Corinne:

All right, everybody. Welcome back. So today, Kathy and I are here and we’re going to be talking about how I journal my food. That I swear, I think that I teach super important concepts, but this is the one that people ask me the most on. And I also think is probably the easiest one to teach all of you. And I want to first start with why it’s important kind of the science behind it stuff. And then we’re going to get into the how part. But I will just tell you guys, I know for sure that the people… I wish I had numbers on this, but I can just tell, because we have tons and tons of success stories every single week. And when people ask then, what are you doing? It’s like journaling, that planning is when I write my stuff down.

Corinne:

People are more consistent with their weight loss. The more they’re willing to write about their weight loss. And I just think that this is true. This comes from my gut, comes from watching thousands of women, every single week, coaching people, the people who come on my calls when it’s time, like, “Oh, I’m going to throw myself on the sword, not losing weight.” And I’ll raise my hand, [inaudible 00:01:14] don’t coach me. Tell me about your journaling. Well, I’m not really doing that part.

Corinne:

We just expect that weight loss is magically going to happen without us having to actually put in any effort or thought in it. I will promise all of you, listening to my podcast is not enough. It’s great, it’s entertaining. You’ll be sitting going, “Preach. Amen, yes, Ooh, that makes so much sense.” But when I say you need to do the work, I almost always mean you need to get your ass in a chair with a planner and you need to write shit down, what you’re going to eat for the day, what you’re going to think for the day and what you’re going to do for the day. If you do that, you are giving your brain, which controls everything, clear direction on what you want it to do for the rest of the day. This is the beautiful part of journaling.

Corinne:

And I don’t care, we can call it planning, we can call it journaling. When I say journaling, I mean write some shit down on a piece of paper. That’s what it means. That’s the… Go look it up in the dictionary. I am sure it says write some shit down on a piece of paper.

Kathy:

I have no doubt. That’s what it says.

Corinne:

[inaudible 00:02:29]. So I want you guys doing it because once you write the stuff down and your brain has some direction, the only thing that you have to do the rest of the day is decide to do what you said you would do. That’s it. You only have to make the decision now to actually follow through. But here’s what y’all want to do, along those [inaudible 00:03:00] way today, I’m going to do better. Oh my God, I’m so sick and fucking tired of not being in shape, can’t stay in my clothes, I don’t even want to look at the scale. He’s a bastard, I’m changing and I’m going to do better. And then that’s your big ass plan. And then…

Kathy:

You going to do better?

Corinne:

Yeah, I’m going to do…

Kathy:

I’m going to do better, yeah.

Corinne:

Yeah. My big ass plan. And then the rest of the day, you’ve not told your brain what better is for you. So every single time, it’s time to eat, every single time you’re stressed, every single time your old habits to snack and stuff come up. In that moment, not only do you need to decide what better is, but then you have to decide to do better. So now you’ve got two steps you have to do versus just the one.The planning and the journaling and stuff, it cuts out 50% of the exhaustive work of weight loss. Be tired of being exhausted and thinking that weight loss is hard, then start making some decisions ahead of time on a piece of paper, first thing in the morning. 50% of the load is done at that point. The other nice thing about journaling and writing and deciding on paper first, is that you get to do it from love, from compassion, from I was going to make it easy on myself today, here are the things I would do. You get the opportunity to set the rest of the day up to where it’s not a miserable process.

Corinne:

I’ll do better plan, is always based on whatever we think weight loss is like. It’s what we’ve experienced in the past, it’s our horseshit ideas that, well, when I lose weight, when I’m going to diet, it’s very restrictive. It’s always so hard. You just can’t eat anything you like. I hate it because I’m always just hangry. You just have to get to the point where you’re just starving. Your do better plan is based on that mindset. And I will promise you if your mindset is, it’s really restricted, I have to give up everything I like, I won’t be able to eat the things everybody else is. Everyone’s going to look at me. I’m going to have to be overly hungry. It’s going to be really miserable. I’ll never get to enjoy foods that I love. I’m only going to able to eat things I hate. If that’s your working definition, then when it’s time to do better, that’s what your brain is drawing from the information bank on.

Corinne:

And so within the moment of doing better, you’re already stressed out and feeling like ass it ain’t going to do any of that. Because you’re not planning from how could I make it so easy on myself today? What foods do I love to eat? Let’s plan those first, no matter what they are. And let’s just get good at eating those only when we’re hungry. Let’s just get really good at eating those until we’ve had enough. If I’m going to always have these available and I never have to take them off my plan, maybe I won’t have to eat five cards of ding dongs in order to get my fill. So the planning and the journaling and the writing, this is why it’s important. It helps you stop using a busted ass, past diet history, full of weird rules, full of restrictions, full of I did this because I hated myself. I tried this diet because I hated myself.

Corinne:

It overrides all of that. And it allows you to start planning from the place of where you are and where you would like to go. So, Kathy, should I talk anymore about the journaling and why it’s important?

Kathy:

No, but I have got to tell you a story.

Corinne:

All right.

Kathy:

Okay. So the reason… What I have found, journaling my food in the morning about what I’m going to eat all day, gives myself direction, right? It gives myself clear rules to follow. Here’s what I did on Thanksgiving. You’re going to die. I wrote on my plan for Thanksgiving dinner and I seriously this is God’s honest truth, anything I want. I swear to God, I did that. Anything I want eating to enough? Well, let me tell you something, my brain honed right in on anything I want. And by eight o’clock at night, Thanksgiving night, I was miserable. And I thought, why am I so miserable? Curiously coach, Kathy, why am I so miserable? And I kind of did a replay on what I ate. Would you like the list?

Corinne:

Yeah.

Kathy:

I think seriously, it was turkey and dressing and gravy and cheesy potatoes and sweet potatoes and roasted green beans and a roll. And then I topped it off with an Apple turnover and some whipped cream for dessert and three cake pops.

Corinne:

Damn Kathy. You put it down like a [inaudible 00:08:18].

Kathy:

I did. I seriously did. But I know it’s because I told myself that morning I could have anything I want. My brain went straight to those words. It didn’t go to the words until I’ve had enough. It went straight to anything I want.

Corinne:

Here is something interesting too. Oh, go ahead. Finish up. I’m going to ask you a question.

Kathy:

Okay. In retrospect, looking back if I had… I knew the menu, I created the menu. Okay.

Corinne:

[inaudible 00:08:46] creator.

Kathy:

Right. I created the menu. I could have been a whole lot more specific with my intention for Thanksgiving dinner than I was. And I should have been. But that’s just the learning I came away with. I actually, I have laughed about it for about two weeks now, thinking, yeah. That’s why I did that.

Corinne:

And I think this is one of the things… So this is what I was going to ask you because this is where people confuse planning and journaling and stuff. I think journaling is important. So if you’re going to write down anything I want. And I think, honestly, I don’t hate that.

Kathy:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Corinne:

But here’s what…

Kathy:

Oh, I didn’t neither.

Corinne:

Right. But here’s for you next year or for anybody who would like to do. Because we’ve got the holidays. I mean, we’re just in the holiday season, I’m sure you’re going to have another meal.

Kathy:

[inaudible 00:09:37]

Corinne:

Where Kathy creator again, define what want is.

Kathy:

Yes.

Corinne:

And I think that that’s where, the beautiful part of the journaling comes in. So when you are thinking about your holiday meals, birthdays, some vacations, no matter what time of year, where, we’re always going to have these occasions where, Ooh, I would love to eat anything I want. And here are the things I really want out of this. I really want these kinds of foods. And I also want this kind of experience. And here’s how much of that food I want. I think that where yours just fell apart is what you were saying is that you didn’t have enough clear direction as to what want was and what our brains always do… And how long has it been since you’ve lost your weight?

Kathy:

At least five years.

Corinne:

So five years of practice, a fucking coach [inaudible 00:10:42] for that. It just goes to show you guys though that without clear direction, the brain only knows to do one thing. Well, all right, the last time that we were just eating anything we want, we also were 80 pounds overweight. How did we handle that last time? The brain’s job is to go back, if you don’t give it clear direction with your reasoning brain. So for all of you who are newer to the podcast, you’ve got two parts of your brain, the habit brain, which is what I always call the… Like if you go to the library and the card catalog, the habit brain has stored in it all the books of your life. Like, here’s how you’ve done this and here’s how you’ve done this and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So whenever you have this reasoning brain also, but the reasoning brain is not the card catalog.

Corinne:

The reasoning brain is the one that makes new decisions. It’s the one writing the new books. We don’t have a book on anything you want that includes these foods, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So always think about your reasoning brain as it’s writing the books you need, the habit brain only has the books you’ve read. It’s all your past experience. So what happens is, is when you go to anything I want without clear direction, your brain is like, “Okay, well, the only thing that I know to reference is to go back to 80 pound overweight, Kathy celebrating Thanksgiving.” And when she ate anything she want, it was like time to put on the duty stretchy pants. And even those might’ve be have their limits tested too. Does that make sense?

Kathy:

Absolutely. Absolutely. That makes sense. It was interesting to plan it that way. Because I have a very strong planning habit. I think I’ve missed one day and I was sick in like three years or something. I just do this every single day. I find comfort in it. So I thought, look at me, I’m coach Kathy it’s Thanksgiving. I’ll just have anything I want to, enough. Well, I just pretty much decided I wasn’t going to think about it enough. I was going in for that [inaudible 00:12:57].

Corinne:

Well, you probably had enough each time you ate.

Kathy:

Probably, I probably had enough [crosstalk 00:13:02] about halfway through the first [inaudible 00:13:04].

Corinne:

I think I might [inaudible 00:13:04], what’s next?

Kathy:

Right.

Corinne:

All right, I want to talk about the difference between planning and journaling.

Kathy:

Okay.

Corinne:

Planning is where, when I’m talking only in terms of weight loss, we’re not talking about our time and all this other stuff. But planning when it comes to weight loss is where you are going to write down the foods you’re going to eat for the day. For some of you, you might also be writing down your exercise. If you are already an exerciser, please feel free to go ahead and plan your exercise. So Corinne is an exerciser, and in fact you are too. What we do is when I plan, I make sure that I write down like today, here’s what I’m going to do for my exercise. I actually plan my exercise a week out in advance. And then I give myself the freedom each day, now that I’ve gotten older.

Corinne:

I used to be, this is how I used to plan, 30 year olds Corinne. In the thirties, she planned exercise. And then she just followed her schedule. In my forties, I planned my exercise and then on that day, if my body’s not feeling it, I have plan B. It’s always like a lower level, something. So a lot of times it’s walking or whatever. So I always have my plan for my exercise. And then I plan the foods I’m going to eat for the day. Now, when you were planning for your foods, guys, you do not have to get hung up and you only get one choice. A lot of times my plan, if I don’t know what I’m going to want for dinner, I think about the things that I actually have in my kitchen. And I will write down two to three options.

Corinne:

I just get to pick between these two to three. Sometimes I just put down one. I don’t care if you guys are putting one, two, three, 4 million options. What I care about is that you were in the habit of first thing in the morning, thinking about your food ahead of time and planning it in a way that makes sense for you, where you feel like you can do it. And that you will follow through with what you say you will do. When it comes to weight loss and when it comes to food planning, that’s the part that’s the most important. It’s not necessarily, y’all get too hung up on what foods are on the plan. The skill that you need is the consistency, the showing up, the doing what you say you will do. When that gets intact, you start feeling better about yourself. You start building integrity and trust and confidence.

Corinne:

And when you take those feelings, I trust myself, I have confidence, I’m feeling motivated, I’m feeling momentum, I’m feeling these things, it is a lot easier to then challenge yourself more. But most of you do is you start with really challenging yourself with crazy ass plans that are super restrictive and based on old horseshit. But you don’t have trust, you don’t have a lot of motivation, you don’t have confidence yet, and you don’t have commitment yet. You’re just trying to make and willpower yourself into doing things you think you should be doing. This is everything. And this is why I wanted to do this podcast because we’re coming up on the New Year. It’s really important that you guys understand planning and journaling and how they apply to weight loss. So that’s the planning side. So if I was you and I was a beginner, all my podcast listeners are beginners, my members y’all, you’ve got… We have a five day planning challenge coming up in January. We’re going to kick off the New Year with the coaches every damn day.

Corinne:

They’re coming in for five days. And we’re going to teach you the deep cuts version of your planning of your journal of everything. But for all my listeners who are just starting simply getting some paper and writing down like, alright, today, here’s what I’m going to eat. Put more food on there than you think you need. That does not mean you… If I put down three dinners, that doesn’t mean Corinne eats three dinners. It means Corinne has a choice. If you put down snacks and you’re not hungry and you are following my free course over at PNP411.com, then all you got to do is say, “All right, snack time. Am I hungry? I’m not hungry.” Well, wait, almost skip it. But you have the confidence and the assuredness and the the calm of knowing I have plenty of food on my plan, now it’s just me making decisions.

Corinne:

I don’t have to think about what I’m going to eat. I don’t have to think about what I want. I don’t have think… If I want to change things, I’m like, “No, tomorrow I’ll plan for that. But today, just getting really good at eating these things. I don’t have to eat them, I’m just choosing to eat them today. Tomorrow’s plan can look different based on the things that I discovered I would want today.” That creates the ease and that creates the showing up. The journaling, this is what’s a little different. I have my members, they always do two sides. Planning is what gets you decisive, journaling helps you understand why you’re going to do it. Journaling helps you understand what thinking might be getting in your way of making it easier on yourself. Journaling also helps you clear your brain out. One of the things that y’all, don’t always understand is that a lot of it do a lot of thinking.

Corinne:

We try to… I think I’m going to do better. I think I’m going to do this. We listen to our thinking and the problem with that is when you’re only thinking you’re ingraining, whatever you believe now. If you think weight loss is hard, you’re going to try to lose weight. And you’re only thinking about weight loss, you will ingrain and believe that weight loss is hard. When you actually do what I call paper thinking, it’s like this is the journaling. Journaling is really your paper thinking. That’s where you’re writing shit down on a piece of paper. Paper thinking it allows you to separate what you’re thinking from what might also be true. Sothe reason why I have my members do this is if they think weight loss is hard, have them write about it.

Corinne:

Write down five reasons why you think weight loss is hard. And then I want you to step back and I want you to separate from it. I want you to read it. And I want you to know these are the sentences in my head about weight loss that make weight loss hard. That right there allows you to start understanding, Oh, weight loss is just weight loss. It’s not hard. It’s not easy. It’s not anything. It’s what I think about it. So if I want some relief from thinking weight loss is hard, I need to take my five sentences that I journaled on today. And I need to ask myself what else could be true that would make it more doable for today. Then you go to work all day long. When your old shitty brain wants to tell you, it’s hard. You say, ‘”But this also could be true.” That’s how you start taking your mindset. You put it on paper, you do some paper thinking and you shift the narrative.

Corinne:

When you aren’t spending your entire day, thinking weight loss is hard and you’re spending your day rerouting your brain to think it might be easier than you think, because it could be this, you automatically start experiencing relief in the process of weight loss. I promise all of you who are listening to this podcast, I will never steer you wrong on the journey to your weight loss, to making it feel easier. And it will never feel easier because I’m telling you some weird diet trick that gets your weight off fast, some hack or something like that. It’s always going to be because I’m going to teach you how to think about it in a way that actually feels good. That’s the biggest difference maker when it comes to weight loss. So many of us are just trying to suffer our way through it and wonder why it’s hard to look forward to doing things. Wonder why on the weekends, we need relief. Wondering why during the holidays, we just can’t seem to be motivated. Because during the holidays, nobody fucking wants to be sitting around suffering with food. We want to be enjoying ourselves.

Corinne:

The problem is nobody’s talked to us about how can we actually enjoy ourselves while also losing weight? We only know one way, weight loss has to suck, it’s hard. And here’s my Big Book of Lies as to why it’s so hard. All right, so journaling is about your thinking. So when I’m journaling, here are the most common things that I journal about. I journal gratitude every day. If you are one of my No BS women, you know. I ask you every day, what are you grateful for? Your planner, I want to tell all the No BS women, your planner that I give you inside the membership has everything you need for journaling in it. We have in the back paper thinking space for you, where if you want to write about anything you want, it’s there for you. We even give you the questions to ask yourself. If you want to spend 30 days journaling and uncovering your story around the scale or your body image or whatever, you have all of it.

Corinne:

But if you never ever want to do that kind of thinking, your daily injuries all have every single paper thinking question you would ever need to ask yourself. I designed it that way on purpose for you to make the journaling feel good, easy, and get you your weight the fastest way possible by cleaning up bullshit thinking that’s in your way. So when I’m journaling, every day I journal gratitude. I think it’s important. We spend so much time in our life, I can’t tell you how many times, and Kathy, you probably have the same experience on your office hours. So many people say I should be happier and I’m not.

Kathy:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Corinne:

And that is because we are conditioned to think about what’s missing in our life instead of first thinking about what’s right in our life, taking stock of what we already have. In this world right now, people are always on the pursuit for more, they want to buy more, have more, do better. We’re just conditioned that there’s always this next wrong, this next wrong, this next wrong. And we feel lack when we’re not taking stock of what we already have. So I write everyday gratitude and almost every single day my husband gets the number one slot every day.

Kathy:

[inaudible 00:24:50].

Corinne:

Everyday I write about Chris and why I’m so grateful for him and what it is that I love about him. It helps not only my marriage, but I get to feel very loving first thing in the morning. The next one I write about worthiness everyday. I write about what’s right about me, why I am worthy, why I’m so special. And guys, I did not always feel this way. I have taught myself how to love me. This is not an egotistical moment of Corinne every morning. It felt that way for a long time, it felt very necessary to not be bragging about myself until I realized loving me is not bragging. I’m literally writing in my own damn journal who the fuck’s going to get hurt by Corinne loving herself. No one.

Kathy:

Yeah. You’re giving your brain direction again.

Corinne:

Yeah.

Kathy:

This is how I love myself today. This is why I’m worthy today.

Corinne:

So every single day it’s about worthiness.

Kathy:

Yeah.

Corinne:

And for all of you who are, your self-esteem is in the toilet, this is a necessary step for you in order to be able to lose your weight. People who don’t feel worthy, never finished the weight loss journey. They stall out at some point. People who have a low self-esteem, this is the most common thing that I’ve seen for these people. They have enough willpower to get to a certain point because they’re trying to use misery as a motivation to lose weight. It works for a little while until you get to the point where you’ve had enough success, and it’s really hard for you not to acknowledge it. And when you’ve relied on misery to lose weight, when the misery is gone, you will create misery because that’s what you’re used to. So suddenly you’ll look around in your life and you’ll find miserable things, and you’ll go back to eating over it because you don’t have the misery of being really overweight to drop the weight loss anymore.

Corinne:

So it’s a skill to love yourself, to feel worthy. And it’s a necessary skill of weight loss for the longterm. Diet plans just don’t teach it. But I have noticed the more we double down on love, the more our people keep their weight off. And the more people… We got more people in the century club, the people who’ve lost over a hundred pounds. It’s everyday now, they’re just dropping in my class.

Kathy:

Yeah, I know.

Corinne:

A hundred pounds.

Kathy:

Awesome.

Corinne:

A hundred pounds, a hundred pounds, a hundred pounds. And you don’t even have to have a hundred pounds to work with us. But because I lost a hundred, I typically a lot of people who have lots of weight to lose, definitely want to lose weight with me, especially because the more weight you have to lose, the more and more it’s an emotional issue.

Kathy:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Corinne:

And so goals is the next one. I can’t say it enough. I write my goals down every single day. You can have one goal, you can have five goals whenever you want to have. But I write them down every single day so that I never forget them. So that the more that I do paper thinking about my goals, the more during the day, my brain knows what book to go to when it wants to make an important decision about food. It’s not going to go to the book of Corinne is a piece of shit. And here’s why she should eat this because she wants it. It’s going to go to the book of Corinne loves weighing 150 pounds. And these are the things that she eats to maintain. You need to write your goals down. And when you’re writing your goals, your brain knows how to prioritize them throughout your day because you’re spending time on paper with them.

Corinne:

The other thing, I write down stuff that I’m proud of. I also do some journaling. This is one of my… I will tell you when it comes to what I would call the journaling, where I am going to fix things in my life. My two favorite ways to journal are, I wish this was different and why. That question helps me so much. I have done that work around relationships in my life. I’ve done that around my thighs. I’ve done… I mean, just you name it, I’ve done it. And what it does is when I… Because wishing that something was different, feels very hard. It feels very painful. There’s a yearning. It just doesn’t feel good when we’re just wishing some things were different. But it’s not so much that you want to know that, you want to know why you want it to be different because whatever you list the why’s, then you get to separate like I talked about earlier in paper thinking.

Corinne:

And then you get to challenge it. Do I really like that reason? Does that need to be different in order for me to make any changes in my life? It just opens you up to be able to see things and to be able to question your own thinking, sometimes we want to keep it. I still to this day, wish my thighs were different. I catch myself thinking it all the time. And my why is always because, well, because they look bad. They make me feel bad. And that’s when I noticed that thinking, I can say, “All right, we don’t have to think that they look bad.” I’ve had to really teach myself that they look bad is a way that I think about them, not a real fact. I also get to think about my thighs of like they look great in jeans. My thighs were a size eight. Nobody cares about my thighs like I do.

Corinne:

There’s a thousand things that think about thighs other than I wish they looked different because they look bad or whatever it is. It just opens you up to understand the new thinking that you might want to be having. The other one is about worries. In moments… There’s just times when I’m very worried about things, I write down my worries and I immediately write down what’s in my control around each one of them. Sometimes the only thing in my control around the worry is the amount of time I spend thinking about it. My uncle right now is having a lot of tests run, there’s something going on with his health. There’s zero Corinne can do about this. And so when I worry about my uncle, I always tell myself, “The only thing that’s in your control is how much time you spend thinking about it.” So dedicate some time to think about it. Like one day I told myself, “One of the things that I could think is the only reason why I’m worried is because I love him so much.”

Corinne:

That thought, I can hang on to that one. And I can use that one, that’s in my control and it feels way better than just imagining that he’s dead. So it’s using your journal as a way to think on purpose, as a place to have a soft place to land on the days that you don’t feel so good about yourself or about things, to process. That’s the importance when it comes to journaling, because I promise all of you when it comes to weight loss, if you don’t give yourself the gift of writing about things you love about yourself, things you’re worried about, things that you want to do for you today, the things that might get in your way today. A lot of them sound genuine, here are the things that are going to get in the way of me accomplishing what I want to do. And here’s how I can solve that.

Corinne:

It’s just a way to think through how you want to show up for the day. People who typically have a weight problem, need it more than anyone because your solution through the day for when you feel bad, when you don’t know what to do, when you’re confused, when you’re overwhelmed, when you’re worried, when you’re happy, whatever is, Oh, food’s the answer. I should get a snack, I’m bored. Oh, I’m worried, let’s just go eat chips. It sounds ridiculous when we say it that way, but our brains automatically go there.

Kathy:

That’s the subconscious thinking that you were talking about.

Corinne:

Yeah. It’s the book-

Kathy:

That’s the [inaudible 00:34:27], right.

Corinne:

-A book of when I feel like shit or don’t know how to think, pantry.

Kathy:

Yeah. And that’s what paper thinking, I love that term, that’s what paper thinking actually reveals to you is that subconscious thinking, that stuff that’s going on in the background where you think you’re just in the pantry, there’s a reason you’re there and it’s because your brain thinks that food is going to solve whatever’s going on, right.

Corinne:

And then a lot of times, for a lot of you, your brain is not solving some kind of deep dark hurt. A lot of times it’s just solving, I’m bored, I don’t want to wait an hour. I don’t know how to be patient. A lot of times your brain is solving inpatients. I can’t tell you how many people inside our membership get coached on this every single week. Dinner’s at six, it’s five o’clock, I’m starting to get hungry and their brain starts going, Oh, you’re just going to be overly hungry. You should go ahead and have a snack. Your [inaudible 00:35:29] your dinner. Our brain is impatient. Our brain is like, “I just want to eat something right now.” And I’m so jacked up and I need to eat something right now because you’re sitting there telling the story of, well, you’ll overeat. Well, you know you’ll do this and it’s going to be terrible. And what if you get too hungry? And so that’s stressful.

Corinne:

But if you do enough paper thinking and you notice that’s a habit, guess what? You can write on paper in the morning. Tonight when it’s time to have my hour before dinner, here’s how I want to be thinking. I’m a grown ass woman, if I can’t wait an hour or something else is wrong with me.

Kathy:

And that’s where the thinking on purpose comes in. That’s how you use the paper thinking to decide what you’re going to think on purpose an hour before dinner.

Corinne:

Yeah.

Kathy:

I love it. That’s genius. Corinne.

Corinne:

Thank you. So here’s how I actually do my [inaudible 00:36:28]. I get up in the morning, I get my coffee, in the winter I turn on the fireplace, in the summer, sometimes I just go outside and sit. I plan my food each day. And then I plan my food then I plan my work day. I like to paper think my work day also. I make sure my goals are written down. I make sure that I do my gratitude, that kind of stuff. All of that’s in my… I use the same No BS plan or the other the girls use. I do that one first. I do my business stuff second, and then anything that I want to journal on after that, if I want to journal, I have what I call Corinne’s therapy session. Like this morning, I just woke up in a mood. I was in a mood, my aura ring, O-U-R-A, for all of you who are wondering, you wear this ring and it basically, it tracks all these kinds of different things. And then every morning you pull up your app and it will tell you your readiness for the day.

Corinne:

And I woke up this morning and we’ve had a stressful couple of days. Chris has been sick and we didn’t sleep, but a couple of hours, one night and all this other stuff. And so my aura ring [inaudible 00:37:45] said, “Ready for something fun.” And it said… I think I was at a 96% recovery level and [inaudible 00:37:56] other stuff. I literally looked at my app and I said out loud, “No, I’m not.”

Kathy:

That’s funny.

Corinne:

I was like, “All right. I think my brain’s in the toilet this morning.” I’ve woke up ill. One of the things I did this morning is I wrote, I just wrote out a bunch of stuff. I said, “What right now am I worried about? And what do I wish was different?”

Kathy:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Corinne:

And I had a list of about five things and each one of them next to one, I would just write, here’s how I want to be thinking about this. Now that I understand how I’m currently thinking, here’s how I want to be thinking about it. Here’s things I have control over. You’re the things I don’t have control over. And that’s okay because… I just do a lot of just talking to myself, a lot of times, y’all over-complicate things. I just write my own voice. It’s like, if Kathy came to me and said these things, here’s stuff, I would tell her.

Kathy:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Corinne:

That’s all you got to do. It doesn’t have to be some kind of life coach mantric, it’s a lot simpler than what we give ourselves credit for.

Kathy:

Yeah and I do mine at night.

Corinne:

You do yours at night?

Kathy:

I do mine at night. Just to give the other side of the coin here. It helps me to clear out my brain, to think about the gratitude and the worthiness before I go to sleep at night, it helps me have a good night’s sleep. I wake up feeling like I felt when I went to bed at night, a lot of times. So I do my planning for the next day. I look at how my day went and I decide what tomorrow is going to be before I go to bed at night.

Corinne:

Yeah. I always do mine first thing in the morning. I’m such a toad at night. I cannot, I mean, Chris and I would go to bed about seven o’clock every night [inaudible 00:39:42].

Kathy:

Yeah.

Corinne:

I find… But I also like to wake up super early. So I always find doing mine first thing in the morning is most beneficial. But the key is to do it during a part of the day where you will do it consistently.

Kathy:

Right [inaudible 00:39:58].

Corinne:

And I do mine very consistently, but I literally just plan my food, plan my work day, clean out my brain a little bit. It takes some days like three to five minutes. My food planning doesn’t… To even fill out the entire sheet, doesn’t take that long. And one of the things that I do, so for all of the No BS members, you have two pages for your planner. You have the, this is the plan for the day, this is the assessment of the previous day. I always assess first. Then I turn the page and then I plan for the next day. That in all, only usually takes me three minutes, five minutes if I’m wordy. But I’m only getting wordy on the days, I want to be wordy. I don’t make myself be wordy, some days it’s super fast. If I’m in a hurry and unless I… I just want to get the food down. I skip all the other questions.

Corinne:

It’s whatever you want to do, that feels right and gets you in that consistent habit is the most important part. And then when I’m done with journaling, I’m just done. That’s it. Sometimes I will sit there for about 30 minutes. I will write like lots of goals, ideas I have, I will write. If I’m wanting to do a new exercise plan, I might do, I might write out the exercise plan and do a lot of why it’s important to me to start this one, what I’m most looking forward to, what excuses might get in my way and what am I going to tell myself anyway, I do a lot of that too. All right. Anything else you want to add?

Kathy:

No, I think it’s really key to know that this doesn’t take a lot of time. You can make it take as much time as you want, or you can make it take as little time as you need. It’s a habit that I’ve developed over the past three or four years that I really miss. And I get really… My brain wants me to remember it because it’s so good. It’s so good for me to think about, especially the gratitude and the things that have gone right.

Corinne:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). All right, everybody, that’s it. If you like this podcast, please make sure that you screenshot the episode posted on your social, use #NoBSwoman. You never know when we’re going to find you and share you on our social. And share it with some friends. This is important topics that I think a lot of women want to know. They want to know, how do I get out of my own way? How do I actually… All right we’ll make a plan. How do you actually do that? So y’all have a good week. We’ll talk to you later.