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Jan. 12, 2024

275. Shift Your Mind, Change Your Life: Paths to Happiness with Dr. Joe Parent

275. Shift Your Mind, Change Your Life: Paths to Happiness with Dr. Joe Parent

Happiness Solved with Sandee Sgarlata. In this episode, Sandee interviews Dr. Joe Parent. Dr. Joe Parent is the Best-Selling Author of ZEN GOLF: Mastering the Mental Game, ZEN TENNIS: Playing in the Zone, THE BEST DIET BOOK EVER: The Zen of Losing...

Happiness Solved with Sandee Sgarlata. In this episode, Sandee interviews Dr. Joe Parent. Dr. Joe Parent is the Best-Selling Author of ZEN GOLF: Mastering the Mental Game, ZEN TENNIS: Playing in the Zone, THE BEST DIET BOOK EVER: The Zen of Losing Weight, and A WALK IN THE WOOD: Meditations on Mindfulness with a Bear Named Pooh. He is a Performance Psychology and Applied Mindfulness expert who has coached athletes, actors, artists, and executives, as well as consulting with businesses and organizations for more than 30 years. Dr. Parent offers business keynotes, workshops, and executive coaching in Performance Psychology and Applied Mindfulness, as well as Zen Golf Lessons, at the Ojai Valley Inn and by video meeting for clients all over the world. For booking, please visit his website DrJoeParent.com. Dr. Joe also hosts regular ZOOM sessions, offering free teachings and guided instruction in the practices of mindfulness and compassion meditations to help people all over the world make it through these challenging times. You can also find him on YouTube, Instagram, FaceBook, and LinkedIn.

Connect with Dr. Joe : https://www.drjoeparent.com/services-1

https://www.drjoeparent.com/products

Connect with Sandee www.sandeesgarlata.com

Podcast: www.happinesssolved.com

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Transcript

00:00:10
This is happiness solved with America's happiness coach, Sandee Sgarlata.

00:00:20
Hey there, and thank you so much. For joining us today. I am so happy you're here. How happiness solved is the place where we explore everything you need to become the best possible version of you. I'm your host, Sandee Sgarlata, and today I've got some exciting news for our dedicated listeners.

00:00:38
We've just launched our exclusive members only portal. This is your ticket to a world of additional content designed to deepen your understanding and engagement with a happiness solved mission. So what can you expect as a member? First, access to a treasure trove of extra podcast episodes. These episodes dive deeper into the topics we discuss, featuring additional expert interviews only found here.

00:01:05
But that's not all. As a member, you'll also get access to monthly group coaching sessions. These Zoom calls are tailored to help you understand the how and why your mindset is the most important asset you have, empowering you to achieve your personal and professional goals. These calls will be recorded and accessible in the exclusive membership portal. And for those of you looking to find a moment of peace in your busy lives, we've got something extra special for you.

00:01:36
Exclusive guided meditations. These sessions are crafted to help you relax, refocus and recharge. Whether you're a meditation guru or just starting out, there's something here for everyone. Becoming a member is more than just accessing extra content. It's about joining a community of like minded individuals, all on a journey to live life to its fullest and become the best possible version of you.

00:02:04
So how can you join? It's simple. Go to GLoW FM happinesssolved and sign up again. Go to glow fmhappinesssolved. That is Glow FM happinesssolved.

00:02:22
Don't miss out on this opportunity to deepen your journey with us. I am so grateful that you are a part of our happiness solve family, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your ongoing support. Now, let's dive into today's episode where I will be having an amazing conversation. With yet another rock star. Oh, and remember, happiness is a choice, and the choice is yours.

00:02:49
Dr. Joe parent, it's such a pleasure and an honor to have you here today. How are you? I'm great. It's so nice to be here.

00:02:57
And nice to meet you, Sandee. Yeah. And I love your background. So if you get a chance to watch this on YouTube, that is Dr. Joe's real background that's behind him.

00:03:09
And it almost looks like you can see like the full moon or something, right? Not the. This is a picture of the town where I live, which is Ohio. Okay. It's the mountains and it's the moon early in the evening in Ohio, California.

00:03:28
It's gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous. Yeah. All right. So for the audience, Dr.

00:03:33
Joe Parent is a bestselling author of Zen golf, mastering the mental game, Zen tennis, playing in the zone, the best book ever, the Zen of losing weight, and a walk in the wood meditations on mindfulness with a bear named Pooh. And you're a performance psychology and applied mindfulness expert. And I love that you coach athletes, actors, artists, executives, and consults with businesses. And what a great profession to be in. Well, thank you so much.

00:04:03
When we talk about performance psychology, it just applies to actual performances that athletes and artists, performing artists have. But it's also the performance of leading a meeting, of giving a talk to a group, a business group, and then it's how we perform everything that we do in our lives. And what we want to do with mindfulness practice is become an artist of everyday life so that we live artfully, we live creatively, we live fully experiencing the present. And basically my message, what I do for anybody in any field is I help you get out of your own way to get the most out of your abilities. I love that.

00:05:01
So we're going to talk more about this because you do a lot of the same things that I'm doing. It's just I don't have a phd, but I want to hear your story because I love to know how you got to where you are today. I'm guessing you play golf and tennis. Just guessing. If you wrote a book about that, how did you get to where you are today?

00:05:22
And what is that thing that drives you? Well, let's go back many decades. I was always interested in the bigger picture, and so I was interested in different kinds of spirituality. As a teenager, I would go to my friends churches. When the Mormon missionaries knocked on the door, we invited them in.

00:05:48
I wanted to learn about all these different things, kind of the big picture, not just body, not just mind and body, but mind, body and spirit. Right.

00:06:02
I went to college basically in the field that my father was in, which is engineering. And then at a certain point, I kind of had a conversation with myself and I said, well, what do you really want to do? I don't really want to be like my father. And I said, what am I really interested in? And I'm interested in why I do the crazy things I do and other people do the crazy things they do.

00:06:29
And I knew I didn't mean crazy. Crazy. Just self defeating things, that. Right? And I said, well, that sounds like psychology, so maybe I should go over and major in psychology.

00:06:40
I actually had that conversation with myself and immediately changed colleges. I was at Cornell, and you had to go to a different college from engineering to the college where arts and sciences, where psychology was. My parents weren't that thrilled, but that's what I wanted to do. So that became my direction. To understand myself, to understand others, and try to be a happier and better person and help others be happier and better people.

00:07:15
Not long after that, I guess after my sophomore year, that was the start of my sophomore year. About a year later, I encountered some of the teachings of Buddhism. A friend of mine, this will betray the language of the late 60s. We were rapping about the meaning of life, and he said, I got this cool book. And I said, lay it on me.

00:07:38
So that's our old hippie language. And as I was reading it, I was going, well, that makes sense. That makes sense. Already think that. Already think that.

00:07:48
That makes sense. That makes sense. And I finished the book, and I said, I'm a Buddhist. I'm already a Buddhist, and I didn't even know it. I brought Buddhism and western psychology together, and that's really where everything that I teach comes from.

00:08:03
The eastern wisdom understanding of mind, and the western psychology understanding of mind merged.

00:08:15
It. I love it. So I'm a retired us national and international figure skating coach, and I've been a life coach, certified life coach since 2004. I have a gold medal in ice dancing. And so I always love talking to anybody that is an athlete, has a book for athletes, whatnot.

00:08:39
So for me, I never even considered working with athletes on their mindset, because, I don't know, I think I had this limiting belief that you had to be a sports psychologist. Right, in order to work with athletes. But I ended up getting recruited by a local international training facility, and I'm working with some of their ice dancing teams. And it is just the most rewarding thing I've ever done, especially when, like, two days ago, one of my clients, their moms, they're twelve and 15, they just competed at nationals at their level, and they got second place. And they're like, thank you, Sandee.

00:09:19
And I'm like, oh, my gosh, second place. That's awesome. Exciting. It is. It's so incredible.

00:09:28
I couldn't wait for this conversation because just Zen of golf. Yeah, okay, I'm a tennis player, so the Zen of tennis, I'm like, ooh. But what was it? So I'm guessing you play both of those sports, obviously. Right.

00:09:42
You're in southern California, so that's a perfect place because you can play tennis year round. Unlike me in northern Virginia, I can't play tennis outdoors year round. So why was it that you wanted to put these books out? What was it about mastering that mental game with golf and then playing in the zone with tennis? Right.

00:10:03
And you just mentioned the subtitles. Zen golf. The subtitle is mastering the mental game, and Zen tennis is playing in the zone. But before that, I want to pay homage to two athletes that were my favorites years and years ago, Torville and Dean. Oh, greatest ice dancing pairs from Britain.

00:10:24
Yes. I loved watching them in the Olympics, so I really do appreciate what you do. Oh, thank you. And just real quick to shout out to one of my best friends on the planet, Daphne Doffney is her name. I forget what her name was, her maiden name, but she and her partner were ice dancers.

00:10:47
They competed with Torville and Dean in Great Britain, and they never really made it to the Olympics because of Torville and. But she was. They were always second to Torville and Dean. And so, yeah, small world. Well, you are a performance coach.

00:11:04
If you're a life coach, you're a performance coach. That's right. And coaching the skaters and ice dancers, the books came out of my work in golf, particularly. One of my closest buddhist teachers took up the game late in life. So we became very close and played a lot of golf together.

00:11:34
I played all sports, football, wrestling, track, tennis, baseball. And golf was the only unorganized sport that I played during the summer. But when we would play, we talk about how mindfulness, how meditation, how awareness connects with golf.

00:11:58
And it really spurred me on. And I met a young man at one of the buddhist programs I was teaching on buddhist psychology that was going to become an assistant pro. We went on the golf course and he said, tell me what my mind is doing when I'm playing golf. I said, I'll tell you what your mind is doing. You tell me what my body is doing.

00:12:22
And we became a team where he would teach the physical game and I would teach the mental game. And he set up his business, invited me to do clinics together. And then at a certain point, people were saying, well, we want to do more of this mental game of golf. So I started teaching that on my own and writing some articles. And a literary agent met me and said, this is really, she said, buddhism and golf.

00:12:58
That's really hot. And so she was able to help me write a proposal and double day publish Zengolf over 20 years ago. Oh, wow. Still doing well. Because it was written to be evergreen, which means I didn't put a lot of dates and stories from particular incidents.

00:13:21
But the mind doesn't change. That's right. We work with the mind. And again, for Zen golf, what I presented, and I present this in Zen tennis, too, how you prepare for what you're going to do, how you perform with as much presence and commitment as you can. And then how do you respond to the results so that you learn from what you did, so that your performance next time improves?

00:13:51
And they call that Kaizen, or the path of continuous improvement. So, to start with, when you approach anything, look at the dimensions of clarity, commitment and composure. I call it the three c's. Three c's? Yeah.

00:14:08
Okay. Do I have a clear picture of what I do want to accomplish, or am I worried about what could go wrong? Focus on what you do want to accomplish. Do I have commitment to that or do I have second thoughts? Clear away the doubts.

00:14:25
And if you can't clear away the doubts, you better make a different plan that you can commit to. Right. Like if you're training the ice skaters and there's a jump that they just are too afraid of, you say, let's not put that in the routine until you believe in yourselves. That's right. And the last is composure.

00:14:47
And we work with the breathing a lot. So if people are listening to or watching, they can do this along with me. Take a full breath in through. And you want to breathe mainly in through your nose, unless you have sinus problems, like somebody I know. And if you breathe out, it can come out both your mouth and your nose.

00:15:08
But breathe in through your nose and take a full breath in. And then slowly let it out. And let yourself sink down and feel the chair or the ground underneath you. And do it again. Full breath in.

00:15:23
As you breathe out, drop down. Drop your awareness down deep into your core. Feel the ground or the seat beneath you. Notice how quiet your mind got moved out of your head and into your body. That's composure, present mind.

00:15:44
Not drifting off into the past or future or someplace else, but fully present to your experience, which is the definition of Zen action, with awareness fully present to the moment. So use your breathing to anchor you in that, and that's your preparation. From there, you can perform and let your talent shine. Stay out of your own way and get the most out of your abilities. And afterward, you reflect.

00:16:17
You reflect on how fully was I committed? Was I really ready and composed before I started did I have a clear picture of what I was trying to accomplish? And then you set your intentions to improve on the next one. So for golf, I call that preparation, action and response to results, or the par system.

00:16:45
For tennis, you plan, you perform, and then you reset. Yeah, it's all the same. And you do that in any performance that you do has a beginning, a middle, your preparation, your performance, and then how you learn from that, that's what we want to do. The key is people usually think, I've got these problems and I need to become a better person to accomplish what I want to accomplish. It's really the other way around.

00:17:21
You're already a good person. You already have a certain level of talent and ability. You need to get out of your own way and remove the excess. Can I tell a little story that's kind of the signature story of Zen golf? Please.

00:17:35
Yeah. And I can make this a young boy or a young girl for you. Let's make it a young girl. She had a statue, a little clay statue that was a family heirloom. And she loved that little statue, but she always wished that it was made of gold.

00:17:53
And so when she earned some money doing little jobs, she saved her money until she could go to a jewelry store and get her statue gold plated. Now she had a beautiful little gold statue. Everybody was, complimented her on it. But gold doesn't stick to gold leaf or gold plate doesn't stick to clay very well. So it kept rubbing off.

00:18:21
And she had to use all her time and energy to keep earning money to repair the facade of her gold statue. One day her Grandmother came from a trip of many. She was away for a long, long time. And little girl was excited about showing the statue, but embarrassed saying, and I'm going to get it fixed because there were splotches of clay showing through. And the grandmother took the statue lovingly and moistened her handkerchief and rubbed a little where the clay was showing through.

00:18:54
And where she rubbed the clay away, a bright yellow color shined. And she said, look here, you never had to cover your statue in gold. You just needed to remove the clay to reveal the solid gold statue that you possessed all along. Wow. Yeah.

00:19:13
A little teary when I tell the story. Because the point is, that's who we are, right? Our nature. We are the gold. We've just been covered up with things that people have told us that have made us feel diminished with things that failures that we had, that we were embarrassed about and covered over that.

00:19:40
And so instead of trying to add more on to who we are. We just need to remove the excess and reveal that solid gold that is our heart already. What a beautiful story. I love that. I love that story.

00:19:59
All right, here's a little nugget for your audience, okay? And when I teach my students in their performance, I say, you see, you're thinking all about this technique stuff instead of trusting that you already know it. So instead of just going in and trusting your instincts, you keep adding more thoughts on to what you're doing, and you keep adding more on. And I call that moron performance because you keep adding more on. If you just get out of the way and let your talent shine through, that's when you're going to perform your best.

00:20:44
It's another metaphor. The sun is always shining. You don't have to create a new sun. Just part the clouds. Part the clouds of doubt and lack of commitment, and you will perform like the sun is shining.

00:21:00
Love it. You've already dropped so many golden nuggets today, so thank you. I really appreciate that. Because as I told you before we started recording, that's my goal here, is to give the audience as much great stuff that they can apply right now. So here's the interesting thing.

00:21:18
Because when I analyze my own behavior, because I'm a very high performer, high achiever, which has served me well in life. However, the issue with that is when you're a high performer, high achiever, you tend to be really hard on yourself, right? Because it's never enough. Never enough. No.

00:21:38
Got to do more. Got to do more. So why is it, is there anything, and this is going to tap into your psychology PhD? Is there something in there that we all possess that makes us, or where we allow ourselves to do that? Or is it really just the ego that everybody has and it's just part of our DNA.

00:22:03
I just want to get your take on it. It's not part of our DNA. It's the ego that the ego centered ideas that everybody has developed. Ego is a funny word. Yeah, because we do have individuality.

00:22:23
It's the self centeredness and the preoccupation with how am I doing according to some standard that I've set for myself? How am I doing according to the standard that I imagine others have for me? And all of that is adding more on.

00:22:42
Basically, you're telling me I'm a moron. Right to the simple situation that we're facing. So here's a little nugget. Take your sport or whatever your business, whatever endeavor you're engaged in. Take that seriously.

00:23:00
But don't take yourself so seriously. Right. And have a sense of humor about the fact that we are all striving to be perfect and that that's impossible to reach. Right. See, the perfectionism is a two edged sword.

00:23:18
It motivates you. And we want to use that to become better, but we don't want to use it to punish ourselves. Right.

00:23:30
I've got a little exercise for you, okay? Think of your best friend. Okay? And she made a mistake and is feeling bad about the fact that she did that. And you want to be supportive.

00:23:46
Right? So let's do and say, that's okay, Daphne. Everybody makes mistakes. Right? Go ahead and say that.

00:24:01
Yeah, that's okay, Daphne. Everybody makes mistakes. Great. Now you're going to say the same sentence, but we're going to put the name Sandee in there. It's okay, Sandee.

00:24:11
Everybody makes mistakes. That was a little harder. Wasn't.

00:24:18
So you're like. And I almost want to be like, it's okay, Sandee. Yes.

00:24:26
Isn't that interesting? So we can just be aware of. It's just being aware. It's being mindful of it and understanding. I don't want to treat myself that way.

00:24:38
It doesn't benefit us. We learned when we were little kids, our parents, with all their good intentions, when we did something wrong, they would scold us or punish us. And so we learned, oh, if I make a mistake, I should be punished, because that's for my own good. Well, guess what? When our parents aren't there, guess what we do?

00:25:01
We take on the job, right? And sometimes we do such a good job that our parents would be very proud of us for how much we punish ourselves when we make a mistake. We don't need to do that. It's not our voice. It's so be kinder to yourself.

00:25:20
Make friends with yourself. Accept your successes and your shortcomings and say, I accept it. That doesn't mean I can't change. But if I don't accept it, I won't change. Right?

00:25:34
Yeah. Love that. And I usually tell people when I'm doing a session on this same type of topic, talk to yourself like you would talk to a child that's upset. Right. With kindness.

00:25:50
And it's easier said than done sometimes, Dr. Joe.

00:25:56
That's right. Yeah. And like you would your best friend. Absolutely. And accepting.

00:26:03
And what I find for me is it's just a matter of, I have to catch myself in the moment. Right? Exactly. And I catch myself in the moment. And what I found I would notice when I was waiting for my coffee was dripping out of the keurig.

00:26:20
Be like, okay, I didn't do this yesterday. I didn't do this. I didn't do that. And I was like, stop. Wow, look what you did do yesterday.

00:26:28
And I start doing that more and more. And so we sometimes do revert back into old behaviors, and that's okay. You just become aware of it and recognize it and focus on all the things I did do well and what I did get accomplished. And that kind of helps me to shift that dialogue a little bit. Well, this is what I wanted to present in the book, a walk in the wood meditations on mindfulness with a bear named Poo.

00:26:55
Yeah. And also on my diet book, I just had some fun with it. I called it the best diet book ever because I wanted people to. When they google, if they do a search for best diet book, oh, it's going to come up because that's the title. But it's the zen of losing weight.

00:27:13
And so for both of those, and particularly for the Winnie the Pooh book, it's for families and it's for parents and children to read together, to learn how to be confident, to be more curious than afraid, to be kind to each other and to learn how to be kind to oneself so that you can be your own best friend and learn and grow in that know. We've gotten such good feedback because people love Winnie the Pooh. And my sister and I wrote it together, new stories of Winnie the Pooh. And then after each story, I give instruction on mindfulness and the practice of perception in nature, developing gratitude, developing confidence, all of these values that we all want to grow as a family together. That's beautiful.

00:28:21
I love that. So I wanted to talk a little bit about tennis just real quick, just because. And most of my listeners know and all my friends, of course, I'm obsessed with tennis. I didn't start playing until six years ago. I sort of put the hopes aside of ever making it to Wimbledon.

00:28:41
But, you know, who knows, right? I love to joke about it, but I tell you, if there was a way, I'm 58 years old, so if there was a way a 58 year old could play in Wimbledon, I would figure it out and I would try to do it. But what I love about tennis, other than the fact it's so much fun to watch, and it's just to watch some of these amazing plays, they just had the men's final on. And watching Djokovic just, oh, my gosh, he's, like, superhuman. But here's the thing, and I use this example a lot with my clients.

00:29:15
And that's why you said with tennis you had two things, but the last one was reset. I forget the first two, but the last one was reset. And that's the thing about tennis that I love is the big, because at the end of every point you have to reset and it's so hard to do, and you see these guys doing it out there. It's even harder to put it into practice when you're an amateur thinking that you could be a pro someday. Right.

00:29:43
Which is how my mind works. But what is it with the tennis players? Because you look at somebody like Novak Djokovic, okay, and it was last year, I believe it was in the French Open, but I could be wrong. He lost the first two sets. He took a bathroom break, came back and won the next three and won the grand slam title.

00:30:11
I believe it was the final. Could be wrong. The announcer afterwards said, okay, so you took a bathroom break. What did you do? And he goes, well, I did have to relieve myself, but I had to have a conversation with myself.

00:30:25
I looked in the mirror and I had to have a conversation with myself. I knew it was going to be look in the mirror. So here's what I want to know. If someone like Novak Djokovic, which arguably, I think, could go down as the greatest athlete of all time considering the travel, the length of the season, what he's know all of that stuff. Yes.

00:30:49
How is it that our minds that someone like Novak Djokovic has to take a break and look himself in the mirror and give himself a pep talk so that he can get back out there and win? Sometimes, especially when we are performing well, we take our process for granted, okay, and get a little sloppy. We lose focus.

00:31:21
We sometimes get ahead of ourselves at whatever level. I remember one Masters tournament where Jack Nicholas was in the lead and he was walking up the fairway and he started thinking about what his acceptance speech was going to be. And he actually gave himself a little slap on the cheek and said, wake up, jack, there's still more golf to be played. That's right.

00:31:53
So there's a couple more shots to hit. So those things happen to everybody at every level. The skill is to know that these things happen and to catch it like Jack did and wake up, a little wake up call. And sometimes great athletes who are kind of coasting and don't even realize they're coasting when the other person gets ahead or they start falling behind the level that their time or their score on their performance, they go wait a minute. I need to up my game, right?

00:32:42
And increase the focus and increase the intensity and really tune into my process. And so, yes, it happens at all levels. And the key is to recognize it. And the resetting goes back to what I was saying. Resetting is not fixing something that's gone wrong, because otherwise you start fixing one thing and then you start fixing another, and you keep adding more fixes on, and that's adding more on.

00:33:17
So what we want to do is say, okay, what's in the way here? Okay. Clear it out. You know how to do.

00:33:29
I wasn't in the bathroom at the time, but he may have said, hey, you're playing to not make mistakes. And just assuming that he's going to make enough mistakes and you'll be fine, start playing to win and stop playing to not lose. Right. Big mind shift reset there. That's it.

00:33:53
Yeah. Because if you're playing to not lose, it's a whole different energetic energy around playing to win. Yeah. The prevent defense often prevents winning. Right.

00:34:07
Love it. Okay, last thing I want to ask you about is the best diet book, the Zen of losing weight. Did I say that correctly? Right. Yes, the zen of losing weight.

00:34:19
Is there a zen of losing? There is, and I'd like to know what is the zen of losing weight? Because I feel like the interesting thing is there are no recipes. Okay. No menus in it, because everybody's so different.

00:34:34
Right. The real key is making friends with yourself.

00:34:42
Okay. The second is being mindful of your choices and being mindful of your intention and your goals.

00:34:57
But you have to do that within the context of being friendly to ourselves, because we all slip. Yes, we do. And then within that, say, okay.

00:35:09
And basically, it's not revolutionary. Take less in, burn more up. Right. Exactly. Changing your habits.

00:35:21
The key is tracking and noticing what you're doing, but setting your goals and setting reasonable, reachable goals. Right. If you set a goal of losing 20 pounds, it's so far in the future, it's really not very workable. If you say, okay, I'm going to lose two pounds in the next month. And then you track and you're aware of eating more, eating less.

00:35:50
But it really started with, I decided to lose some weight. And my teacher noticed that I'd lost some weight, and he said, how did you do it? And I said, it's called the say no diet. I just started saying no to seconds. Yeah.

00:36:10
I just stopped taking seconds. And then that developed into other habits. Okay, take a half a portion and then wait. Go to a restaurant ask for the togo box when the food is served and put half of your meal in the togo box.

00:36:34
Okay. Because momentum eating happens. There are all these techniques in the book that are very simple and very painless to change the thing, if you use a slightly smaller plate, you can fill that plate and you'd have your big plate and you go, well, that doesn't look like very much. You take your salad plate and put your entree on it and you go, wow, I can't fit it all on here. This is great.

00:37:03
It's mental. It's all mental. So you change your habits in that way and start to move little by little in that direction, because you have to ask the question, can a mouse eat an elephant? Yeah, one bite at a time. Right.

00:37:25
So be kind to yourself. Accept where you are and what you do and notice your habits and pick ones that you can change and do a little bit less of. So it's not punishing you. Well. And also, I like the fact that you're not going to become 10% better in one day in anything that you're doing.

00:37:48
I talk a lot with my clients about just shoot for 1% if you can just be 1% better every day. Right. And the same is for losing weight. I love that. Okay, let's just set a goal of losing two pounds in one month.

00:38:00
And who knows, maybe you'll lose five. Right. And it's really nice because then that becomes the norm. Right? And you say, okay, so I've gone from 140 to 138.

00:38:16
Great. Okay, so now if I see the scale go to 141, I need to tighten things up a little bit. Yes. If I see it go to 137. Well, now I can shift my range.

00:38:33
You see, you use a range. You don't have a specific one. You have a range that you're going to move it some days. What's weird is you eat a lot of salty food on one day and you retain a lot of water, and it looks like you gained weight. That's right.

00:38:48
The next day. So our weight fluctuates, but have a range and just slide that range down little by little. So you get near the top of the range. Yeah, you tighten things up a little bit. You get near the bottom of the range.

00:39:02
You can relax a little bit and then just slide it down little by little. But not get punishing yourself if you go up. Yeah. Well, I know women especially are very hard on themselves, but I know some men are as well. This has been such an amazing conversation, and I could talk to you for hours about all of this stuff, but is there anything else that you'd like to share with the audience before we finish up?

00:39:33
I think that the main thing goes back to being kind to yourself and seeing yourself as basically good with things that are covering that up and not feeling like you need to add. To be a better person, you need to clear the interference and let that great person that you are shine through. Beautifully said. Dr. Joe, thank you so much for joining me today.

00:40:06
Thank you to the audience. You can find out where to reach Dr. Joe in the show notes and also follow him on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn as well. So thank you again. It's really been a pleasure.

00:40:21
Wonderful talking with you, Sandee. Bye.

00:40:35
What a great conversation and thank you again for listening today. If you're enjoying the content, please subscribe, like and review. And if you're eager for more content, go to glow fm happiness solved and join our exclusive membership portal. I also invite you to follow me on Instagram and Facebook at coach Sandee Sgarlata. Again, I am so grateful for you and I hope that you and your family are healthy and safe and that your lives are filled with peace, joy and happiness.

00:41:05
Take care, everyone.