You Can’t Change Unless You Change

Paul Salter:

You can’t change unless you change. Let that sink in for a moment. Behind every goal you seek, whether that goal be health-and-fitness-related, financially-related, or rooted in your career, or relationship, what you really want to change is how you feel. More important to that next level, what you really want to change is your identity, who you are. You desire to change what I refer to as the “external component of the transformational change model,” which consists of your results and your identity.

But in order to change all the above, the change needs to start with you and come from within. You need to make changes to the internal component of this transformational model of change, which consists of your word choice, your self-talk, the conversations you have with yourself, and what you believe to be true about your potential, your worthiness, and your ability. You can’t change unless you change.

Hey, I’m registered dietician Paul Salter, and you are listening to Screw the Scale Radio. If you’ve been losing and regaining the same 20 pounds and struggling to have a positive relationship with food and a loving relationship with yourself, you’re in the right place. If you’re ready to get out of your own way and truly feel and look your best, buckle up as I dive deep beyond the nutritional Xs and Os to teach you how to build massive amounts of self-confidence, self-love, and self-trust so that you can not only lose the weight you desire, and keep it off for good, but truly feel your best.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of Screw the Scale Radio. Absolutely delighted that I am hanging out in your earbuds yet again and really looking forward to spending time with you connecting with you today to introduce you to the transformational model of change I have been using the past couple of years to really help myself ascend repeatedly to the next best version of myself, to step in to that version, or that identity that I desire to be, to feel the feelings, emotions, and results I desire, and the same framework as what I’ve been using to help countless men and women just like you not only achieve significant but sustainable weight loss, but truly have used this framework to empower them with the confidence, belief, and tools to feel, look, and be the best version of themselves.

I’m so grateful that you are here with me today. A friendly reminder, if you haven’t done so already, say hi. Connect with me on Instagram, @paulsaltercoaching. Really enjoying those of you who have had the courage to reach out and say hi. I appreciate it and I look forward to just using that as another opportunity to provide valuable, candid, sometimes smack-you-upside-the-head kind of content to get you to recognize how much potential you have within you right now, how much power you have, how much control you have within you right now to achieve the change you desire, but that change you desire starts with making change from within. That’s what we’re going to focus today’s conversation on. To do so, I’m going to walk you through a couple of things this episode. First and foremost, I’m going to introduce the, rather six core components of the transformational model of change. I’m going to introduce you to the underlying behind-the-scenes currency of change and ultimately share with you the recipe for putting this into action to achieving the transformational change you desire.

As I mentioned in the beginning of this episode, when it comes to wanting to change, you want to change your weight, you want to change the amount of money in your bank account, you want to change the relationship, the feelings that you have with your significant other, and you want to change how fulfilled you feel in your career, or chosen job path, the change that you seek is external. You seek changes in your results. What is taking place around you, what you have to demonstrate, “Yes, I’m making progress,” or, “My change has paid off.”

But far more important to that, what we are all seeking is not only a change in how we feel but a change in our identity. You are seeking a change in who you are because right now you are frustrated with some aspect of your identity. That singular aspect of your identity is the sole source of friction, tension, defeat, overwhelm, anger, bitterness, sadness, stress, resentment, guilt, shame, all of the above that is manifesting to multiple problems in a singular area of your life. It might be challenge and frustration with your weight, with your relationship with food, with your relationship, with your significant other, your relationship with money, or far more important than all of that, your relationship with yourself. But the problem is when we keep putting too much emphasis on trying to change our identity, changing our results by only prioritizing looking externally, we miss the real catalyst and origin of change, and that is looking within and making the changes internally to experience the changes we desire externally.

The transformational model of change is going to come across to you as incredibly simple, and that’s because it is simple, but simple is not the same as easy. Moving left to right, if you were viewing this visually on a diagram, we would describe rather the transformational model of change as follows. The concoction of your word choice or your self-talk paired together with your thoughts or the conversations you have with yourself ultimately flow into your beliefs or the stories you tell yourself, and collectively your self-talk, the conversations you have with yourself and the stories you believe to be true about yourself, these influence your actions, or your lack of actions, and your actions influence your results, or your lack of results, which ultimately shapes your identity.

Moving left to right quickly, we can see that the very words we use to talk to ourselves that compose the thoughts or conversations we have with ourselves is where it all begins. If we continue to give more and more time, energy, and emotion to a thought, it becomes elevated into a belief. A deeply rooted held on thought that has received so much attention, time, energy, and emotion over the past months, years, or decades, that the belief now becomes the author, the narrator of the story. Your life is now running by that particular script. If you believe to be true that you will never lose weight and keep it off, if you believe that you are destined to be broke, if you believe you are destined to be single, these beliefs are running the script unconsciously behind the scenes, influencing your actions, thereby influencing your results, and ultimately cultivating your identity that right now, if you’re listening to this episode, it’s probably something you want to change.

That’s the model. If you were to take a piece of paper or maybe during your next journaling session and just write left to right word choice, thoughts, beliefs, actions, results, you could begin piecing together examples of a thought the way you speak to yourself, a limiting belief in how it has ultimately influenced the remainder of this transformational model of change.

Let me give you a very simple surface-level, arbitrary, yet probably pretty relatable example. If in the realm of weight loss and health and positive body image and just having a great deep appreciation and love for yourself, the word choice commonly used to talk to yourself includes, “I’m an idiot, I’m stupid. I can’t believe that I just did that. I will always blank. I will never.” That absolute negatively-charged word choice is fueling and making up the vast majority of your thoughts.

Well, guess what? We have anywhere between 80 and 90% of the same thoughts day after day, which means we are giving them more and more attention as the days, weeks, and months go by, so eventually these thoughts, we have them so much, we put so much time, energy, and emotion into ruminating on these thoughts, we can’t get out of our own fucking heads, these thoughts eventually become elevated into deeply rooted beliefs. Now, all of a sudden, our life shifts, we’ve come to that fork in the road, and unconsciously have chosen to go down a path because this new thought has become elevated into a belief, and now, that is the path we are on. That belief is running the show.

If we believe we are destined to be fat, guess what happens? If we believe we are destined to always gain the weight back after a diet, it manifests as your reality because those beliefs fuel both conscious and unconscious self-sabotaging actions or self-sabotaging behaviors. They’re the reason after three weeks, you call it quits on a diet, and try to find the next perfect diet a week or two later. They are the reason behind as soon as you finish a diet, you eat everything in sight for the next three weeks, gain all the weight back that you work so hard to lose, and then some, and why your actions don’t align with the results you desire. Your results are out of whack with the identity you desire and there’s just a whole hodgepodge or clusterfuck of incongruencies.

But when we turn down the emotional volume of our brain, we distance ourself from the situation in past events, and we sit down as rested, grounded, and logically as possible with a critical approach with compassionate curiosity, judgment-free, we can simply see how our negative self-talk shaped the conversation in our head, formed the beliefs we have about ourselves, which influenced the actions we took when trying to achieve the results and identity we desired but ultimately created results in an identity that we are unhappy with in the first place. This is very important to understand.

The beautiful thing about this model of change is you can use it in both directions. You can get really clear on who your identity is now, or what your current results are, and work backwards to uncover, “Oh, this is the belief fueling this self-sabotaging behavior. These are the thoughts I’ve had. These are the words I used to speak for myself.” Even more fucking awesome is you can now use this model of change as well to begin positively impacting your results and your identity by planting seeds of positivity, thus altering your thoughts, your beliefs, your actions, and therefore, eventually your results, and your identity.

But let’s talk about what the glue is keeping this framework all together. Moving in both directions, there is an underlying current that catalyzes the transformational change, harnesses the power from your word choice that ultimately leads to catalyzing the cultivation of this identity you either desire or currently have. That underlying current is emotion. You see, emotion is energy. The Latin derivative of the word “emotion,” and I’m going to butcher the technical pronunciation of this, but it’s something similar to sounding like emotere, E-M-O-T-E-R-E. Emotere, emotere, I don’t know. But you get the point, which literally means the direct translation energy in motion. Therefore, emotion is simply energy moving throughout your body.

I mean, think about this as an arbitrary example. Think about the last time you felt anxious. You likely had a physical experience present, too, such as tightness in your chest, or knots in your stomach. But eventually, that physical feeling faded as the energy either moved on, or became so deeply repressed, it wasn’t felt on a surface level, and it bogged itself up, buried itself deep, and it’s going to come back later on to rear its ugly head, but more on that in a different discussion for a different day.

But what’s really fascinating about this energy is that it has a vibrational frequency that we can actually measure, it’s typically measured in Hertz. Since emotion is energy, emotions, too, not only have a vibrational energy, but can also take specific shape one moment, and then completely transform to the next. Therefore, you can and often do experience a change from one emotion to the next in a blink of an eye on a regular basis. One moment you’re sad, boom, the next you are happy. One moment you’re overwhelmed, the next you are feeling accomplished. Emotions are constantly in flux. They are dynamic and chronically impermanent. Energy, emotion, we’re going to start using them interchangeably because they literally are just that, and emotions are impermanent. But if we continue to make important decisions related to our beliefs, our actions, our results, our identity, if we continue to make important decisions from impermanent states, they lead to unwanted consequences.

To give you another examples, you’re flustered, angry, bitter, resentful, fed-the-fuck-up with your weight, your body image, your relationship with food, your eating habits, but you’re so overly emotionally charged, which is again, it’s a temporary or impermanent state, that you choose this rash irrational behavior, which is committing to a 30-day juice cleanse, or some other stupid fad-type of diet. Well, it feels temporarily good. You have found a solution operating from a very emotionally-charged place. That therefore puts you in a position to not really think critically through this decision and this, ultimately, commitment you have made. You might experience a short-term high or… What’s the word I’m looking for? You might experience a short-term high or some type of relief. There it is. But ultimately, within a few days, maybe a few weeks, you are now experiencing the dreaded consequences of your short-term irrational behavior and decision because you and I both know a 30-day juice cleanse is not a sustainable way to lose weight, or feel your best, or to show up as your best shining your brightest.

Emotion is the workhorse behind the scenes that helps take… This emotional current is so deeply rooted, emotional power rather, in the words you use to speak to yourself, that it’s etched into the thoughts you have. If a belief is a thought that’s been given extra time, energy, and attention, it gets so deeply rooted, there’s just emotion, emotion, emotion, that drives the actions, cultivates the results, and shapes the identity of who you are, which is why it is so incredibly important to become a master of your emotions, a master of your energy, to develop the skill of emotional intelligence, extreme emotional awareness and management so you can harness the power within that emotional energy, and redirect it, reshape it to work for you rather than against you.

I know a lot of what I’m speaking about could likely benefit from a visual representation. I have a handful of graphics, charts, and flow diagrams, if you will, that I’m more than happy to send to you to help you better understand this content. Just send me a quick message on Instagram, @paulsaltercoaching, letting me know that you would like the resources associated with podcast episode 234, and I will get those sent to you as soon as possible.

What we’ve discussed is a simple framework that ultimately unpacks or provides an understanding as to why we have the current identity or handful of results that we do in our life right now. Everything can be traced back to our self-talk, which influences the thoughts and conversations we have with ourself, which influences the beliefs we hold to be true about our worth, our ability, and our potential. Collectively, all of that shapes the actions we take or the actions we do not take, which influences the results we do or do not have, and ultimately, all of that together shapes our identity. That transformation, that ultimate self-talk, and then all of that magic happening to really create your identity is fueled by emotion, fueled by energy that is always in flux, chronically impermanent, and if you can take back control, and begin to manage and eventually master both your emotion and energy, you have the ability to master your life.

The last little tidbit I want to share is related to the recipe of transformational change. You have great awareness if you’re listening to this episode and you’re picking up what I’m putting down. But in order to begin facilitating change, you need a genuine desire to change and an emotionally-charged why. In addition to that emotionally-charged why and genuine desire to change, you need to take extreme ownership of this framework for transformational change and to recognize that you and you alone are the solution. Once those boxes are checked, you need to begin a deep dive and a pursuit of vast information gathering and collecting, harnessing the power of your past, learning from your past. I believe it’s episode 232 or 230 where I talk about how you can harness the power of your past, learning from successes and failures of both yourself and others. That’s a great prerequisite episode to listen to prior to this one.

As you continue to harness the power of your past, what’s most important to recognizing the final step is that you need to take consistent intentional action, but these actions should feel different. If you want to experience rather a different feeling, different set of results, to be a different person, you need to take different actions. Guess what? By the way, that different action is going to feel different, and that difference is often going to be experienced as discomfort, pain, hardship, chaos. If you’re feeling that way while doing something different, take it as a sign that you are on the right path. Lean into that. Cherish it, celebrate it, and keep taking action that does feel different because it will lead to a different result. You can’t change, change your life, change your wealth, change your health, change your relationships unless you, the individual inside, change your self-talk, how you speak to yourself, what you think about, what you converse with yourself about what you believe to be true. You can’t change unless you change.

Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode. I hope you found it valuable. As a reminder, if you’d like some visual resources and some examples of this in real action, just send me a message on Instagram, @paulsaltercoaching, DM me that you want the resources for episode 234, and I will gladly send them your way. If you think you know someone who would find not only this episode, but Screw the Scale Radio in general as a valuable resource and valuable podcast to add to their listening arsenal, I would greatly appreciate you sharing this podcast and episode with him or her.

Lastly, listen, 30 seconds to leave a genuine rating and review truly goes a long way in helping me put this show, this information, this content in front of more people just like you who are going to find immense value in it and use the content to take action to step into that next best version of yourself, so please take 30 seconds and leave a genuine rating and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you are listening to today’s episode. Thank you again for being here. Have a wonderful rest of your day, and as always, screw the scale.