SPEAKER_01 0:12

Hello and welcome back to Empower Your Menopause, the podcast where we bust myths, share strategies and empower women to thrive thrive in this next phase of life. It's Coach James here with my partner in crime, Coach Julie, and today we're going to dive into a topic that has affected probably most of us at one point or another. So if you've ever felt like you're crushing life or totally failing at it with no middle ground, like you don't have time for a 60-minute workout, then why bother moving at all? Or you had one cookie or biscuit and it's ruined your diet, and you might as well call it a cheat week. But if all those sound familiar, welcome to the All or Nothing Club. Population of that club is probably way too many of us. But here's the good news you can escape it. It starts with something that we call PMA. Now, unlike other coaches, we don't talk about positive mental attitude. Well, we might do at times, but really this is more about positive, messy action. Positive messy action is all about ditching perfection and embracing tiny imperfect steps forward. Because spoiler alert, motivation doesn't come first, but action does. And those baby steps, that's exactly where the magic happens. So settle in for this episode of Empower Your Menipause, where we're going to unpack why all or nothing thinking gets you absolutely nowhere at this phase in your life, how to embrace progress over perfection, and why messy action beats no action every time. So, Julie, why don't we talk a little bit about what all or nothing thinking actually is? How does it manifest itself? Is there a psychological definition of this that we've dug up?

SPEAKER_00 1:54

Oh, yes. Well, we've, you know, we we all as expert coaches, we've dealt with this quite a lot with our clients and we talk about it quite a lot. But instead of just talking about it, we decided to actually dig into some of the research because there is science behind this phenomenon as well, if you if you want to call it that. So we found that according to cognitive behavioral therapy, all or nothing thinking, here's the definition, also known as black and white thinking, is a cognitive distortion where individuals perceive situations in extremes without recognizing the middle ground. For example, believing that a single mistake means total failure or that anything less than perfection is unacceptable. This mindset can lead to procrastination, fear of failure, and avoidance behavior. So, what does that mean in plain English? It's a mental trap that basically says, if I can't do it all perfectly right now, I'm not even going to try. So things like that, James mentioned a bit earlier, skipping your workout because you didn't have time to do a full session rather than doing a little bit of movement or eating one, you know, cheat meal or bad meal and deciding that the whole day or week or month is ruined. No, postponing starting something new until all the planets align, until everything in the situation is perfect. And, you know, we've we've got plenty of client examples and personal examples as well, really, because who isn't at some point kind of a struggling perfectionist? I call myself a recovering perfectionist because I've dealt with this quite a lot myself. So, you know, let's let's talk about some of the some of the situations where we've where we've worked with people like this. James, do you want to do you want to start?

SPEAKER_01 3:49

Well, I had one just this week, actually. Um I won't mention her name, but she probably knows who she is when she's when she's listening to this. I did a piece on our social channels about this yesterday as well. So many people took up this idea of dry January, uh, an alcohol-free month to start the year off. And so did this client of ours, and she'd also tried to make lots of other changes to her lifestyle at the same time. She was eating better, uh, she was doing better, she was moving more, she was going out, and instead of a dog walks with a dog just being sort of like you know, little tootles along, she was making them more intentional. So she went through the whole month making some really, really great strides. And even before the end of the month, she'd said to us, you know, I know that the end of the month is going to be tricky. So she'd recognized it was gonna happen even before it happened. But January ended, and her and her peer group, her social group, went out for drinks, and it all came crashing down over the course of a weekend where uh Sunday afternoon lunch turned into a really, really boozy session, and that's fine. There's nothing wrong with going out with your friends and enjoying themselves. The the challenge that this particular client had was that it had convinced her that she'd done something wrong, so it wasn't a misstep, it was a now I might as well just put it all in the garbage, put it all in the in the rubbish bin. And we chattered through it, and the truth is that when you get this kind of thinking, when you talk through it with a friend or a coach or somebody who can understand the phenomenon, often it's the chance to reflect on why that thinking occurs, where it comes from, but also to talk you down off the edge if you want. There's absolutely no need for that client to throw everything in the bin, everything in the garbage. And we reflected a little bit over the course of the session on all the important successes she'd had that showed exactly why she could achieve what she wanted to achieve, rather than focusing on this one event that she felt had absolutely curtailed any progress she wanted. And I bring this up a lot with clients that I talk to as part of the one-on-one part of our business. If you ate chocolate every day for a month and you had one plate of salad within that month, that one plate of salad isn't really going to tip you into a healthy lifestyle. So, why is it that we view it the other way around that when we're doing loads of good things and we do one thing that we consider that it doesn't serve us, that our mindset flips on that? And ultimately it's a form of self-sabotage. Yep. We know change is hard, and we know our mind plays tricks on us when it comes to change. And I just think it's a really interesting psychological phenomenon. And as you said, Julie, you know, we all go through it. You and I aren't immune to this kind of stuff at all, or at least we probably were uh less so when um less immune to it when before we started working together, because now we can talk each other down off this idea of trying to do everything perfect, and we can adopt a positive, messy attitude both in our own lives and in our business life as well. How about you? Have you got anyone that comes to mind?

SPEAKER_00 7:19

Yeah, I I do, in fact. Um, I remember working with um uh a lady, we'll call her Linda. She's a 48-year-old executive woman, and you know, she she's was really struggling. We started working together, and one of her big issues was managing portion sizes, and I think that's a common issue for a lot of people. Um, and so we worked to improve her overall health and energy levels through a number of different steps, but portion control, portion sizing uh that's appropriate for her, became a focus and she was doing really well with that. And then she went away, and during her um her time off, she had uh indulged at a buffet, right? So she just went all out and felt like, oh, now I've completely derailed everything, there's no point. Why am I gonna, you know, why why can't I ever be successful at this? And um, we had a similar talk to what you and your client did, just saying that, you know, one one meal isn't a setback. We do these things, we all do, I still do these things and I and I coach people on this. I mean, we're human beings, right? And life presents us with all different kinds of scenarios and situations, and we have very deeply ingrained subconscious memories and beliefs and associations with food and our relationship to food. And sometimes whatever we're feeling, um, it could be celebration, it could be loneliness, it could be a trigger that brings back a difficult memory or you know anything in between. And and a lot of times we we almost unconsciously end up doing these behaviors. What the difficult part of that is what comes when we have this kind of judgment. So in Linda's case, we had to really go work through that and to to help her see that you know one meal isn't going to change your entire life. And that's perfectly okay. And sometimes those meals are intentional, and that's even better because then we can say, I'm choosing this and it's okay. And then you do the next healthy thing, right? So for her, it was finding a sustainable way to live more healthfully while being able to enjoy some of these things that she did. And, you know, in future vacations, she was able to travel and have some indulgences, but not spend the whole vacation just going, you know, completely off the rails. And that's a really good way to learn how to forgive yourself and get back on track and get rid of some of that guilt. I think it's the guilt that makes us feel worse than anything. But what are we guilty of, right? We ate some food, okay.

SPEAKER_01 10:13

I think it's really interesting, isn't it? Because, and maybe we'll do an episode about this at some point. How do you handle vacations? Because for many people, the vacation period is a sort of like turn it off for a week, two weeks, so they can switch off all the healthy habits that they've accumulated over the course of the year, and then they're going to vacation time, and it's like, right, for two weeks, I'm gonna do what the heck what I want, and then it's even harder to come back afterwards and and correct things. So that might be procrastination in a in a in a longer form, but in this more acute form, this idea of all or nothing thinking when it comes to individual events, we do just see it so so often in clinic, isn't it? And I wonder, let's dive into a little bit then. Why does why does this not serve us, Julie? What is it, what is it about it that doesn't help?

SPEAKER_00 11:11

Well, the you know, there's again more research into this. It talks about it has a deep psychological impact. And when we when we live this way from day to day, it can actually lead to depression. We start ruminating over every little mistake that we make, and then we become anxious about the next step and the our future and what we're capable of, right? So it fosters, according to the psychology today, right? This fosters a really harsh view of our experiences. So every perceived failure is is maligned, it we feel worthless and hopeless. And who wants to live like that? But it it's such a it's such a knee-jerk reaction for so many of us because we see, you know, I'll I'll look at or I'll reference like TV shows and maybe not quite so much these days because you get a lot more raw kind of real people in in characters, but generally speaking, television programs and advertisements and social media, all we see is that best face forward of everyone thinking that we have to measure up to these ideals, and they're just not realistic. I mean, who hasn't woken up with their hair sticking out all over the place and you know, pillow marks on your face and having those days, but that's not what you see when you're looking at all these different things, right? You see the nice, shiny, well made up, all put together, and it just may it makes you feel it's easy to feel then. I shouldn't say it makes you feel, but it's easy to feel like everybody else has got it together except for me, right? And then it's that sense of procrastination or perfectionism that leads to procrastination. And I am absolutely recovering perfectionist, so I can attest to this, but it it we delay think doing things because we don't think we're gonna do it well enough. We have this fear of failure. I mean, sometimes we have a fear of success because it it means we have to change uh the way we perceive ourselves, right? It's we we behave in a in a usually uh in alignment with who we see ourselves as, like how we how we see ourselves. So we can end up just really increasing our stress when when we do this. And and I my one of my favorite, um one of my favorite things, I guess, is productive procrastination. Because even though we're busy, busy, busy doing things and this is important, it has to be done, and this is important and it has to be done, a lot of times we're doing these things to avoid the hard thing. So, you know, when it comes to health, well, I need to get rid of all of the unhealthy things in my house, or I have to, you know, I have to clean out and create this perfect environment for myself before I can start my exercise program or you know, whatever it is. And these things feel like we're making progress, but we're actually just putting off what we need to do instead of taking that one step forward, right? And I yeah, I can completely relate to that. How about you?

SPEAKER_01 14:26

Well, my most hated job in the house is emptying the dishwasher. You can bet your bottom dollar if I've got something hard to do that is challenging for me, the first thing I do is go and start emptying the dishwasher. It's absolutely productive procrastination. It's I'm making myself busy so I can stop doing the thing that I really should be doing, or I can put it off for a few minutes later. So we I talked on the post that we put on our socials this week about five sort of like steps, suggested steps where people could put into action to try and reframe this journey and try and make it into a more positive experience. So, number one was acknowledge the fact that maybe you've done something because you've recognized it, so but don't let it take over your mind. I think it's important to always remember that journeys aren't linear. We'd love them to be linear, we'd love them to start, you know, if it was a graph, we'd love it to start low in one corner and end up high in the other corner. But we know that life's not like that, there's just too many things in there. So acknowledge that these bumps in the road are not unexpected at all. In fact, we should expect the bumps, and like you were saying before, if you actually plan the bumps in yourself, how cool is that? Where you can say to yourself, right, this Saturday I am gonna go out with my friends and enjoy a couple of extra glasses of red wine, whatever it may be. And then I think the other thing is to number two, I would say is reframe the situation to shift from I've failed to I've learned. What can you learn about that behavior? How does that behaviour you how did it make you feel, and how can you make that experience of how it makes you feel better the next time it happens? Are there any things you can think of that might help? So, could you change the environment? Could you get in accountability? Could you set yourself some specific intentional goals to say, yeah, on these days I'm gonna let myself off the leash a little bit? I sometimes talk to it as talk about it as though you know those retractable dog leads, you you know, you let the dog and often enjoy itself a little bit, but most of the time you kind of zip it in and have it close to you so that you and the dog are both safe when you're walking down the street. And then, like I spoke about a client I talked about the other day. I think reflecting on progress is really important. What else has happened? We have a really good exercise that we give to some of our clients, it's called looking back, looking forwards, which just actually asks people to reflect on their journey and what they want the rest of their journey to look like. And that can sometimes working through that worksheet can really help clients get a better sense of all that progress doesn't just go out of the window because of one misstep. And then our favourite, of course, is choose action, right? Act action changes things, it is a three-letter acronym. Um, and so whatever those steps are choosing something to do and taking a step back in the right direction, however small it is, and then obviously keep it going just because things haven't happened the way you actually wanted them to, that doesn't mean that it is that massive failure. I don't know whether you've got anything to to add to those, Julie.

SPEAKER_00 17:56

Well, I'd one of the things that I like to think about is okay, I've done this thing that maybe I was trying not to do. Um, not only, as you said, not only thinking about what can I learn from this, but reflecting on it as in how did I feel when I did this? Because if there's some guilt or shame associated with it, there's usually a feeling. But physically, if it was a food indulgence, did I was the food as good as I thought it was going to be? Did it make my body feel good within a couple hours of having eaten it and the next day? Or did I feel bloated and gross? And do I want to feel like that again? Because I think reminding ourselves that these things come with you know a whole spectrum of um experiences. Did I miss a I missed a workout? Okay, so what? Did I did I get some other kind of activity that day? How can I be a little bit more active the next day? Did my body need a rest period? Is that something that actually ended up serving me? Do I need to not feel guilty about that because recovery is just as important as the workouts? And then, you know, we talk about this seriously ad nauseum, but setting micro goals. And there's research behind this. It says breaking tasks into smaller, manageable steps can reduce the overwhelm associated with large projects. It helps you build momentum and creates a sense of accomplishment with each completed step. So, as you were saying, you know, being able to take a step forward, whatever it is, there is no failure in this whole health journey. It's it's feedback we get, it's learning, it's a learning experience. There are things that we skills that maybe we have to develop a little bit. It's a great way, it's a great place to get coaching to help guide you on some of those blind spots. Um, and and celebrating that you took action, especially if it's imperfect action. You know, just talking about um progress over perfection. We need to take action. It's better than not doing anything, right? Because 1% better is still more than zero. Um, and then as you said earlier, the positive messy attitude, right? Embrace the messiness of trying, make it a game, be curious, learn and grow from it. Because why not have fun at the same time if you can, right?

SPEAKER_01 20:36

Yeah. I the the celebrating imperfect action for me is really, really important, particularly for the women that we speak to within our coaching practice, through various things, through the overwhelm of life in general, through the stresses of having perhaps a challenging menopause, through societal pressures that come in. It's very easy to fall into negative thinking in general. And I think sometimes that is the spark for this huge all-or-nothing um reaction to events. And when you congratulate yourself for doing something well, you're just rewiring that negative self-talk a little bit, and I think that is really, really important. Yeah, words that we speak to ourselves matter, um, they matter really, really massively whether they're negative or positive. And the challenge is, of course, is that usually when we indulge in self talk, it's it tends to be on the negative side of things, and we think why should I celebrate something as small and perhaps that I might perceive to make an imperceptible difference, like managing to leave my gym sneakers by the bed at night, so I've put them on. First thing, but that is the first step towards getting up the next day and being ready and putting your sneakers on and actually going in into the gym. So you should absolutely celebrate all these things and give yourself for those micro actions a micro pat on the back each time so you can rewire the neurons in your brain and actually start to overwhelm some of the inherent negativity that some of us have with some more positive thoughts. I think that's that's really really important. So dig dipping into that positive messy attitude, diving in, using it as a learning process, and celebrating the fact that you're willing to do that. I think all those things are really, really important. Now I know you've been doing a lot of research into this today, Julie. So and you came up with a surprising fact within your research. So I wonder if you want to share that with everybody.

SPEAKER_00 23:00

Yeah, I did. And this this was a little bit of a slap in the face because I was having one of those days where I was thinking, I have all of this stuff, how am I going to get it all done? And then I realized that, you know, this can wait, that can wait, and and having to let go of that expectation of doing it all and doing it all perfectly. Um, perfectionists have a higher risk of eating disorders, anxiety, and depression. Um, and this is a research done by the National Institutes of Health. There's a scholarly paper that I found. It says such a life is riddled with fear and extreme caution, which stunts creativity, joy, inspiration, and even productivity. And I for for those most people I talk to, they want to feel inspired. They want to feel productive, they want to express themselves and be creative and especially joy. We need more joy in our lives, and perfectionism is the killer of joy, right? It's the killer of progress, generally speaking. So I just found that interesting. If you think about all of the anxiety and depression and people on medication for those things, I wonder how much of it is tied back to these unreasonable and unrealistic expectations we have of ourselves. And especially when we talk about women in the menopause journey, because we we feel like we have to do it all, we feel like we have to manage it all. We've got families, we've got jobs, we've got households, we've got maybe we've got kids or pets and communities and school events and you know what have you. Um, and and we kind of lose ourselves in the midst of all of that. So if you're feeling any of these things, take a might be a good time to take a look and see where can I let go of the reins a little bit? You know, where can I make good enough okay?

SPEAKER_01 24:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:55

I think that's a big help.

SPEAKER_01 24:57

Let's chat through just a few practical tips to finish off then, then kind of like trying to distill some of the things we've talked about. So starting with one small action where anything counts, it can really overcome this idea of inertia from procrastination, help you build momentum. Having some kind of mantra is always a good idea, you know, reminding yourself that done is better than perfect or progress, not perfection is really, really good. One of the things that I was actually taught when I did my master's degree in nutrition was to always work with clients on an 80-20 rule when it comes to their food. So 80% of the time you're trying to do the right thing, and 20% of the time you can allow yourself that little bit of loosening of the leash. So, you know, the concept of good enough is actually a really great foundation for what can be excellent results. I know that when I was a kid at school and I was sitting exams and things like that, if somebody had said to me that I'd get it right 80% of the time, I would absolutely be happy with that. I didn't want to hit 100% in every single exam that I did. So why should we not view a health journey in the same way and allow ourselves that 20% of messing up? Because no perfectionism does perfection doesn't exist, so it's almost impossible when it comes to something like this. And then if you need some help, jump into our Facebook group. Uh, you can find that obviously on Facebook. We'll put the links links below. Um, and put a habit in there that you want to track, and we'll help you track it. We're currently doing a a great squat challenge in there that Julie came up with, where start with one squat a day, then two squats, three squats, four squats, and by the end of it, um, I think people will have done 300 squats. Is that right, Julie?

SPEAKER_00 26:46

Well, the the last day, it's a hundred days squat challenge. So the last day they'll do 100 squats, but over the course of the entire challenge, they will have done 2,050 squats.

SPEAKER_01 26:56

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 26:57

By adding one squat per day.

SPEAKER_01 26:59

So so simple, pretty impressive, but really impressive. So dive into our Facebook group and join in there with a conversation. You can ask questions of Julie and myself in there. You can track habits in there if you want. There's people who will hold you accountable, including us two. So do join us in there. The other thing, of course, that you can do is if you want, you can book a one-to-one call with either myself or Julie. Uh our free roadmap call, which no sales, it's about getting you to a starting place on your menopausal journey. And to do that, we'll look at where you want to get to, we'll look at what's serving you right now, and we'll look at what's not serving you. And it's there that we'll step in and give you some tips to get going if you feel as though you're blocked. So, once again, the link to that will be in the show notes. Julie, I've talked loads today. I'm gonna let you say goodbye to everybody before we head off.

SPEAKER_00 27:58

Yeah. Well, great. And I I we would love to we'd love to see you in the Facebook group. We would love to connect with you and make a call. Um, please be sure to like and subscribe and share so we can bring this podcast to a greater audience. And we'll be back again next week with some more great information for you. And in the meantime, this is Julian James reminding you to stay strong and stay fabulous.

SPEAKER_01 28:25

See you next time, everybody.