? It's all or nothing. So how do we stop that? How do we change that mindset? Yeah.

[00:10:27] I've gone down the mindset path myself and I know I know better and I've been doing better, but I always worry, you know, that the birthday's coming up or a wedding's coming up or this or that. Yeah. That once I go off, I'm just going to say, forget it. Yeah. Which again, I would say that's a self-trust issue, right? We don't trust ourselves that if we get a little lost in the woods, that we aren't going to find our way back to the path. Okay.

[00:10:52] And that's a part of the process is realizing that I had a friend come in town and we ate some stuff and drank some stuff that maybe we'd normally wouldn't. But I trust myself enough to know, I know what to do to get back on track because I do. I know to put myself to bed. I know to have a healthy meal tomorrow. Like it's not rocket science. Right. And that's the craziest part of all. Like I have interviewed hundreds of women's health experts over the years.

[00:11:22] They're all basic, when I ask them the question, like if we had to boil this down to like three or five things, what would they be for a woman to improve her health? And they're always the same things and they're always unsexy. Get enough sleep. Eat real food. Move your body on the regular. Hang out with other humans. Spend time in nature. These are not new. Right. Nobody doesn't know this. But because we aren't consistently self-honoring with those things, we convince ourselves we need something really complicated.

[00:11:50] And so we sign up for the complicated and we all know how that rolls. We do really well starting Monday. By Tuesday, we're in a partial face plant. By Friday, we're in a full face plant. And then we're back in that space of like, okay, this didn't work. I need to find something else to follow. And I would just challenge anyone thinking that you don't need anyone to follow. You need to learn how to become a leader. And leading really looks like, I mean, I think to your point, starting to change the narrative.

[00:12:19] Recognizing that a lot of us have narrative that is talking us always out of the work. I've always struggled with my weight. I've never been athletic. I'm not a morning person. Right. We have these narratives that definitely prevent us from being able to do things that we say we want to do. So we have to challenge that. We have to ask where those things came from. Is it working for us? Which often the answer is no. So then we have to start changing it.

[00:12:46] But the other thing, and I think this is a really grace-filled entry point, is we have to, I think, really reevaluate what health even is. Because I know for me at 20, health was a smoking hot body. Like that's all I cared about. I just wanted to look good. Right. I didn't care what it took. I didn't care what I ate. I didn't care how much I slept. That's all I cared about. Obviously, now that I'm 50, that's a very different thing. Right. Like health means I can keep up with my 16-year-old kid.

[00:13:13] And I want to age with as little time spent in the medical industry as possible. But like I have such a different driver now for wanting to do things to take care of myself. But a lot of us have the all or nothing thinking because we've been diluted into thinking that health is a place we arrive at. Right. It's a destination with rainbows and unicorns and nothing but sunny days. And only the lucky get there.

[00:13:39] And once we get there, yeah, once we get there, our work is done and dusted. We can take our foot off the gas pedal and never have to focus on this again. That would be lovely. There is not a human on the planet that doesn't wish that was true. And it's not true. That's not how it rolls. Health is a direction. It's a direction that we choose to travel in or not. And here's the really great thing about directions.

[00:14:04] When we get lost in the woods, all we have to do is remind ourselves that we're one decision away from traveling back in that direction. That's it. Like one decision. I always use the analogy of going to the grocery store. So if I drove to the grocery store today and I saw that there was a detour, I would not pull over on the side of the road and pitch a fit for the next six months. Right. I mean, that would be crazy, right? But this is what we do with our health. I would just look for my navigational signs.

[00:14:34] I might reference Siri or someone who could lead me in a new direction. And I would get to the grocery store. No big deal. And I think that when we have that approach to our health, we can resume the direction with so much more ease and grace versus pulling over on the side of the road and pitching a fit for six months to a year or for some people for the rest of their life. Very true. It makes me think of that paralysis by analysis. Have you ever heard that?

[00:15:02] Where we sit and think about stuff so much that we never take action. And that's part of the problem. Yeah. Definitely. Like it's, we can definitely overthink. I mean, I think thinking, like examining our thinking is important, but I also think that that too can become what I call a hiding habit where we're trying to think our way all the time out of a problem. Where it's like, no, think a little bit to make a decision and then start taking action because that's what's going to move you.

[00:15:30] It's funny because I've been telling my youngest daughter here lately for different reasons, but I'll say commit, commit to what you want to do and just go. And if you make mistakes, you course correct. But I don't do that myself necessarily. But I've been putting it in my own mind lately because I hear myself saying it to her. So I'm like, commit and go. But it's so smart.

[00:15:52] I have so many clients that will call and they're just, we're on a call and they're so like just frustrated or they're having such a hard time making a decision about something. And I'll just say, if this was your kid or your best friend or your spouse, what would you tell them? And they immediately know the answer. But with themselves, it's like they won't give themselves permission to just acknowledge that I do know. I just don't like the answer. That's the bigger problem because the answer usually calls us into work.

[00:16:21] Yeah, I can see where that would be part of it. One thing I see with a lot of women, and it falls in line with what you were saying, like how we have a narrative behind what we're doing. But there seems to be like an epidemic of I'm not worthy, right? If I get in these circles with other women, I mean, that's the theme. We all think we're not worthy or we're not capable. Where is that coming from? Is that from the constant comparison on social media or where do you think? I think it comes from so many places.

[00:16:50] And unfortunately, because it comes from so many places, it just compounds. So it comes from probably things we learned in our households as children. It comes from the schools that we went to, organizations we were a part of, maybe sports. I know for me that was the dance world because think about the dance world. You're always trying to earn a role. I'm trying to literally prove my worth in the dance industry.

[00:17:13] And I think that, yeah, now with the advent of social media, I mean, it seems like, and also women, I think with feminism, like we've come to this place where we've kind of encouraged each other and bought into this idea that we can do all things for all people at all times. And we can do whatever we want, whenever we want. And to me, that's almost not freedom. It's almost becomes this like, ooh, like overwhelming thing. Exactly. Because there's no parameters.

[00:17:42] And so I think that we have to decide what the standards are for our own life, where we want to put our focus. And also, and this is a really big thing, instead of proving our worth, which is what a lot of people do with health, by the way, they're trying to lose weight to become more lovable. They're trying to lose weight to prove that they're of bigger value in some way.

[00:18:05] And the thing I challenge with that is that we should be honoring, taking care of ourselves to in honor of our worth, in devotion to our worth, not to prove it. Right? That's something else entirely. And I would say the proving your worth energy is not very healthy, because it's coming from a place of lack. And it's coming from a place that doesn't feel good. And I don't think that'll ever lead to deep health.

[00:18:32] So what would we do to start changing those mindsets? I mean, to really change them. Yeah. Well, I think a really simple thing, so tangible. I challenge a lot of my clients to keep a victory log. At the end of every day, I'll say just write three to five things today that you're celebrating that you did awesomely well. And they can't be the same things. Okay. So tonight's list can't be the same as last night's list.

[00:18:58] And that's hard when you don't have a practice of acknowledging what you do well in the world. I mean, I have women stress out a lot about that, but I always tell them, let it be little things. It could be showing up to a call that you didn't want to show up to. It could be cooking a healthy dinner that you were going to talk yourself out of. It could be going for a 10-minute walk with your dog when you could have stayed on the couch. Like, it doesn't have to be anything epic. But when you start acknowledging the wins, the brain wants to find more wins.

[00:19:28] We train the brain. We train the brain to look for a certain type of evidence. Either evidence why we're lacking and we'll never succeed and why everything is hard. Or we look for the evidence for why this might be possible for us and how capable we are and how we might be able to do this. And it's honestly, both of them are always available to us. That's the hard part. We always have those two options available to us. I heard a TED Talk once.

[00:19:56] I wish I had written down the name of who it was. I can't tell you who it was, but it was a gentleman. And he said it so beautifully. He said, I don't know why it's this way, but the negative to humans is like Velcro. We tend to focus on the negative. Everything we do poorly. Everything we're not good enough at. Everything we could be better. In all the ways we could be better. And the positive slides off of us like Teflon. And I thought that was such a great analogy because it's so true.

[00:20:23] We tend to hyper-focus on all of the places that we could be better. And there's a part of that that I think is beautiful and wonderful and helps us to expand and grow. But if that's all we're focusing on, it's no wonder that we feel like we need to prove our worth because we just feel like we're not enough in the world. So I would just say that we kind of need to learn how to become our own cheerleaders. And again, it's very awkward.

[00:20:51] It feels like a goofy practice at the beginning. But once you start getting evidence of the return, you won't ever stop doing it because you like who you are more when you start doing that. So whether it's a victory log or just giving yourself a little pep talk at night, it could look like a thousand things. But I like the victory log because it's just three simple things. And it's just a really nice way to end the day. Yeah. And if you have a, to me, if you have a bad day, you could always look back and say, and

[00:21:21] remind yourself of all the wins where if you just verbalize something every night, you may not recall it in that moment. You know what I mean? Yeah. Exactly. So I like that idea. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. And also writing them down, you can look right back over the last few months of victory logs and you start realizing that, oh, I'm not doing as badly as I thought I was. And I especially would challenge people to do it in the areas where they really feel like they're not doing well.

[00:21:47] So if health and wellness is the area that someone struggles in, try to find three wins a day in that specific area. Right. Yeah. Right. So how do you recommend that women especially, but it's probably men too, but how do we set up boundaries and not feel guilty about setting boundaries? Yeah. Well, I think, again, I always, I think so much of the hardship we have with certain words is because we haven't ever maybe questioned what we make them mean.

[00:22:17] Like, I know that sounds silly. We all know what a boundary is. Right. But we've been told that a boundary is maybe something that keeps people out or keeps people away. Right. Or kind of scolds people for doing something that we didn't like. And that's not at all what a boundary is. A boundary, I think, is an act of love because we only, we set boundaries with people that we care about. Like, I want you in my life, but in order for you to be in my life, I kind of need, this

[00:22:46] is what I need in the relationship. Or when we set boundaries with ourselves, right? I love and respect myself enough to put a boundary on how much social media I'm consuming or how much alcohol I'm drinking or how much whatever that we could go on and on about all the things that we do to sort of wound our own health. But I do think boundaries are an act of love. And I think when we remind ourselves of that, they do get a little bit easier to set.

[00:23:16] I'm not doing this to hurt the relationship. I'm doing this to save the relationship. Right. Because if this boundary keeps getting crossed, the relationship's probably not going to go well. But the other thing I will say about boundaries is we have to be okay with other people's discomfort. And that's hard for women. It is. It is. We've worked our whole lives. That's where the guilt comes in. If you feel that they're uncomfortable, then you start second guessing and feeling guilty, I think. Yeah.

[00:23:43] And the beautiful thing to remember is when you set boundaries in a kind way that you know are an act of devotion to your own well-being, that's why you're setting the boundary is because you want to stay well. And so this is something that you need to put a boundary around. When you know that's where it's coming from, if someone else has discomfort with that decision, that's interesting. Right?

[00:24:12] Like I always say that because it is like, it's kind of a good filter for the people that you want in your life. Because if somebody has an issue with my boundaries to be able to take care of myself, it makes me question if they want me to be well. Right? Right. But also they have thoughts about what you're, they're putting their own meaning on your boundaries and you can't control that. Right? Like they have their own thoughts about your decisions and that's not your work. That's their work.

[00:24:42] So I think when we can, there's a great book. I don't remember the author's name, but The Courage to be Disliked. It's a fabulous book. And I highly encourage anyone that this is resonating with who's like, oh my gosh, I have such a hard time making people uncomfortable. Read that book. Read it like 10 times. Because I've never read a book that's better on the subject, but The Courage to be Disliked is phenomenal. That sounds good. Yeah. And you said something that is, it'll sound silly when I say it, but I'd never really thought of it this way.

[00:25:09] When you said you set boundaries on yourself, because I always think of boundaries as external, right? I know. I never thought of, oh, I should be putting boundaries on myself to honor myself, to love myself. It is. And we look at that as restriction, but it's not. I think that there's a level of boundary that we set with ourself that actually affords us freedom. So I wrote a newsletter last week exactly on this, and it was along the subject of how

[00:25:36] when I was younger and had a lot more resource availability, time, energy, mental bandwidth, anyone who disagreed with what I thought or believed, I felt like I needed to kind of make a stand for that, right? I needed to argue. I could not be at peace unless the other person believed what I believed. And oh my gosh, like first of all, you're never going to win that battle. And the amount of resources I wasted and the beauty of midlife is we start having less of

[00:26:05] those resources on board. We don't have as much energy and mental bandwidth and resources in general. And so we have to be very discerning about how we spend them. So one of the boundaries that I set a few years ago was that I don't need to argue with people who don't believe what I believe. When I'm in a conversation, often, more often than not, I will say that is so interesting or okay, and I'll leave it there.

[00:26:34] Now, it doesn't mean I don't ever take a stand and I do in my own way, but it's not expending so much energy because I'm not going to put in that fight with everyone. And that's a kind of boundary that I set for myself to preserve myself because I was so tired and I was so frustrated all the time and it wasn't boding well for my life. So why would I keep doing that? But it was really hard because it was just a pattern I had practiced for so long.

[00:27:03] So it didn't change overnight, but I just had to keep bringing myself back to this is self-care. This is high level self-care. This is worth it. This isn't just about them. It's about you. So I do think boundaries with ourselves are really important. Oh, I do too. And what do you think about our identity? Because we base our identity on some of this stuff, right? So it's changing your identity to make these changes, at least how you see yourself, right? Yeah. So how does that work?

[00:27:31] So one of the things I have my clients do is I always encourage them to write a power statement. And a power statement is just finishing the sentence. When I am standing fully in my power, I am a woman who, and let the pen go to page and just see what comes out. You might write 10 pages. You might write a paragraph. You might write a sentence. But the reason I challenge people to do this is because it's really interesting to inquire

[00:27:59] about what that version of you is like and how she moves through the world. And I know that when I'm a woman standing in my power, I actually don't feel like I'm in my power when I'm arguing with people. Like that doesn't feel like power. That feels like I'm just wasting energy. And I get really kind of misaligned with myself. And so I recognize that when I'm in my power, I'm very responsive, not reactive.

[00:28:25] I'm able to sit with an emotion without just becoming the emotion. I'm able to make decisions that I feel good about later, right? Now, I'm not saying I am this person all the time. I'm saying when I'm standing in my power, that's how I behave. And so when I can start doing more things in my day that align with that version of myself, eventually I become that person. Now, again, it doesn't happen overnight. It's not a quick fix.

[00:28:53] But even using the example of, I don't know, if somebody wants to become really strong and agile as they age. When I'm standing in my power, I'm a woman who can really take on any physical feat she wants to. Okay, well, what would that mean today? Well, it would mean that I probably need to maybe move my body a little bit, right? And maybe stretch and eat well and strength train. I don't know.

[00:29:19] But when you get clear on what would lead you to her, there's your curriculum. You don't need someone to write that protocol or that plan or that pathway. The bigger question is, why aren't you doing it? Right. Right. And we're not doing it because it's uncomfortable. It's awkward. It's inconvenient. It's inconvenient. And we're convincing. We're talking ourselves. We're spending more time talking ourselves out of the work than into the work. And so we just stay right where we are in the spin cycle of stuckness, I call it.

[00:29:49] I think you're right. And I think it all ties in together as far as I was, as you were speaking, I was thinking of time management because a lot of us aren't great at time management. Well, why are we not great at time management? Because we're letting people overstep boundaries and take more of our time. You know what I mean? We're never saying, hey, I need this chunk of time to go work out. I need this chunk of time to go read a book. Yeah. We don't. A lot of us don't do that. We just do for keep doing for others. And then you have no time left for yourself.

[00:30:18] And you go to bed and get your couple hours of sleep and get up and do it all over again. Well, I was just going to say, I think that I think women are actually exceptional at time management. It's just not when it comes to them. Right. Because they're putting everything and everyone else on their schedule. I mean, they get the color coded markers. They get the pretty planners, right? We all know how that goes. And they don't show up anywhere on their own schedule. And I think the bigger challenge for the type of people that I work with, which is largely

[00:30:45] midlife women who are perimenopausal, menopausal, is they have an energy management problem. Because they never take care, because they never conserve any time for themselves on their schedule. They're tired. They're reactive. They're irritable. They're like, they're just keeping their head above water. Right. That is the bigger problem. And so when we can look at, okay, I need to become better at energy management. What does that mean for me? Well, where are all the areas you're leaking energy?

[00:31:13] Where are all the areas you're spending energy in the day? And where could we reclaim just a little bit of that energy for you? And trust that it's going to feel uncomfortable, because it will. But once you do it enough times, you start to feel the benefit. And it's like you can't go back. Like once you taste that enough times, you can't go back. Because you just feel so much better. And you like who you are more. Because you are more responsive. You're more solution oriented.

[00:31:43] You're nicer to be around. You're more creative. All the things. So yeah. So I think it's a really good point that women are the time management piece. You're right. We don't put ourselves on our own schedule. But the cost of that is that it completely leaks all of our energy. And we have nothing left to give. Right. But I know for myself, I tell myself all the time, I'm going to start doing this every day. And then somebody needs something.

[00:32:10] One of your kids, your husband, your mom, somebody. Always. And you're off doing. Yeah. And then you feel like you failed again. And so I don't know how to, I guess for me personally, like how you put boundaries on family. Yeah. And that's really hard. Yeah. I think that's the hardest part. It is. Well, and here's the thing. Like once in a while, it will be an emergency. Like your mom will be in the hospital, heaven forbid. Right. Or something really catastrophic happens where it's like, okay, I need to go.

[00:32:40] Right. But 98% of the time, it's like somebody wants you to go to the grocery store and pick something up. Or they want you to help with a tax form. Or these are not emergencies. Right. And we can say, I would love to help you with that. I'll be available in 30 minutes. Right. Or I'll be available at four o'clock this afternoon. Right. We make it the emergency, not them. Very true. But we're so used to, again, people pleasing and jumping when people say they need our help

[00:33:09] that we kind of create that ourselves. I did this a lot in my business. For years, every time I got an email, I would answer it right away, whether it was 10 o'clock at night or Sunday, or it just didn't matter. Right. And it was driving, it was exhausting my energy. And finally, I just had to come to the recognition that, okay, I'm not saving the world. I'm not doing heart surgery. There's nothing about this that's crazy urgent. It can wait. And I can give you an example. Like I've been practicing this for years.

[00:33:38] And just the other day, it was a Sunday. And somebody had bought a course of mine online and they emailed about trying to get access because they couldn't figure out their password. And we have an email that goes out that says, we will get back to you during regular business hours, Monday through Friday. Right. And it was so hard. It was so hard for me to refrain from answering that email, but I didn't. More for myself because I do pride myself on customer service and all those things.

[00:34:05] But I knew that if I gave in, it wasn't just a little decision. I was like, I was going to create, I always call it integrity pain with myself because I knew that I was making a decision around something for the wrong reasons. Right. Like I was making up the story that this person was going to be upset with me if I didn't get back to them at nine o'clock at night on a Sunday. Like what business gets back to anyone at nine o'clock on a Sunday? They would be okay. And they were.

[00:34:33] The next day we got them what they needed and they were off and running. Right. Right. So I do think we all do that. But back to what you were saying too, like we make these promises to ourself that I'm going to start exercising today. But I think a couple things that we fail to do, which creates a problem is number one, we don't get really specific about what exactly we're committing to. Like I'm going to exercise today. That's very big and very vague. Like what are you going to do exactly?

[00:34:59] So getting clarity and specificity, but also define for yourself, what is the bare minimum? So like a client will say to me, I'm going to walk for 30 minutes at lunch every day this week. And I'll say, okay, that's awesome. What's the bare minimum? And they'll say 30 minutes. And I'm like, no, that's not the bare minimum. That's the goal. That's what you would like to have happen. But we know how this rolls. Like we know how life works and most of us overcommit. So what's the bare minimum?

[00:35:27] Like if you had the worst day in the world, you could still get in how much of walking and they'll say five minutes. Great. That's our bare minimum. Now I'm not saying that you're going to do your bare minimum every day, but if you did your bare minimum every day, I guarantee you'd feel awesome at the end of the week, just because you showed up to do the bare minimum versus nothing. Oh, it's very true. Yeah. Right. So, but we don't like doing that because again, we make it mean like, I'm not smart. I'm not capable.

[00:35:57] I'm something's wrong with me that I have to break it down this much. No, you're just human. We're all this way, right? We have these lofty goals, but we set the bar of expectation so high that we become the obstacle to our own success. Yeah. I think you're exactly right. Bare minimums. Like the listeners, I want them to take that away. Bare minimums are huge. It is because I know, I mean, speaking of walking at lunch, I used to walk at lunch like

[00:36:24] a half hour and I quit because there's so many demands on me at work that now I feel like I'm letting someone down if I take even five minutes for myself, that's five minutes. I could have been helping someone else. So that's the other side of that. That makes it hard. I think. But I'm going to push back on that. Like, what if? I know it's wrong. I'm just saying that's what. No, it's not wrong. But what if you taking that five minutes to go for that walk actually made you more

[00:36:53] efficient at helping that person, made you a better communicator, made you more creative in whatever problem the two of you were trying to solve. Because I would argue that that's what those mini breaks during the workday actually do. We kind of put this meaning on them that it's like, I'm taking away from a valuable task or I shouldn't be doing this because it feels indulgent. And it's like, hang on a second. This is actually a gift to your brain. This is giving your brain a little break to pause so it can come back and refocus.

[00:37:23] It's giving your body a little movement so you can generate some energy. Like what's actually happening is all good stuff. And it's going to make you more effective at your job, not less. Oh, I agree. It's just when you're in the moment, it's very hard. Yeah. I know. I know. So you mentioned something a little bit ago that I think is very important also. Midlife and hormones. How does that play into all of this? Oh, well. Besides the energy. I know it affects energy. It affects everything.

[00:37:53] I mean, I think one of the biggest challenges at midlife, if I had to boil it down, is that we are contending with the most stress we've ever had in our life in many cases, right? We're still trying to get kids out of the house if we have them. We're in the throes of our career or trying to wrap up a career. Some people are retiring. We have aging parents sometimes we're taking care of. We have ailments that we're starting to get diagnosed with. I mean, there's just a lot going on at midlife.

[00:38:21] And on top of it, we're losing the very hormones that help us to manage stress. So that's fun, right? Like we need these hormones more than ever and they're starting to leave the party. And so that is the challenge. And here's the gift in it. Our tolerance for other people's BS and our own BS gets very low. And that's a great thing because what it does is it forces us to face a choice, which is

[00:38:50] you can renovate your life in the ways that it needs to be renovated so you have less stress or you can keep doing what you're doing and continue to get the same result. But your body is not the problem. The body is just going through a transition. And self-care now looks different than it did 5, 10, 20 years ago. And so if we honor that, it doesn't have to be this insufferable process, right?

[00:39:20] Right. But a lot of us are just, again, we're so attached to this rigidity that self-care is always supposed to look the same that we really kind of claw our way through. And that just sucks. So it's, and I do want to clarify, stress is not a bad thing. Stress is a beautiful thing in the right dose and for the right reasons. So if you were going to, let's just say, I don't know, start a new business that you

[00:39:49] had been dying to start for 20 years, there's going to be stress involved. But it's called eustress, E-U stress. And the purpose of that kind of stress is to evolve and grow and expand our life. Strength training is a great example of that kind of stress. It's not comfortable to do. It creates little micro tears in the muscle. But the whole purpose of it is to make our muscle more resilient and more robust. Right. But there's also a lot of stress in our life.

[00:40:18] And this is the kind of stress a lot of us are more familiar with that causes distress. Stress. And this is what I call unnecessary stress. The stress in your life that just doesn't need to be there. So you thinking horrible thoughts about who you are as a human all day long, that's totally unnecessary stress. Not setting boundaries, unnecessary. Eating garbage food, unnecessary. Right.

[00:40:43] Like there are things that we're doing that are creating a stress load that just doesn't need to be there. And so it really becomes a two-part equation. Part one is we need to remove as many unnecessary stressors as we can. That might be removing some people. Right. To be honest. Like sometimes it is. That's true. Yeah. It's ending some relationships or going to therapy for relationships. Maybe that's even the relationship you have with yourself. It's changing the way we eat. It's moving our body differently.

[00:41:11] It's putting ourselves to bed on time. It can look like a lot of things. But the second part of the equation is we have to decide where do I need to lean into stress on purpose? Is it having difficult conversations? Is it asking for help? Is it delegating? Is it making someone else uncomfortable with a decision that you know is right for you? I mean, these things are hard and stressful, but there's so much benefit on the other side.

[00:41:39] And so that's really, those are really the two buckets that I coach my clients through is where do we need to take out the unnecessary and where do we need to add in the purposeful? And when we start doing more and more of that, their life starts to just shift dramatically and their energy starts to shift dramatically because they're not leaking so much energy. Yeah. And it's interesting because I know for years I've prided myself on, usually I live in a world of a lot of stress.

[00:42:06] And so we have a family with a lot of health issues. And anyway, I've always prided myself that I can function well. My brain does very well under high stress. And I always thought that was a great thing until my body showed me that even though the brain might be functioning well, the body is not. And I think it's a wake up call for people. Hopefully people get it sooner than I did, but that stress, the negative stress really takes its toll.

[00:42:36] And sometimes you don't find out until something's already occurred. Because we normalize it. We normalize it in our head. Our culture normalizes it, right? Exactly. Because we should just be hustling all the time and doing all the things for all the people. And yeah, your body will always pay the price. Like that bill is coming and you just don't know in what form. But I always say it's dis-ease initially, but that can eventually lead to disease because

[00:43:03] the root of so many health challenges is that just underlying chronic stress load. The body could, because think about what happens when you're in a state of stress. There are systems in the body that actually slow down to try to conserve you energy so you can run, you can fight, you can flee, right? And when those systems are constantly being shut down, your digestion, right? Your gut health gets disrupted.

[00:43:30] Your brain, your prefrontal cortex goes offline because you're not going to do your best thinking in a moment of emergency, right? You're just going to react. Right. And that can save your life. That can be a beautiful thing. But when you're constantly living like that, definitely things start to break down physiologically. And very often I see women, I work with a lot of women who have lived in very high stress levels for years thinking they were getting away with it. Yeah. And then they finally retire or whatever it is, and then they get the diagnosis. Yeah.

[00:44:00] Or then they get the whatever happens because it was a slow burn, right? It was happening. It'd been happening for 20 years. It didn't happen just when they retired, but their body is finally paying the price. Right. And that's not fun. No. And that's something I wish I would have realized sooner, but it was exactly what you said. I thought I was getting away with it. We all did. And some of it was stress I couldn't control. Like my husband had cancer and my daughter and my husband, one daughter, they both had

[00:44:29] to have brain surgery within nine months of each other. So there was a lot of it I could not control, but I thought, hey, I'm still functioning. I'm getting through. But regardless of where it's coming from, it's still going to catch up with you. So. Yeah. I wish my dad right now, he has Parkinson's. He has a whole slew of problems, but Parkinson's is one of the bigger ones. And I look at how he lived his life. He was a really high up as an executive for years. And he never took time to take care of himself.

[00:44:59] His wife got Alzheimer's early onset Alzheimer's in her fifties. Oh, wow. Right. It just caused so much stress. But also my dad never learned self-leadership skills for stress. So he had nothing to work with. He was just keeping his head above water, doing the best he could to stay alive and kind of keep everything running. And then of course he retires and his, everything just started to kind of fall apart because his body was just exhausted. And it makes so much sense that that happened.

[00:45:27] But even now with Parkinson's, he's still like, I try to coach him so much through this. It's hard to coach your parents. I don't recommend it, but I try so hard to just remind him that dad, like you stressing out about a light bulb, not being replaced. That's so unnecessary. Right. And it's honestly making Parkinson's worse. So like, let's just think about other things. Let's focus on all the light bulbs that do work in the house. Right. But yeah, it is.

[00:45:57] It's enough of that kind of pivoting where it's like, and it's not positive thinking. I think this is really important to kind of clarify. It's useful thinking. Is the way that you're thinking about this situation, your dog dying, your husband having cancer, your whatever, whatever the case may be, is the way that you're thinking about it useful to the way that you want to navigate it? We'd love it didn't exist. That'd be lovely, but we don't get to control reality. Right. Right.

[00:46:25] But when I do manage my brain, I call it parenting your brain. When I parent my brain in every scenario, because it's the only thing I can really control, it's either going to leave me with a lot of regrets about how I showed up, or I'm going to feel really good about how I showed up, even though it was a really sucky situation. Right. Right. At least I liked how I showed up within it. Yeah. And that's the name of the game is just knowing that there's always going to be curve balls. Oh yeah.

[00:46:55] And I am proud of, I guess, the way I showed up. So I've got that at least. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Right. And here's the thing, like, isn't it funny too, that we kind of compartmentalize our life? Like I can get my family through brain surgeries and cancer, but I can't walk at lunchtime. It is true. Yeah. Well, yes, you can. And you know what? Part of that, I really feel, and this is the hurdle I have to overcome, but it's because

[00:47:24] that was for them and the walking is for me. And I think that's where it's at. I think that's the issue right there. Yes. And I always say that like self-care is so much bigger than us. It allows us to be better partners and lovers and business owners and just friends and all the things because when we are more whole, when we are more aligned, we just, we're better humans.

[00:47:52] And so it is an extension of care for other people to take care of yourself because we're able to show up for them in a way that we're like, oh, okay, I can do this for you today because I slept last night or I ate breakfast this morning. Yeah. And I know what you're saying is 100% true. It's just getting in that alignment or getting to that point that, that sometimes takes a little bit, I think for some of it. Well, and I think it's also the practice of it.

[00:48:22] Yeah. Everything is a practice. Right. Right. And practice is inherently messy because we don't practice things we're awesome at. We practice the things we suck at. Right. And we want to be better at. So we have to, and I mean, your podcast, the name of it is such a beautiful point to this is that we have to be willing to be messy to elevate our lives. And so every time a client says to me, they make a commitment about something, they're going to walk, they're going to eat. They're going to, I don't know, make a phone call.

[00:48:52] I'll always say, just expect it's going to suck because it's going to. And if it doesn't suck as much as you think it will, that's great too. It is. But if you expect it to not suck and not be hard, you're going to delude yourself into thinking something's wrong when that happens. So just expect this is new. It's kind of like if you were going to take a fencing class today, have you ever fenced before? I haven't. No. Right. I would just expect I'm going to suck. I've never fenced. I have, I know nothing about it.

[00:49:22] So I wouldn't walk in there thinking I'm going to be the star of the class, but that's kind of how we move through our wellness journey is I have to be perfect and awesome at everything that I'm starting to practice for the first time, or I haven't practiced in a long time. And that's just craziness. It really is. Yeah. Yeah. Let it be sloppy and messy. Nobody cares. The fact that you're showing up, that's what matters. And it will get less messy as you continue your practice.

[00:49:52] But those first few weeks, just expect it's going to be messy and it's not going to be fun and it's not going to be, it's not going to feel easy. And then it shifts. I like that idea. Yeah. Expect to suck. Yeah. I should get a post or a bumper sticker. No, no. I meant that even though it's going to suck, it's going to shift. It's going to shift. It always does. So one of the things social media, I think is really good for is you do once in a while

[00:50:18] run across a really inspiring story about someone who was in a horrible car accident or had some horribly debilitating disease and they just persevered and did the things and pulled themselves out. And it's, oh my gosh, like it was not fun. It was not easy. They were not awesome at it. They just refused to quit. They refused to give up. Right. Right. They had more to live for. And I think that's a big part of anyone's journey is why are you even taking care of your health?

[00:50:46] Because there's obviously something you want, you're still living for. What is it? Remind yourself of that every single day. Very true. Yeah. And we, if you have a family and kids, friends that are family, everybody has something to, to live for and to strive for and to be here longer for it. Yes, definitely. Yeah. Well, I want to be mindful of your time. I want to give you time to talk about your book and your coaching practice if you would like. Yeah. I mean, the book, if people are landing with what we're talking about here today, it's

[00:51:15] The Consistency Code, A Midlife Woman's Guide to Deep Health and Happiness. And it's really just a deeper extension of what we've talked about here today. I mean, I go deeper into sort of my own journey through the wellness industry, but I teach basically four buckets of practices in the book, which is the code, the practice of awareness, the practice of organization, the practice of follow through. And the practice of realignment, because after so many years of coaching in the movement industry

[00:51:43] and that nutrition industry and that life coaching industry, those four practices, that's the work. Like if we can just keep doing those four things, we're going to keep moving forward. And that's the name of the game. So I don't give protocols anymore. I still sometimes I'll educate about diet and exercise on occasion, but I really like to say that nobody needs another formula for a once in a lifetime transformation.

[00:52:09] We need more skill sets to navigate a life of transformation because that's what life is. It's a constant ending and beginning of things. And if we can't navigate ourselves within that uncertainty and that unpredictability, we'll probably never be healthy. Yeah. We have to learn how to pivot. And I like how you also talk about being able to quickly bring yourself back on track as one of the keys, right? So yeah, it's always just coming back.

[00:52:38] We can expect we're going to fall off, but if we can, the quicker we can get ourselves back on, the better off we are. Yeah. Anyone listening, don't ever say again that I'm starting over. You're never starting over. None of us have that luxury, right? We've been on the planet so many years. We don't get to start over, but you do get to resume. That's all it is. It's just resuming. That's so gentle. That's so grace-filled. But yeah, if anybody wants to hear more of the like, go get the book. You can get it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, all the places, or you can just go to

[00:53:07] theconsistencycode.com and you can find out all the places where you can purchase the book. Yeah, it's great. I love everything you talk about. I could talk to you for hours. So thank you. I love it. You're very inspirational too. So I appreciate that. Oh, yay. Good. Well, you're a great interviewer and I really appreciate you taking the time to have me on. Oh, absolutely. All right. Have a great rest of your day. You too. Thank you. Bye. Bye-bye. As we wrap up today's episode, what I love most about this conversation with Courtney

[00:53:36] is that she reminds us that health isn't something we arrive at. It's a direction. And honestly, I think that's just a message so many of us need to hear because life is messy. There will be stressful seasons. There will be setbacks, detours, and days when we just don't show up the way we intended to. But that doesn't mean we failed. It simply means we're human. One thing that really stood out to me is Courtney's reminder that we're often spending more time

[00:54:02] talking ourselves out of what we need than talking ourselves into it. And maybe the goal isn't becoming a completely different person. Maybe it's learning to trust ourselves enough to take the next small step. Whether it's setting a boundary, taking a five-minute walk, getting a little more sleep, or simply acknowledging your wins at the end of the day, those small choices do matter. Courtney, thank you for sharing your wisdom, your honesty, and your refreshing perspective on what real health actually looks like.

[00:54:32] And to all of you listening, remember this. You don't have to be perfect. You don't have to start over. And you don't have to have it all figured out. You just have to keep moving in the direction of the life you want to create. Thanks for joining me for another episode of The Beauty and the Mess. As always, I hope this episode helps at least one person. And with that, I hope you have a blessed week, my friend. Thank you for listening to The Beauty in the Mess.

[00:55:01] If you enjoyed what you heard, please share it with a friend. And if you haven't already, please subscribe, rate, and review this podcast on your favorite pod player. If you have any questions or comments, any topic ideas you would like to hear about, or you think you would be a great guest on the show, you can reach me directly at thebeautyandthemess.com. Thanks for listening.