MODULE 2

WEIGHT & BODY IMAGE

Section 2

This transformational counseling technique will help you fast-track your work with any client and get clear insights around assessment and strategies.

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Greetings once again, my friends. This is Mark David Here we are continuing our conversation about all things weight and body image related, and how to help ourselves be the kind of people who are best suited or better suited to help others in the realm of food and body. Having a good relationship with food and body. Now, I love a good shortcut. Now, what I wanna say about that is I don't like cutting corners. I like being thorough. I like being complete. But if I can take a fast road to get somewhere in a good way, then I'm all about that. And that's what the four questions are about. The four questions are our shortcut in many ways to being a smart practitioner. The four questions are our shortcut to better understanding people. The four questions are a way to really turbocharge your ability to wrap your arms around your client, kind of like your energetic arms around them, and really get a sense of who they are. You know, a great coach or counselor moves with a sense of slow. That's me. I take my time. I've got all the time in the world. So I bring a sense of timelessness to my sessions. I, you know, I say this a lot in a lot of different ways, in part because I think it's damn important. So I have a sense of slow, I have a sense of timelessness when a client steps into my office or we're on the phone, or we're in Skype. I want time to disappear, and yet I want to be able to get to know my client promptly. I want to be able to assess them promptly as quickly as possible without rushing. So in order to do that, we gotta be skillful. In order to do that, we have to make every move count in a lot of ways. So, asking the right questions. Now, you know this, but it's good to remind each other. Asking the right questions is everything really is asking the right questions is all about, you know, knowing the questions to ask. It's knowing how to frame a question so that the person who's hearing the question doesn't feel pushed or forced or shoved into a particular answer, or they don't feel like they have to show up in a certain way. So there are certain questions we ask of others that we hope to be effective. And that's what a lot of this training will be about, is learning how to ask questions and listen for answers, and listen for the answers beneath the actual answers and the words that the client said. Sometimes we're asking questions in the back of our mind, but in the back of our mind, we're asking questions of a higher power. We're asking questions of the wisdom of universe, the wisdom of life, the hidden architecture, the hidden code of the world. And we're noticing the answers. So hearing the answers, really listening to the words and to what is underneath the words is everything. Because you know this, you're old enough to know you've been around the corner enough to know people say things and they don't mean it. Um, or people say one thing, but they're really saying another. Or people don't always feel good about answering difficult questions directly, and understandably so, because we, you and I as humans, our clients, they wanna protect themselves. And as much as people want help, oftentimes they don't. But they do. But they don't, but they do. It's a little bit of a paradox. They want help, but not if I have to bear my soul, not if I have to be vulnerable, not if I have to really reveal myself, not if I have to show you my pain, my upset, my suffering, uh, my tears, my confusion. So people will have a veneer and they just kind of want you to fix them, or they just want this to be easy. They hope it's easy. They hope you got some magic up your sleeve. And part of it is learning how to help our clients feel comfortable. So always, always, always, my first move with a client is really, I wanna let them know. I know I wanna communicate with my look, with my smile, with my body language. Um, I'm your friend. I'm a safe place. I'm okay. I like you. You can't do anything else to make me respect you or regard you more than I do. Now, you're great. Yep. You wanna lose weight, that's fine with me. Now, by the way, the four questions, this applies to every client of every kind, whether it's weight, body, image, over reading, binge eating, emotion, eating, digestion, fatigue, mood. And we're introducing this topic now because here we are diving into weight. And hmm, it's important because these questions are important. We're gonna get to them in a moment. I just wanna build up by saying that, by identifying compelling connections between, you know, health, eating and important life domains, our effectiveness as counselors, as coaches increases dramatically. You know that by now. So we're gonna value, I value, I mean this, every question that I ask in a session, the question that I ask my client, I value that question. The questions that I'm asking myself about my client, I value those questions, the questions that I'm asking. A higher power, the wisdom of the universe on behalf of my client. I value those questions. What I want to say to you, this is really important. This is the hidden architecture. This is the mystical, magical, shamanic aspect of how to do your job well. When it comes to helping another human being, when it comes to their challenges around food, body, and health. When we consistently value the questions that we ask and we're asking questions of value, you're more likely to receive answers of value. Kind of like what goes around comes around. I wanna say that again. When I'm asking questions that I value, not just asking throwaway questions, Hey, how was your day today? Okay, yeah, that might be a question to schmooze. Hey, how you doing? Did you have any trouble finding the place? You know, what do you think of my beautiful house? Um, thanks for, okay, fine. Those are, those are throwaway questions. But once I get down to business, every question that I ask has value to it. In my mind. I value those questions. They are questions of value. Therefore, I'm inviting answers of value.
Chances are, if you've ever complained, you know, I asked all the right questions and my client is just giving me one word answers. They're really resisting. Um, that's not about your client, believe it or not. That's about you. It's your job to draw your client out. Now, yeah, every once in a while you get, you're gonna get the impossible person who is there, but they don't wanna be there. And if I discover somebody is there with me in a session and they don't want to be there, I raise my hand immediately. That is not okay with me. Do not waste my time. Nor should you waste your time and money. Okay? I take my work seriously. I'm here to deliver value. I'm here to serve people. The only reason you should be with me is because you wanna be here and you're willing to do the work.
So from that place, I value my client. I value experience, I value the questions that I ask.
Therefore, there's a darn good chance I can receive answers that have some value to them. Now, whether your client knows it or not, they love great Questions. They love great questioning. It wakes people up. You know what your client's favorite topic is in the world. Them, you know what your favorite topic is in the world. You, I know you're interested in other things. I know you care about other people, but the person you live with 24 7 since the beginning and until the end is you. So let's just be clear. Your favorite person, even if you don't like yourself a hundred percent, the person you think about the most, obsess about the most wonder about the most are concerned about the most are interested in the most is you. Nothing wrong with that.
But it's actually good to remember that because your client is here to see you. They're paying you money. They want a result. They want help. They're in some kind of pain, upset or confusion. What a wonderful opportunity to help another human being. So no matter how uncomfortable your client is, even if they don't know it, they love a good question. Your questions might scare the heck out of them. Your questions might confuse them. Your questions might be confronting for them. Your questions might be uncomfortable for them.
I have no problem if my client is uncomfortable, by the way, as long as it's in a context. See the context, the container that I'm creating for my client is sacred. It's special. There's unconditional acceptance. There's nothing more you can do possibly in your life that would make me love you more. Lose weight, gain weight, be healthier, less healthier. Eat more, eat less diet. This, I don't care. I don't need you to do anything except step into your potential, which I will then celebrate with you. But it's not like I'm gonna love you more when you get rid of some issue. So anyway, your client oftentimes gets uncomfortable. There's a skill in allowing someone to have their discomfort. I wanna say that again. There's a skill in allowing someone to have their discomfort without trying to save them, without trying to rescue them in the moment. In fact, one of the things we're here to help our clients learn is how to manage their discomfort. And one way you manage your discomfort, your client manages it, is they have to learn how to hang with it.
Oftentimes, we as practitioners, we get uncomfortable when our client is uncomfortable. You follow what I'm saying? We get uncomfortable when the client's uncomfortable. No, let it go. Stay in your comfort zone. Allow your client their discomfort with your interesting questions and just create a space of unconditional acceptance because things will reveal themselves. So more to the point, A great question by itself generates wisdom, insight, movement, and more questions. The journey never stops, my friends. Your client is on a journey for the rest of their life. You are on a journey for the rest of your life. Your client's relationship with food, body and health will never stop until they die. As far as we can tell. It's always gonna be different. There's always gonna, it's always gonna change. What your client worries about today is gonna be different five years from now, 10 years from now, 70 years from now. So it's a journey. What's the destination? Hmm? I don't know that there is any, but there's a direction. And the direction is to greater awareness. The direction is to greater consciousness. The direction is to more love. The direction is to deeper understanding The direction is to fulfill the content of our acorn and become the beautiful potential that the wisdom of life has seeded inside of us. And that's a forever becoming. So as a way to fast track our ability to assess our client, thank you for meandering with me a bit. As a way to fast track our ability to assess our client and understand them at a deep level and begin the process of generating doable and sustainable strategies. What I'm going to say to you is asking the four questions that I'm about to explain is a very effective tool, straight up, effective tool. And you know, one of the ways I came up with these questions was I actually, in order to create this training, at some point when I felt I had a certain proficiency, um, working with people and having the kind of success that I knew was unusual, I had a reverse engineer, I had a breakdown. What is it exactly that I do? What's going on in my mind? How am I assessing people? How am I, like, what am I doing? So one of the things that I noticed I was doing is I was scanning for these four questions. So I'm gonna read these questions to you. I'm gonna say the four questions, which are not necessarily going to blow your mind in this moment, um, or in any moment perhaps. And then I'm gonna break down each question and why it's important and why I ask it and where it can go. So the first question I'm asking in the back of my mind, okay, so this is not something I'm asking my client. I'm asking the universe, I'm asking on behalf of my client, what is stressing my client. That's question number one. What is stressing my client? Next, I'm wondering what is their biggest stress? If I could identify such a thing as their biggest stress, another way to say that is their biggest fear, their biggest concern. The thing that is truly keeping them up day and night. Their version of a personal hell. What is that? I wanna identify the mother of all their fears and stresses.
Next question. I wanna know what is most important to my client? If they could really download for me what is most important to them, I wanna know the answer to this question at some point. I wanna know the answer to all these questions at some point. What is most important to my client in their life?
Question number four. This is where the action is, is where is life? Where is a higher power? Where is the wisdom of the universe calling my client? Because as you can see, this last question assumes a higher wisdom.
You need to take that question and translate it into a way that that question works for you.
Where is the hidden code of the universe calling my client? Where's a higher wisdom, a higher power? If you're a religious person, where's God calling my client?
We're asking these on be asking these of the invisible of the universe on behalf of our client. And what I'm saying to you from the outset before I start to break these questions down, is that when I have the answers to these questions, I got a framework. I have a structure, believe it or not, I have a place to start to plug and play. I can actually begin my work with a client
and have a good sense of where to go. I've got a roadmap. My GPS is working. Now here's what I mean.
You know, let me say this. As we answer these questions, we can firmly stand in this deep knowing that whatever helps heal and integrates our client's personal life will help heal and integrate their metabolic challenges and their food concerns. So none of these are about food. What's stressing my client? That's, that might be about food and body. What's their biggest stress? Yeah, that might be about food and body. What's most important to my client maybe might be about food and body, whereas a higher power calling them, usually not about food and body at all. But as we understand the answers to these questions, which are very personal ones, it's about a person's life. How they're showing up on planet earth. Knowing these helps us work, believe it or not, in a metabolic realm. So again, these questions are for you, the practitioner. You are not asking them directly of your client.
I may cut you loose to ask one or two of these questions directly of a client. At some point we'll see. But again, we're silently asking these questions of an invisible wisdom on behalf of our client.
And we're kind of asking them a bit more indirectly. Sometimes it might take a little time, it might take a number of sessions to get clear on what these answers are. That's okay. We've got all the time in the world. And because you are learning how to make haste slowly, because you are learning how to create spaciousness while moving at a good pace, you're gonna probably learn pretty quickly how to answer these questions. Yeah, within a couple of sessions with a client at most, at some point, and at some point soon. Let's detail question number one. I'm gonna break it down. I'm gonna tell you why I asked this question. So what's stressing my client? You've heard me talking about stress. We are looking to determine where our client feels anxiety, rush, fear, push force, anger, frustration, confusion. We're looking to discover these places with indirect questioning.
You're gonna see once we get into the intake around, wait, for example, you're gonna see the questioning process.
So, but in the big picture for now, before you know the specific questions I'm asking a client, the bottom line is, I'm on a date with my client. And during that date, I'm literally, I'm literally talking to my client like I am meeting a new friend. And I'm gonna get to know, I wanna know everything about you. 'cause we're gonna be in relationship. I wanna know about your family, I wanna know about your parents. I wanna know about your kids. I wanna know about work. I wanna know about money. I wanna know about your sex life, your relationship to sex. I wanna know about your health and everything about it. I wanna know about you and your weight and everything you think, feel and believe about it. I wanna know about your relationships. I wanna know about your education, your school. I wanna know about what you're planning for your future. I wanna know some things about your past. I wanna know about stuff that's happened in life that didn't quite work for you. I wanna know about what you believe about the universe and what your religion or your spirituality is.
My friends, you've gotta be interested in humans. If you wanna do this work, if you don't like people, this is not a good job.
I'm fascinated with humans. I'm fascinated with humans, and I'm fascinated with how everything is connected to everything which is connected to everything. And I'm fascinated with how we can use our relationship with food and body as a doorway to some unbelievable places to help people grow and transform and heal.
So I'm trying to find out where's my client feeling? I use the word stress, what's stressing my client? But stress also means where are they feeling? Anxiety, rush, fear. They're being pushed, they're being forced. Where are they feeling anger? Where are they feeling frustration? Where they feeling confusion. All of those will create a stress physiologic stress state in the body. I'm looking for the kinds of stressors, fears, rushes, anxiety that show up and or impacts my client more on a day-to-day or a weekly basis. It is present in their life. Now, trust me, if you're asking questions about their family, their parents, their kids that work, money, sex, health, weight, relationship, school, past, future, challenging life experiences, relationship with religion or spirituality, you're gonna start to hear a lot. You are gonna start to pick things up.
I don't want you to ask somebody. Oh, um, tell me what stresses you, what makes you feel anxiety, rush, fear, push force, anger. No, not a good question.
The best questions oftentimes, oftentimes, not always at all, are the ones that you never even ask directly, but you get answers to because you're asking them in the silence of your mind and you're scanning everything else your client does and says, for answers to those silent questions that they're asking.
You know, I might be schmoozing with my client and saying, you know, tell me like married family, kids. Oh yeah, yeah, I'm married, I got two kids. Love my family. Just love my kids to pieces. Yeah, we just got such a wonderful flow. It's really great. Um, wow, I'm so glad to hear that. And, and, and tell me what kind of work you're doing these days. Oh man, do we really wanna get into that? Okay. So right then and there, I'm looking for little cues. Okay, well, family doesn't seem to be stressing you out, but as soon as I said the word work, all of a sudden you let me know. Hmm. That might be where some action is. So, you know, I'm gonna ask more questions about that. So looking for cues, uh, simply looking for cues of what is stressing my client on a day-to-day basis. This is no different. If I said to you, Hey, listen, I'm gonna set you up on a luncheon date with a person you don't know, and think of it as a new friend and I'll pay you a million dollars. If on that luncheon date, without asking the question directly of what stresses my client, what, uh, what stresses this person, what makes them feel anxiety or, or, or fear or push or force or anger or frustration or confusion, I want you just by like talking to this person and getting to know them, I want you to be able to come back to me and answer that question. What's stressing this person? And I'm gonna offer you a million dollars. I guarantee you would nail it. 'cause you'd be listening, you'd be scanning, you'd be using all your intuitions. You, you and I don't always realize what smart, I'm gonna use the word psychologists. We are, we understand the mind of humans. Just because you've been on the planet for a while and you've been interacting with people, a lot of us don't even realize the information that we pick up on from others. All the juicy details. Okay? Of course, as we know, stress is as always a key physiologic driver in unwanted symptom and behavior. Any kind of stress, fear, anxiety, push force rush equals physiologic stress response. As you remember, if we can't help a client de-stress in their key areas of stress, healing and transformation are rendered as difficult, if not impossible. Uh, my friends, you've gotta be down with that. You have to get that. When you and I find the stresses, the fears, we begin to find the hidden doorways to healing or the stepping stones to begin to get there.
Another way to define stress is key life lessons that are calling for our attention and driving us into character development, soul growth, and personal evolution. Hmm, another way to define stress. I'm gonna say that again. Key life lessons that are calling for our attention and driving us into character development, soul growth and personal evolution. Certain things that stress you out, that put you into fear or anxiety that don't do it for me. And there's certain things that make me fearful and anxious that are not an issue for you. Those are often the places in life where we have something that life is trying to teach us,
especially stressors that seem to keep showing up and don't go away.
Part of our personal evolution is to learn how to regulate our emotions, regulate our internal experience, regulate our emotions and internal experience such that we don't go into self harm or self attack or foolish strategies that are driven by fear and inadequate thinking. Because we were coming from a place of stress, anxiety, fear, rush force, push, anger and judgment. And so we are learning how to regulate our internal experience, how to befriend ourselves, how to stand by ourselves when we can do that. It is far, far, far easier to have a healthier relationship with food and body. My friends. You think it's about food and body. It's about you standing by you. It's about your client learning to stand by themselves to understand that here we are on planet earth, though, from the moment you pop out of the womb, you're trying to figure out how to regulate yourself. You're crying in, you're screaming because something's wrong. Either you're hungry, you're colicky, you got gas, you're in pain somewhere. And all you know how to do as an infant is scream and cry your head off. Okay? That's our first way that we regulate is we're scream at the environment because we can't do anything really. So we're alerting the big humans in our environment. Yo dudes take care of me. Something's up. Figure it out. 'cause I don't know what the hell I'm doing. 'cause I'm just a little tiny infant that just popped out of the womb. Gradually we teach our tiny humans how to feed themselves, how to not make a mess of themselves,
how to not harm themselves, how to understand, not to put your hand in the hot fire. How to understand that that knife is sharp. Here's where you pick it up from. We're teaching them how to regulate their environment. We're teaching them cleanliness. We're teaching them to wipe their own butt. We are teaching them, here's where you poop and pee. It's really simple. And then at some point we're teaching them how to eat. And then at some point, and oftentimes here's where things get a little haywire. Um, nobody ever really teaches us, oh, you're upset. Here's how you deal with that. You're, you're feeling fear. Here's how you deal with that. You are feeling turned on. You're feeling too excited. Here's how you deal with that. Yeah. You know, oftentimes our parents are telling us our environment, our teachers are telling us. So all I'm saying, long-winded way of saying our journey on planet earth is learning how to regulate our internal experience such that it works for us. Because at some point, life becomes difficult for us to the degree that we might resort to eating habits that don't work for us. And all of a sudden we don't know why we can't stop the eating habit. That doesn't work for us. And our own habits, our own behaviors are out of our control. The reason they're out of our control is because we're actually using those behaviors to regulate ourselves. But they don't actually work well. But we did the best that we could. So in essence, you are here to teach your client, to help coach your client, to help inspire your client, to help educate your client in ways to better regulate their internal experience so that they can have a good relationship with food and body.
So when you think stress, I want you to think amazing golden opportunity to learn our earthly lessons for the purpose of greater happiness and vitality. That's another way to context stress. Amazing golden opportunity. Golden opportunity to learn our earthly lessons for the purpose of greater happiness and vitality. So some reminders of why we ask this particular question. Weight, okay? When it comes to weight, stress equals non caloric weight gain stress by itself. Excess stress for many humans will put weight on the body. If a human is overeating, oftentimes stress, anxiety, fear that is not being well regulated leads to poor appetite regulation, because that's just how we are designed in the physiologic stress state. Appetite is deregulated body image. Okay? When it comes to me loving my body, if I'm stressed out about this in my life, that in my life I'm not learning how to regulate, it will often show up as just an inability to love self. We will start to self reject and self-hate. And for many of us, we will aim that self-hate at the body, at the shape of the body, at the weight of the body. Digestion, stress equals sympathetic nervous system dominance. Depending on the degree of stress we are experiencing, we will be in some degree of digestive shutdown, which means some degree for many people of unwanted digestive symptoms, bloating, uh, gas, um, weak digestion, sour stomach, diarrhea, constipation, heartburn. Many people are experiencing fatigue. Why? Because stress equals for many people, decreased energy. Production immunity, stress equals immune depletion. So you know why we're talking stress when it comes to weight, when it comes to body, when it comes to health. So I'm collecting information now, you and I we're moving out of a very ancient planetary habit of survival, consciousness and survival physiology. Humans cross the globe. Many humans are gripped in stress. So we're growing out of the laws of the jungle. We're stepping into the light more. We're letting go of unnecessary fear and survival-based thinking, we're using inner growth to fuel genetic and epigenetic evolution. In other words, we're using personal development to help support having our healthiest metabolism. We are learning as a species. It is a species wide problem. When we attack self or attack others, many human beings attack others. We do that directly. We do that indirectly through hating people, judging people, and just beaming bad energy at that bad energy at them. We do that to others, we do that to self. And when we're doing that, unwanted eating behaviors are often predictable. Unwanted weight gain or weight loss resistance is often predictable. So I'm asking what's stressing my client? I'm asking this question of the universe on behalf of my client. So I'm looking to identify the stress in my client's life because I'm identifying a potent and ripe place for healing. It's kind of like discovering and identifying a virus in many ways. You know this. Now, the antidote, by the way, the cure for any stress that's afflicting us is, is pretty consistent. We gotta learn to begin, begin, begin to relax into the very thing that's stressing us. Impossible. Though it seems,
what's stressing my client, Hey, my weight loss client, the answer might be what's stressing 'em? It might be the fact that they can't lose weight. Okay? That's one of their stressors. Believe it or not. One of the moves I'm gonna be doing with my client is to ask them to encourage them, to help them consider that this thing that they're stressing out about weight loss is something that they actually should consider, ought to consider relaxing into. Because when you relax into it, here's what happens in your physiology. When you're not relaxed into it and you're in stress chemistry, here's what happens to your physiology.
So the antidote is always to relax into the very thing that's stressing us. The antidote is also to discover if there's a higher teaching in this particular thing that is causing me stress, anxiety, fear, upset.
What am I judging? Who am I angry at? What's, uh, is there a higher teaching here for me? For me? Forget about the other person. Is there a higher teaching here for me? And then it's about taking practical steps, baby steps, inner or outer steps to help us begin to cope and manage and evolve.
Relaxing into the thing that's stressing us. Listening for the higher teaching in that which is stressing us, taking practical steps that literally the kinds of steps that will help us grow and evolve.
I'm wondering if that makes sense to you. It's kind of simple. It might even sound a little simplistic. Oftentimes we overlook the simple in search for the complicated people get dazzled by big words. People get dazzled by complex systems. People get dazzled by a new approach, a new diet, a new gizmo. That's strange and unusual and bizarre and sounds scientific.
And we often miss the simple road.
So I'm gonna say again, the cure for any, anything you notice, something stressing your client. Just so you know for the future, when you, when you start to problem solve, you are gonna be coaching your client to begin to take baby steps. It's not gonna happen overnight. They're not gonna begin to relax into the very thing that's stressing them. You know, work stresses them. Oh, Mr. Client, just relax into it. Of course that's not gonna work. But I'm gonna let my client know, Hey, you know something, I get that work is really stressing you. We're gonna, in the course of our work. I wanna explore ways that you can relax into that more. It's gonna take time to learn how to relax into that because there's a huge benefit there. When we start to relax into something, relaxing into something means we literally take ourselves out out of stress chemistry. When you take yourself outta stress chemistry, here's what happens to your digestion. Here's what happens to your appetite regulation. Here's what happens to your calorie burning capacity. Here's what happens to your higher thinking. When you take yourself outta stress chemistry, you put yourself in the sweet spot, in the best part of the probability curve to actually accomplish what you wanna accomplish. Mr. And Mrs. Client, which is weight loss. That's why I'm saying this stuff, because you and I are creating a physiology. We are creators, we're powerful dudes and dude es, we're creating a physiology by how we think and feel and believe about the world.
There's always a higher teaching in the things that are irritating us, annoying us, angering us, things that we judge the people, that we judge, the places in us that we judge. The thing that stresses us out. There's usually a teaching in there and there's always practical steps that we can take, okay? Most of our clients are looking to kind of manage their stress or to fight their stressors or to get rid of them or to sweep them under their rug. You know, we're helping them recontact, we're helping them. We're reeducating them about what stress really is, again, which is a doorway to personal and metabolic growth. You are explaining this to your client at some point along the way.
Please don't ask your client, okay, what's stressing you out? I really mean that. You're gonna need to determine that through all through listening for all the conversation that you're in in a first session and a second session. You're gonna be able to determine that because you're gonna be exploring the key domains in their life and you're gonna be tracking them. You're gonna be tracking the places where you notice your client gets a little frustrated, they get concerned, they get quiet, they get ambivalent, they look like they're getting confused. They, their body language changes, okay? You're learning to take those cues and notice those because those are likely places where your client is going into stress, anxiety, fear, shutdown, IE, stress physiology. So once again, the goal of asking this question determine key life areas of stress. So you, the practitioner can now have specific places to work with your client. There it is. Here's your beginning.
From there, you can invent and create homework assignments based on those key stressors. You wanna see me doing this when we get into case studies?
You now have places to work when you've answered this question. Oh, okay. My client I've determined is stressed out about work. Their marriage is giving them a lot of stress and they're really stressed about the fact that they haven't been able to lose this weight. Got it? So at some point, I'm going to be working on all those three areas, and I'm gonna pick, not necessarily easiest place first, but the one that seems most right? And I'm gonna tell you, for a weight loss client, I am actually going to look at helping them de-stress around weight loss first. 'cause that's what they're most going to identify with, and that's what's gonna grab them. So there's a 99.99% chance that if your client is coming to see you for weight loss, they're stressed about that.
But oftentimes it's not so obvious. This is why I'm bringing it up. Because sometimes, sometimes people will say to you, oh yeah, you know, I'd just, I, yeah, I'd like to lose a little weight.
I'm not always so sure. I believe a person when they say that, they're almost brushing it off.
A lot of people talk like that and they really wanna lose weight. And it really is gripping them and it's really stressing them out. And they have a hard time being honest and authentic and real about that and understandably so. Yeah, I'm sure I'd be, I'd like to lose a little weight.
So don't get seduced by that. So quickly.
In essence, what I really want you to get about this is that in a lot of ways, your stalking, you're like a wild animal. And what you're stalking is your prey, is what you're trying to locate and find in the jungle are all the little places that your client has anxiety and stress. And you're gonna collect those. You're gonna notice those. You're gonna have to take notes either during the session or after the session and write those down. And I would love for you to rank a client's, let's say, top five stressors in order of intensity and importance. That's what I'd like you to do. I'd like you to be able to say, yeah, these are my clients. Top 2, 3, 4, 5. You know, it's, it's, it might not be five quite honestly, but see if you can notice what are all their stressors that seem to have come out? Where are their judgements? You're looking for places where they tighten up. You're looking for places where they lock up. You're looking for places where they're in defense. You are looking for places where they're on the run. You are looking for places where they go into hiding. You are looking for places that they're in anxiety because in some way, shape or form, there's a good chance, there's a chance. It's connected to their relationship with food in some way, shape, or form. And there's a chance that is connected to their weight and or their weight loss resistance perhaps. So you're gonna work again with, you're gonna have to learn how to pick out the most interesting stressor for you. And then you're gonna be addressing the others in the course of your work. So that's kind of the big picture. And I'm gonna say for weight loss clients,
usually their biggest stress, not their biggest stress, one of their key stressors is literally weight and it's loss. As strange as that is, we're looking to help them relax into this place, you know? Okay, but let's look at this a different way. And as an example, if a key life stressor for your client is, I hate my job. They're right up there. They're right up front with that. I hate my job. And their issue is weight. They're coming to see you for weight. How it looks like is, you know, at some point in a second session, perhaps, 'cause I've already collected this information, I'm gonna inform my client, my weight loss client of the connection between stress and weight. I'm gonna give them all the little scientific mind cookies. I'm gonna frame it for them in a way that doesn't scare them, in a way that explains it to them. I'm gonna inform my client that, you know something, this stressor has to be handled in my opinion. If you wanna ultimately get where you wanna go, which is the weight that you wanna have. So I can't truly help you lose all the weight you wanna lose. Mr. Ms. Klein, I can't help you truly get where you wanna go if there's this very intense stressor that we're not working with, that is driving your physiology in the opposite direction of where you want your physiology to go. So I, Mr. And Mrs. Client, I wanna change your physiology. Now, I can't get into your DNA and change it and operate on it. However, we have an interesting, beautiful access point to changing your physiology, which is noticing the places where you go into stress and anxiety and fear and upset and judgment and hate. Because those are the places that put us in the physiologic stress response that can increase insulin and increase cortisol and signal the body to store weight, store fat, and not build muscle.
Now, I wanna remind you, that might sound a little strange to you, Mr. And Mrs. Client, but you're here to see me in part because the strategies you've done, they haven't worked for you. We've already talked about all the diets you've been on. We've talked about the times that you've gained weight, and then you lost to do this, that, and the other thing, and then it came right back. So we know what you've been doing hasn't worked and, and you've worked. I, I get it, you've worked hard. I applaud you. Um, and I'm glad you're coming to see me because now we're gonna do something different. That's the beauty of the work I do. And my training is, okay, I look at it, I've been trained to look at this thing differently.
So I'm gonna notice if my client is in their victim market type, I'm gonna look to help them with self-empowerment strategies around work. All of a sudden, I'm a little bit of a job coach. All of a sudden, I'm wondering who do you, where's the communication breakdown for you at work? Is it was somebody who works under you, somebody who works laterally to you, someone who works over you, your boss. Who do you need to be more honest with? Who do you need to have a, have a sincere talk with? Can we talk about your work style? Is there a way that your work style is causing you more stress? Or is there a way that we might change your work style? So I wanna get into what exactly don't you like about your job? What, like, let's, you always want to break it down, my friends, you always want to ski into the specifics. God is in the details exactly what doesn't work for you at my job, at your job. So we're looking for what are the self-chosen stressors versus what are the real and the actual stressors. I might have a conversation with my client, is this the right job for you? Is this the right career for you? What would it mean for you to explore something different? What would it mean? Oh, you can explore something different for whatever reason. So you have to be in this job for a while. Wow. How can we, I'd love to figure out with you, I don't know how to do this right now, but I would love to figure out little ways, tiny ways that we could reinvent your experience
such that your job feels a little better, work feels a little better. There's a little more juice, there's a little more love, there's a little more empowerment. Now, this might sound weird on the one hand because what does that have to do with weight? But what I'm saying to you, Mr. And Mrs. Klein, is what I've seen over and over and over again is that wait for so many people is not just this one thing like, oh, you just need to eat more. I don't know, turnips or you just need to do, you know, sit-ups or you just need to, no, it's not those silly things. Oftentimes, it's a complex of piece here, a piece there, a piece here, a piece there. But I'm especially looking for the places where I can have a direct impact on your physiology. Now, by the way, when you tell that to a client, they're interested, like, you're gonna impact my physiology. I like that because a lot of people are thinking, oh, I just want to change my metabolism. Well, believe it or not, you could actually change your metabolism by changing your inner world. We don't wanna go there. We just wanna lose the pounds, get these pounds off these pounds of the enemy, these pounds are the problem. No, you know what the problem is? I hate my job. Now maybe you have every good reason to hate your job. I've, I've been in jobs I didn't like before, so okay, I'm hating my job. Now what? I don't want to be living in a state of hate. 'cause then you're a hater and hate is kind of bad. It doesn't work so well for a long time as good in short little burst perhaps. But holding onto hate, um, is toxic. It's toxic to the body. Body doesn't like hate. No body likes hate. So we look to massage the heck out of the hate. So it starts to change into something else. That's the challenge. That's where we need to grow as a human being. And as we begin to grow as a human being and start to reach our natural potential, the body then has the best chance to reach its potential. So I'm hoping you see the nuances here. Now it's my job as the practitioner, it's your job as the practitioner to, as best you can, invite your client into this understanding. Wait a second, I came here. I lose weight. Don't talk to me about my job. Well, Mr. And miss client, big hug. Let me tell you why I am talking to you about your job. And then you go into the conversation I just had, which is, here's my training. I'm so glad you are here because everything you've done hasn't worked. Your dieting hasn't worked, your exercise hasn't worked, your dieting and your exercise hasn't worked, the pills you took, ha, none of it's worked. So we have to try something different. This is called being smart. This is called being scientific. And here's the science behind the stress of the body. So this is your doorway, my friends, and it is a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful doorway. Okay, so this is gonna, we're gonna gain some momentum here. That's the first question. With this one question and its answers. You have so much of what you need to work effectively with your client. I kid you not what's stressing my client. Again, you're gonna be thinking like, I'm on a date and I'm learning about this person and I'm noticing what activates them. I'm noticing what throws them off their horse. I'm noticing where they start to clench their fists and clench their teeth. And sometimes you gotta really be observant and you really have to look and you really have to listen because there's places that your client doesn't wanna show you that they're stressed or they're angry or they're frustrated. And you might simply notice when you ask how's your relationship with your parents? And your client goes, oh, it's fine. Really, when somebody answers in a higher pitched voice than they normally talk in, that usually means they got a lot of stress. I won't say that to a client, but I might say when they answer, but I'm not. But I'm gonna take note of that for sure and I'll circle back to it my friends. We're gonna continue this conversation. This is part one of the four questions. I just kind of wanted to do this in bite-size pieces. I want you to go to part two right after this and we'll start nailing down the other questions. Thank you. And I'm gonna see you on the other side.

PART 2

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Greetings once again, friends. This is Mark David, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating Your Guide On this journey. We just were talking about part one of the four questions. As a reminder, the four questions are, what is stressing my client? What is their biggest stress, their version of personal hell? That's question number two. Question number three, what is most important to my client? Question number four, where is life? Where is a higher power calling my client? We already discussed question number one, what's stressing my client? And we've also discussed how the four questions, I believe can help facilitate us as practitioners in really wrapping ourselves around our client and being able to go from their big picture to their small picture and back again to really get a powerful window into their world. So we talked about what's stressing my client, number one. The second question is, what's my client's biggest stress? Their biggest fear? Now, essentially this question means, what's your client's idea of their numero uno, personal hell, the mother of all their stressors, their biggest nightmare. It's the thing that's going through their mind that seems to have the biggest grip on them in terms of constant daily, back in the mind, fearful thinking, that's what it is. So what's stressing my client? The first question was us kind of cataloging the collection of, you know, you and I have the normal things that stress us out, the normal things that get to us, and everybody has their own sort of unique menu of the various things that stress us. This question is asking us, the practitioner, to be able to identify the number one biggest stress, the number one biggest fear that we could say, wow, this is the place where I am sensing for my client the most energy.
Now my friends, where we have the most energy is where we have the potential for our most power, where we have the most stress, fear, upset, anger, judgment, anxiety. I'm using all those terms. Interchangeably is the place where we have a lot of voltage, a lot of power. Power and voltage in our life is interchangeable. This entire training really is looking at our eating challenges. From a positive psychology model. We are learning to see that something, let's say like binge eating, which has a tremendous amount of power, is something that we just need to learn how to harness. We need to learn to harness that power and use that power for our betterment. Not for necessarily binge eating, but there's a power there. We've already spoken about how weight, extra weight, how science says extra weight is stored, energy stored caloric energy, which is so true, but extra weight is stored all kinds of energy. It could be stored personal power, emotional power, created power, spiritual power, sexual power, all of that. Some of that, a swirl of that.
So we're learning how to unleash power in us and energy in us in a way that works. So the intention of this question, what's my client's biggest stress, their biggest fear is that arguably our biggest fear is often a very powerful driving force in our life that has us live and behave and conduct ourselves in some very interesting ways. So identifying what we think this fear is simply gives the practitioner a deep insight into our client. It might be the first place we work. It might not be, it doesn't matter. You've identified it. And honestly, it doesn't matter if it ends up being their second biggest fear, because it's okay, you're pretty close, you're close to the target. This isn't about getting things right and wrong, it's all good. We're learning how to work with our clients stressors and their fears. We're learning how to help them lean into and relax into those same stressors and fears to begin to embrace them in a different way, and stop fighting them or reacting to them or running away from them, because chances are that's where the action is for your client. So again, we're talking about the four questions right now while we're looking at the topic of weight. But the four questions applies to any client for any challenge.
So again, our biggest fear is often a powerful driving force in our life. When you and I can begin to identify that in our client, we have some gold because your client is coming in saying, it's the weight, it's the weight, it's the weight, it's the weight. And everybody goes, oh, it's the weight. And everybody tries to help this person or that person or themselves lose the weight.
And so oftentimes the reason why we can't sustainably lose the weight is because the weight, the pounds of body fat that we don't want is actually pointing someplace else. So what I'm saying is, let's look at the place in the psychoemotional realm, in the human realm, in the personal realm. Let's look at the place, the commonplace, where extra pounds might, might maybe, maybe might be pointing to. Where might it be pointing to? Invariably there's a darn good bet. It's pointing to a place, a good bet, where we're carrying around a lot of stress, anxiety, fear, plain and simple because stress and anxiety and fear a will drive us to do behaviors that we don't wish to do. Stress, anxiety, and fear that is large, that we have difficulty processing will drive us to do behaviors that we don't wanna do. IE, as it relates to food, will oftentimes drive symptoms that we don't like. So stress, physiologic stress can create symptoms such as fatigue, such as mood issues, such as digestive challenges, such as low immunity,
such as weight loss resistance, such as weight gain. So that's what our stressors can do. So it makes perfect sense that we would look in this area. I, I mean, it's simple on the one hand, but it's elegant and we need to remember this. So this is not a question that is asked directly of a client. Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, what the biggest fear for you in life? You are asking this question again on behalf of the universe, on be, you are asking this question of the universe on behalf of your client. I am wanting you to determine, to intuit, to sniff out the answer,
because sometimes it's going to be a little more obvious what their biggest fear in life is. I'll never find a partner, I'll never find love. I'll never get married. A lot of people have that. I'm gonna be alone. Some people's biggest fear might be, you are going to leave me. I'm going to be abandoned. I'm going to be sick.
I will always look like this and never lose the weight. Sometimes it's easy to sniff out, sometimes it's not. Oddly enough, my friends, here's a paradox. I want you to be able to answer these four questions inside your own mind. And I don't want you to worry about it. If you can't answer it, don't worry. Hold the question. Hold powerful questions. What's a powerful question? Who am I? Why am I here in this world? What is love really? Okay, those are powerful questions. I've been holding those questions for a lifetime. I'll, I'll probably die with those questions because the answers are constantly forthcoming. I might have a powerful question of, you know, what's next for me in my life? Okay, I'm not gonna wait a whole lifetime for that answer, but I might not have the answer today. What's, what's next for me in my life? But I hold the question, I hold the question, the answer eventually emerges. Hints emerge, details emerge. Puzzle pieces emerge. You must learn how to hold powerful questions on behalf of your client.
This is a powerful question. What is my client's biggest stress? Their biggest fear? Again, it's not always an easy question to answer. Your job is to listen for clues in the course of your conversation with a client. Really, my friends. It's as simple as that. Now let me just give you some common examples of a client's biggest fear. Gaining a lot of weight, being fat forever, losing total control with food, and never stop eating, never reaching my target weight, never finding a partner or getting married or finding love, getting a disease, perhaps cancer, dying in pain, being alone, not having children, not having enough money. For some people, it's not being big and famous. For some people it's being abandoned and being left different for everyone.
You know, sometimes we have to be careful because yeah, a lot of our weight loss clients, a lot of them truly live in a massive amount of fear that I will never lose this weight. And and that's sort of their number one fear for a lot of people. Actually, the number one fear is I'm never gonna find love. And they have weight and love tied in together. If I lose weight, then I find love. If I don't lose weight, then I can't find love.
We make up this nonsense in our mind, but we really didn't make it up because that was learned from the world, from all the cues that are coming to us from a thousand different ways. So losing weight is often associated with finding love, being happy, not being alone, finding true love, finding a partner, living happily ever after.
We put a lot of energy into what we think the ideal body and the perfect weight is gonna give us. It's pretty fascinating, isn't it?
You know, oftentimes the personal hell we fear the most is the very one that we live with every day and brace ourselves against. So it's operating in us and through us, and it colors our inner world.
So a person's biggest fear is actually it. You know, think of a computer, it's like a computer virus, and it infects everything and it impacts everything that the machine does. It's in the background, it slows everything down. It gets you frustrated when you're trying to get online and push the buttons and make things happen. Our biggest fear, our biggest anxiety, our biggest stress, our biggest judgment, anger
will often color our life. And we don't even see it.
I'm not gonna find love. It's an understandable fear, by the way. You know, all these fears that we've talked about are understandable, by the way, who wants to get a disease? Nobody wants to love and desire to have children and then not have them. Nobody wants to end up having no money. And in poverty, nobody wants to be abandoned. Nobody wants to end up being alone and not having love in their life. So by the way, let's acknowledge that these fears are understandable.
I don't go to my client. Ha ha, that's your biggest fear, silly little client. These are human fears and they're completely and totally understandable. So what you and I are doing is, and what our clients are doing, and what perhaps humans are doing, is that we are learning how to be with our biggest fears. We are learning how to better metabolize our biggest fears. We are learning how to better relax into those fears and not let them rule us and drive us so we can begin to have a life that really feels like it's worth living.
So this may be stating the obvious to you, but the biggest fear that we live with is coloring everything else. That's what's happening with your client.
And those biggest fears create a metabolism and big fears create the kind of metabolism that holds us back from having our natural metabolism, our natural health. And for many people, not all, but for many people, their natural, natural weight.
Now, you might have a weight loss client, and you might start working with them in this way, and you might notice, okay, here's their biggest fear. And then at some point you start to work with them on that. And at some point that's huge for them. And at some point you really help them. And at some point it helps them change their life and they're happier and things are going better for them. And they might lose some weight or they might not. If they don't lose weight, you still have a success. You've helped them. For many people, weight loss is a journey. It's an unwinding,
it is peeling back the layers so we can begin to remove from ourselves everything that's not truly us.
And as we slowly do that, the body shifts little by little change by change,
by the way, there's a ton of conflicting research out there. It, it, it, it boggles my mind. There's research out there that I hear a lot of people quoting, like, quick weight loss, like losing a lot of weight quickly is the best way to lose weight. There's some research on that. There's also research on losing weight, slowing over time. That's the best way to lose weight.
The answer is probably, it doesn't matter.
Answer's, probably, it doesn't matter. It's probably different for different people. And what I'm gonna tell you is, for most people that I've seen, a super fast weight loss, um, generally is not a good long-term sustainable recipe for success because it often, often, not always, it often indicates somebody did something extreme to get there and didn't really do what is needed to be done to have long-term sustainable weight loss.
So this whole speed thing I am, uh, when in doubt,
consider that the road to weight loss is a steady, slow road.
And slow could mean anything. Slow could mean months slow could mean a year. Slow can mean five years. It doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter as long as we get there. Yes, it matters to people because everybody wants to lose the weight yesterday.
And how many people have I met who've wanted to lose weight yesterday, IE really fast? And they've been trying to do that for a lifetime.
Honestly, if they could have slowed down at some point, they would've gotten there in a short amount of time relative to a lifetime. So I'm saying we often have a skewed sense of time around weight. And that's because there's often a big fear that's in there that's driving us. And the big fear for many people, many people is if I don't do this, my body doesn't shift. If my body doesn't shapeshift, if I don't hit the weight that I'm supposed to hit, bad for me, I am not okay. I am not lovable. I will never be happy.
Now my friends, at some point in the coaching relationship with your client, at some point you're gonna have to intuit this. I want you to feed back to your client your thoughts about their biggest fear and ask them if it indeed rings true for them. At some point, I want you to check in with your client to see if it resonates for them when, when it feels right, when it feels intuitively correct, not in a first session.
Sometime after the first session. It could be the fifth session, it could be the fourth, the third, the second, the eighth. It doesn't matter. You have to learn how to relax into the relationship. You're getting to know someone. You're feeling into their rhythm and their flow. You're feeling into their level of comfortability with you. You are also with your weight loss client, always with any client of any kind. In this case, we're talking about weight. We always, always, always start with our client. You know, at the end of a first session with simple, doable strategies, the simplest, easiest strategy that we think the practitioner thinks has the best chance to yield a short-term result, which usually won't be about weight, but it'll be about how the person feels or how they eat. So for instance, if your weight loss client also happens to be a fast eater, and they also happen to complain about binge eating and overeat, and you give them the assignment at the end of the first session of practice slow eating, and you go over that with them and explain it to them, that's something that in a week or two, they could notice a change in their appetite. They could notice that they're overeating or binge eating less because you're asking them to slow down
and give their body and their brain enough time to scan the meal and let natural appetite regulation show up in an easy way. Big bang for your buck. Client's not gonna lose 10 pounds in a week, but what's gonna happen is they're gonna go, oh my goodness.
You, you, the practitioner must be so freaking confident in not needing a number on the scale to define your success.
Because if the number on the scale defines your success, then again, I recommend to you that your strategy for weight loss should be tie the person up in your basement and starve them. If that's how committed you are to that level of success, that's the easiest way, as far as I know. Um, is that gonna work long-term sustainably? Probably not. Is it against the law? Yes. Might the person agree to it? Eh, who knows? But if that's your commitment, that's where you go. Um, and you say, you see how insane that is. You see how crazy that is. But that's what the mind does when we have a big fear. When we have a big fear. People will, for example, use dieting, just dieting, weight loss, dieting, and they'll try different diets for a lifetime, never getting where they wanna go. Never questioning, huh? Maybe this whole thing about dieting doesn't actually work after 30, 40, 50 years. But because we are in fear, understandable fear, fear clouds our higher thinking, literally physiologically, it's how you're wired. If you are in stress, fear, anxiety, upset, a survival moment, you're being chased. You think you're being chased, you think you're in trouble, you're stressed out, you're worried about something, the lion is chasing you.
Your prefrontal cortex ain't coming from a place of deep, powerful, spiritual wisdom. You're not channeling the timeless, you know, wonderful nature of the universe. You're not creating great art. You're not drawing powerful connections. You're trying to survive in the moment. You're trying to figure out if you're bleeding, you're trying to make fast decisions, and you know you're being chased, you know you're gonna get killed. So you're looking around looking for evidence of where the enemy is.
People can literally stay in that place for a lifetime.
All because of our relationship with our body. That's why we do this work. Okay? So, as I said, at some point you're gonna feed back to your clients, you know, what you think is their biggest fear. Here's an example. Excuse me. So Mrs. Client, my sense of you, you know, based on what I've come to learn about you and try this on, 'cause I've been thinking a lot about you. My sense about you is that you really think, you really believe that if you let go with food and start to enjoy it, if you allow pleasure in with food, you really believe that you will never stop eating and you will become the most obese human ever. Now, you know, I might be overly exaggerating a little bit, but you know, I'm your guy and you're paying me to help you and I really wanna help you. How, how does that, how does that land for you? When I say that, notice how I just said that I postulated it. I invited the person in there. I let them know essentially that I love you
and I'm checking in with them. Because you know something, there's a lot of people who are walking around with this one single big fear.
They are so afraid to relax into the enjoyment of food. Why? Because food is the enemy. Why is it the enemy? Because it makes me fat. Why is fat the enemy? Because we've been taught, if you are fat, you, you suck, you're unlovable, and you'll never have anything good in your life.
The conditioning of the world is quite bizarre. So I'm checking it out with my client,
and if a client agrees with me, then great, we have agreement. So, great, now I understand. And great. What I'm gonna start to do is find simple doable exercises. Simple doable practices that help my client slowly create a more pleasurable relationship with food.
So I might do a pleasure inventory with them. I want you to write down all the things in your life, person's, places, things, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and foods that give you pleasure, pleasure, inventory, but especially foods as well. I want all different foods on the list that you find pleasurable as well as everything else in life. And we might look over that list. And then I might pick out a few pleasurable things to do on that list that have nothing to do with food. 'cause I want them to have more pleasure and get used to more pleasure and start to allow pleasure in so they can trust themselves. Because it's about trust. A human who walks around not trusting the fact that they can eat food that not balloon to be a thousand pounds. A human walking around with that fear is a human who is confused and not living into their potential, but they believe their fear is real. That fear is as real as a lion chasing you. For them, it's real. So I treat it in a serious way. I like to be lighthearted, but I am understanding on a deeper level, this fear is driving my client and it's gonna stop them from living a happy life. So what they need is not to lose weight. They need to learn how to trust themselves. They need to learn how to trust their body. They need to learn how to embody, which means eating, which means learning how to be an eater, which in part means learning how to receive pleasure and nourishment from food, which in part means learning how to relax with food and eat it slowly and take it in and notice it and be present to it. And notice all the contents of your mind that's saying, oh no, you're gonna get fat this. And begin to breathe into that and relax a little more. And notice that when you do actually eat a few things that give you pleasure, that you've been avoiding, wow, we can actually do that if we eat it slow and eat it in a small measured amount. And there you took a baby step and the person can slowly learn how to trust themselves because that's what you're teaching them how to do. That's what you're inspiring them to do. That's what you're coaching them to do.
Identifying our personal client, our our client's, personal health to them, lets them know we really see them, by the way. And oddly enough, even though it exposes your client, it ultimately helps them relax. So one of our superpowers as practitioners, one of the things we really do well as practitioners is that we see our clients. You know, a lot of our challenges as humans, you and me, all of us, is that it's not, you know, we don't always get seen and people don't really know the real me. People don't see me, like parents didn't see me, the adults around me didn't see me. Nobody understood me. Nobody got how I was really feeling. And then we feel alone, and then we feel lonely, and then we feel isolated, and we feel nobody gets me. Nobody understands me. Because at some point we just didn't quite have that experience of somebody seeing me. Well, somebody seeing you, somebody seeing me means kind of seeing all of us.
So when you're seeing your client and you're seeing something that might be scary for them, when you're seeing something that might be emotional for them or personal for them, you tread gently and lightly. Haha, client, I know your biggest fear. Now your biggest fear is that you're gonna keep eating and eating and you'll never stop. Ha ha, ouch. That would hurt. I explained it in a whole different way, in a way that I understand your fear, your fear makes sense. Let's give it a big hug, and let's give you a big hug for having that fear. It's okay. You're amongst friends in a lot of ways. When your client is dropping into their biggest fear
or that biggest fear that they have in them lives in a, in a very young place in us, our biggest fear lives in a very ancient and young place. When we tap into our biggest fears, our biggest booboos, our biggest hurts, it just lives in a younger part of us, a more vulnerable part of us, a more open part of us, a more soft part of us, a more gentle part of us. Yes, we will protect that part of us with a lot of armor and a lot of toughness. But ultimately, when you start to peel away some of the layers, what's inside of us when we come to our biggest fear is a lot of vulnerability. Because nobody wants their biggest fear to happen. So when you see your clients in a way where you're really seeing them and they get that you love and care about them, and you accept them unconditionally,
that by itself is healing. I want you to hear that, that by itself is healing. Think of a time in your life that this happened for you personally, where somebody just got more intimate with you in terms of really seeing you, seeing a vulnerable part of you, a fearful part of you,
an anxious part of you that no one else really knows. And then seeing that in you, and still loving you, loving you, accepting you, not judging you. Have you ever had a time when that happened and it felt so good? You doing that for your client is worth a million bucks? That by itself is like taking a, a magical dose of medicine that is time released in the system in a beautiful way. I mean that another example of feeding back, you know, a client's biggest fear to them. Um, so Mr. And Mrs. Client, my sense of you, you know, based on things that you've said, and what I've picked up, is that not only do you really wanna get married and have a life partner, but if you didn't have this, that would be the worst possible nastiest outcome in life for you. Is that true? And, and, and before you answer that, I, I ask because, you know, I get that you wanna lose weight, but I've also gotten the impression that you've convinced yourself, you've absolutely convinced yourself that you can find true love and have a live partner
unless you lose this weight.
Now, I'm really sincere about this question with you, Ms, Mr, and Mr. Client. Is that true for you?
So once again, I am framing this question
in a way where I'm loving up my client. I'm not attacking them, I'm not making them wrong. I am creating a gentleness around it, and I'm drawing a connection for them at the same time.
Because just asking that question and if it's true for them, and if they say, yeah, that's big, that's powerful because you've just helped them unearth
a way of thinking that is crucifying them. You've helped them unearth a way of thinking that is toxic, a way of thinking that will actually take them in the opposite direction of where they wanna go.
What's the most important thing in my client's life? They wanna get married here. They wanna have love, they wanna create a family, good for you. But they have it complex and tied into, but I have to lose weight to do that, really.
So basically what you're telling the universe is, okay, I'm gonna lose this 15 pounds, and when I lose this 15 pounds, I'm lovable. Come on in people. Here's the lovable me. But if I gain 15 pounds after you and I find true love together, then I'm not lovable. So you're actually advertising for the exact thing that you don't want.
You're using your body as a billboard to attract someone who is really just being attracted to your billboard and not the actual you. And you are saying, my worth. You're, you're, you're saying, my worth only has worth if I lose 15 pounds. Really? Haven't you ever seen somebody your size or bigger who has true love, has what they want in a partnership? Do you know people who are bigger than you and carry more weight around you and have exactly what you want?
Who made this up? So I am gently, I will say it to my client, just like I said it to you. Notice the tone of my voice. Notice where I'm coming from. I'm exposing a toxic way of thinking. I'm being clear about it. I'm letting them notice it's a little silly,
and I'm letting them know that there's a better way and that it's okay. I'm not judging you. So the bottom line is, when you identify a client's biggest fear, be compassionate, tread a little lightly be lighthearted, yet clear, and at the same time, be committed to the importance of helping Take some of the charge out of that fear,
compassionate treading, lightly be lighthearted, yet clear and be committed to the importance of taking some of the charge outta that fear.
If you're a binary black and white person, oh my God, this person has this fear, I have to make sure my client doesn't have their biggest fear anymore. No bad coach, bad counselor, don't do that. Please. It's not your job to take away anyone's fear.
You're not God, you're not the creator of all that is. You can't even do that in your own life, let alone someone else's. That's not your job. Your job is to be a coach. Your job is to be a best friend. Your job is to be a mentor. Your job is to be a guide.
Your job is to bring light into darkness. Your job is to let someone have their journey. We all have fears, we all have to learn how to work with those fears. That's that's what your client is learning how to do. They are learning how to manage their energy. They are learning how to regulate their internal emotions. They are learning how to best harness their mind so their mind doesn't do and say silly things that take them in the opposite direction of where they want to go. And we're letting our client know along the way, Hey, yeah, you were thinking really silly here. Yeah, that's a toxic thought, but guess what? You didn't invent it. It's not your fault. We inherit these things from the world. We are not looking to blame self and attack self for that, or blame anyone, just noticing this is what happens.
Here's another example of how to word with a client's biggest fear. So Mr. And Mrs. Client, I mentioned this fear you have of not finding a partner and thinking you need to lose weight for true love to come your way. Because it seems to me you might be placing some limitations on the generosity of the universe.
Let me explain what I mean by that. If someone doesn't wanna be with you because he or she thinks you need to lose 15 pounds, is that true love? Is that who you really want? How can you find unconditional love? If you're placing such an odd condition on you loving your own self?
Is it possible that you're pushing away love because of your definition of what it would look like? I want someone who loves me. For me, if somebody doesn't wanna be with you because they think you need to lose 15 pounds, you know what you should do? You should take out your little piece of paper and cross them off your list and say, thank you. Thank you for helping Me cross you off my all important list. That's it. You say goodbye to the knucklehead. You don't wanna be with that person. That would be a horrible thing to be with that person. Why? Because you know what that person should do? They should weigh you every day after, after you move in together and find your true love. They should weigh you every day, because I'm only gonna love you if you lost that 15 pounds and you did lose the 15 pounds. But I'm tracking, oh, you gained a pound. Hmm, getting closer to not loving you and abandoning you. Is that what you want in a person? That's what you're doing to yourself. When you think like that, you're doing that to yourself. You're saying, I'm not gonna love me if I gain a pound. I'm not gonna love me if I look like this, but I'll love me if I look like that. And therefore you, everybody out there should feel the same way, especially my true love. So I'm playing with my client.
Another example, you know, Mr. And Mrs. Alein, I mentioned this fear of you imagining that if you allowed yourself to enjoy food, you never stop. You know, you're never gonna stop eating like, like I mentioned that fear, because I believe this fear really holds you back and makes your food life a bit of a nightmare. It's almost as if a part of you feels traumatized every time you eat. Now you know, I care about you. I want this work to work for you. And in my opinion, I'm your coach. I'm your guy here. I have to stop making yourself so crazy
because this fear is actually contributing to chronic low level stress. You remember what we talked about? The stress response. How when you and I are stressed, we have increased cortisol, increased insulin, and those two hormones, when we increase them day in, day out, can signal the body to store weight and store fat and not build muscle, which is just the opposite of what you wanna do. So you and I have powerful minds, and our powerful minds powerfully affect our physiology. So you can't hide from life. You can't, me and you, we can't hide from life. We can't hide from the universe. I wanna work with you and help you begin to slowly feel nourished with food and make friends with it. Because you know something, when you do that, you're gonna start to relax more. And that means parasympathetic nervous system, dominance, relaxation, response. And that's your optimal state of digestion, assimilation, natural appetite regulation, and your best calorie burning capacity. This is good news, but in order for us to change our physiology, sometimes we need to change Our our mind a little bit.
So you see what I just did there?
I'm not just talking from my head and saying, okay, Mr. And Mrs. Client, you need to stop believing. There's false belief that if you keep eating, you're never gonna stop. That's just a bad thought. You, you have to stop doing that.
Can you see the difference in the two ways? I just did it the first time. I'm speaking from my heart. I'm speaking from my soul. Yes, I'm speaking from my intelligence, but I'm not speaking from my head to their head. I'm speaking from my being to their being. I am speaking soul to soul.
Why? Because we usually don't talk to each other in that way. Why? Because we're accustomed to hearing everybody hurling information at us. And at some point we put up these, these barriers, these walls, these immune screens, because there's so much details and so much information coming at us, it is too much.
But when somebody starts to talk to us from a place of love or care or concern or unconditional acceptance or a place of soul to soul, people hear differently when you come from that place. You must trust that.
But if you're gonna talk head to head, then that person's head is gonna talk back to your head. And then you're gonna have two talking heads talking to each other, trying to figure stuff out and trying to convince each other. And yeah, sometimes head to head is good, but in this work, you know, 10% of the time, 15% of the time, some small percentage of the time,
you know, many people are just not accustomed to receiving direct feedback or fierce coaching. They haven't received the kind of love that penetrates a tougher love around their eating or weight or health issues. Now I have a different definition of tough love. Tough love doesn't mean you hit the person hard with love. Tough love means you are willing to fiercely love.
And that's what I'm talking about when I say fierce coaching. I mean fiercely love. Fiercely love means you fierce coaching. Just think about that term for a minute. Fierce coaching. Fierce coaching in, in my opinion, means that you, the practitioner, are committed to the truth above all else, which means you're not afraid to lose a client. I am never, ever, ever afraid to lose a client. I know I want every client who walks into my office to, to run away a course not, but I'm not afraid to lose a client if I'm speaking the truth. Now, understand, you have to learn how to speak truth with love. You need to learn how to speak truth with consciousness. You need to learn how to speak truth in a way that it can be heard. You know, you're not gonna just look at a client and say, God, you know, you don't take care of yourself. Um, you know, you're, you're, you're just outta your body. You're not moving, right? You don't eat right. You're disconnected. You're not in touch with your body. Wisdom can't believe it. Yeah, some of that might be true, but that's really not truth. The truth isn't truth unless there's love and consciousness in it somehow. So we must be committed to the truth, not afraid to lose a client. And you're willing to take risks and go beyond your own fears as a practitioner, your own discomfort as a practitioner, go to your edge.
Fierce coaching means that you, the practitioner, are willing to learn to enjoy being courageous, being honest, being real, being authentic with your client, and to be open to and savor the possibilities. So you're unattached to their response. You don't know how the client's gonna respond when you speak the truth.
Another way of saying this is you're committed to a longer game with your client.
Your client's not committed to a long game, by the way, on average when it comes to their weight, let's say they're not committed to a long game, they've never been taught this, chances are it's not part of their consciousness. 98% of clients when it comes to weight loss, are not committed to a long game. They have been conditioned, trained, brainwashed, programmed to seek short-term solutions to their weight issues. And they go from one short-term solution to another, to another, to another, to another. And 50 years later, none of the short term solutions work.
I am committed to a long game with my client. What does that mean? I will be with you as long as it takes. And you know something. That doesn't mean I move slow. That doesn't mean I don't know what I'm doing. It means that there's a higher plan from the universe. That means that we, nobody knows how much anybody should weigh and how the weight loss journey will unfold. So we are learning my friends, us as practitioners in this training. We're learning tools and techniques and distinctions and understandings and protocols and a way of thinking to be with your client on their weight loss journey. So you've gotta get comfortable being in the unknown. Oh, just do this and they will lose weight. If that's what you need, then A, that doesn't exist. And B, don't work with weight. Okay? Don't, don't even go there. I mean, that, that's a challenge to you. You have to get more and more comfortable with the fact. And it's a fact with capital F, capital A, capital Z, capital T. Then nobody has the secret to the button that you push, the thing that you do, the supplement that you take, whatever it is to make pounds come off. And if anybody says this is the one way, you must know that they are not being sincere or that they're being extremely dumb.
And this has been the con, the collective conversation around weight loss for the last 60 years. And I'm tired of it. And I'm bored as I'm bored outta my noodle with that conversation. So I'm playing a long game with my client because it takes a, a, it takes a certain amount of time for the body to shape shift.
And for many people, for the body to shape shift, it takes some unwinding, it takes some exploring. Do we look in this nutritional realm? Do we look in this emotional realm? Do we do both? Okay, then now let's try this. Now let's try this. Now let's try that. All the wild doing things that are gonna help a person with their health, inner and outer health. Anyway, you're educating them, you're teaching them, you're coaching them into eating skills, nutrition skills, life skills, emotional skills, mind skills that are gonna benefit them anyway as human beings. So either way, you're gonna have success and you have to be comfortable with that. But if you are living in fear that, oh my God, I didn't help this person lose pounds, then that's what you're gonna be living in. Now, granted, sometimes if you have that fear, it's understandable and you're gonna have to train yourself. You're gonna have to train yourself to let go, which might mean you have to train yourself to do that with yourself around your own weight.
But you have to train yourself to redefine success and to not get bullied by a client. To not get bullied by their fear.
This is the real work, because your client oftentimes is bullying. You Show me how I'm gonna lose the weight. Well, I am, we're doing it different. Remember when you said, when I asked how long you've been dieting, you told me 24 years. When you said that, I took note, I said, oh, this person has been doing various strategies that for 24 years hasn't worked. I am now giving you a different strategy.
How much time you wanna give me? I don't need 24 years. Yeah, I might need four months. I'm not sure, but it ain't gonna be 24 years to try something different because your strategies haven't worked. And when I ask you to relax into weight loss or let go of weight loss, that's not what you've been doing for 24 years. So I'm suggesting to you, based on what I've learned, you are an ideal candidate to try a whole different approach. Okay, let's go to the next question of the four questions. Question number three, here's an important one. What is most important to my client? I want you to be able to know when I say to you by session number two, after session number two, if I'm a fly on the wall, I want to be able to ask you, Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Practitioner, what's most important to your client?
I want you to be able to answer that. So meaning, what do they want most in the world, in life? What do they value above all else? Um, you know, for a lot of people, there's a few answers to this question. That's okay, that's great. You don't have to see the most, most, most. There's one thing a person is really clear about and you're clear about. That's what they want most, you know, hallelujah. Um, but I want you to see if you can intuit what this is. Get a sense of what they value most persons, places, things, experiences, hopes, dreams, career, love, children, relationship. You know, here's the thing. If you and I are gonna look at what's limiting my client, what's their biggest fear? What's their biggest concern? Let's also look at what's the biggest thing that expands them. What's the biggest thing that they want to open into? What's most important to them?
Or what are the several most important things in their life? You know, that's a beautiful thing to know about someone.
If I know what's most important to someone, or the most important things to them, I've got the keys to the kingdom or the queendom. 'cause I know what's important to them. I'm gonna tell you why that's important in a few moments here. So I want you to spend some time in the first session seeing if you can figure this out without asking your client. Now, here's what I wanna say. This is the only one of the questions that if you don't know or you aren't sure, by session two, I want just ask them, Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, Hey, you know, I just got this question. Okay? Okay. Here's one way to ask. You know, Ms. Client, I've got a question for you. And, and it's a positive one. What would you say? And I really wanna know this 'cause I really wanna understand you. What would you say in one sentence or less is the most important thing in life for you? Like, like your top priority, you could wave your magic wand. Really, really, really. What do you want most? What do you value most or care about the most? You know, what makes you wanna keep on living?
So I want you to think of this question, my friends, as a playful question, what's the most important thing for you in life, Mrs. Client, that doesn't make the question playful. That makes it sound really serious. Did you hear how I just asked the question before that, you know, I got a question for you is a positive one? I I really wanna know this about you. Like, what, what's the most important thing for you? And when I ask that, I say with a smile on my face. Now, if your client is shy or unsure of the answer, sometimes clients are sometimes ask them to just take a shot, say whatever comes to your mind.
They don't have an answer. They don't have an answer, which is interesting.
But I want you to let them be uncomfortable if they don't have an answer and say, well, just, just what comes to mind? I, I'm, it's, you know, it's kind of like finding one of those, one of those little bottles on the beach and there's a genie inside. And this time you're getting one wish. What are you gonna wish for? This is important. If that happens, you wanna know, especially if the genie tells you you got 30 seconds or less to come up with your wish. And if you go, I don't know, that's an opportunity lost. So I'm playing with my client here. Now, some common answers to this question, there's a lot. I just wanna be happy. That's really what's most important for some people. And it is, this is all good, but it doesn't matter what somebody says, it's true for them. I just wanna be happy. I've heard people say, I just wanna find peace. I just want my children to be happy and to be there for them. I just wanna stop fighting myself. I just wanna have a healthy relationship with food. I just wanna settle down, find a partner, and have a family. I just wanna love myself. And the list goes on.
Usually I don't hear people say, I just wanna lose 40 pounds. When I present the question. And the way you've heard me present the question,
usually the people who wanna lose 40 or 50 pounds are gonna say, I just want to have a healthy relationship with food. I just wanna stop fighting myself. I just want to be happy. I just want to find peace. Because that's what they really want.
Because deep down inside, on a certain level, it doesn't matter how many pounds the body has, the person just wants to be happy. They want to have peace. They wanna stop fighting themselves. They wanna have a healthy relationship with food. And they believe for whatever reason, that when I lose X amount of weight, then I will have the happiness, peace, stop fighting myself, healthy relationship with food. So we usually tie in the happiness piece, all that, all the good stuff with, when we hit the number on the scale,
I would actually love to find exactly how many humans on the face of a planet earth that's ever truly worked for. Um, regardless, I want you to find out what's most important to your client. And it's fine to ask them by session number two. You know, I'm, I'm, I'm, this is a question you could ask them because it's fun and it's interesting. And for many clients it's, it's a showstopper for them. 'cause how many times do you get asked this question? Really? I guarantee you, your client, how many times have they been asked this question? Maybe never. So just asking the question. You are establishing a relationship with them. You're letting them know who you are. You're letting them know, Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, this is, this is what you're saying, silently to them, I ain't messing around. I play big. I really wanna know who you are. The deepest parts of you matter to me. The most important things that are important to you matter to me. That I know that. I'm not kidding around here. I play big, I'm playing with power, I'm playing with care. And this is the kind of relationship that you probably haven't had professionally before.
That's some of what you're communicating to your client. So why do we ask this question?
Once I know this piece of information about what's most important to my client, you know, um, I know that this is going to help me as the practitioner with whatever eating challenge they are coming to see me for.
I will likely be cataloging that information. There's nothing I can do. Once the client tells me, you know, most important thing in my life, I just want to be happy already.
Usually people say it like that. They take a deep breath, that really what they're saying is, I just wanna stop the fight. So in the moment, you know, I'm gonna, once they share that with me, I'm gonna say like, thank you for sharing that, that that really helps me understand you. I totally get it. I totally get it. I might feed back to them and say, you know something, I'm the same way. That's the thing I want most in life. I just wanna be happy and at peace with myself. And for me as a professional in this moment, I'm holding that piece of information because at some point there's a good chance I'm gonna feed it back to them.
So I'm gonna tell you how and why in a moment. So we're looking to help our client resource their own internal power, and to bring All their important energies into alignment. In other words, if something is most important to you, if something's most important to you, to me, to my client, then it is best for us to hold that thing very high. It's important to hold that thing perhaps above all else.
What's most important to you? Oh, I just wanna be happy and find peace. Great. Hmm. That's what we're shooting for then. Then everything we do, every strategy in this relationship must on some level reflect that in some way. Now, that doesn't mean that everything I say and do with my client is gonna just put them at peace and make them happy. But it's moving them in that direction. The point of it is to move them in that direction.
So my client has been in a battle with food. I'm not gonna then give them a diet that makes them battle food more. 'cause they've told me, I just want to be happy and finally have a good relationship with food, then great. Then I'm not gonna make their relationship with food more miserable. But that's obvious. So if something is most important, then it's best to hold that above all else. You know? So here's how I'm gonna feed this information back to my client. You know, Mrs. Client, remember when I asked you last session, what's the most important thing in life for you? And you said to me, and I really remembered this 'cause that was a special moment. You said to me, most important thing for me is for my children to be happy and well adjusted and not have the same body issues that I have. By the way, my friends, I've heard this from a lot of women, let me start again. So Ms. Client, remember when I asked you what the most important thing for you in life is? And you said that you just want your children to be happy and to not have the same body issues that you have. Well, you know something every time, and I say this affectionately, every time I hear you criticize your body and attack yourself for not having your perfect ideal weight, you are actually setting a not so good example for your own children. They are silently picking up on your inner world. They are modeling you. You know this, children watch us. So they're actually modeling you. Children are brilliant observers, but they're very poor interpreters. They see your behavior. They think, well, the big gal is doing it, I'm gonna do it too.
So all I'm trying to say to you, Ms. Klein, is it's time to start thinking a little bit more about them and indulge a little less in your self attack because you told me that's what's most important to you. Otherwise, I'm gonna tell you straight up and, and, and you know, your kids might be destined to learn the lessons that you could not. It's usually what happens in life. A lot of the lessons that we can't learn our kids are having to learn. So if it's truly the most important thing for you, that your children don't have the same body issues as you, then as you start to transform yourself and you don't have those issues, your kids are not gonna have them. Or there's a darn good chance that they won't.
So every time you self attack, you are going against your greatest wish because you're modeling for your children silently. Even if you're saying it to yourself, they're picking up on it. We do that. You do it, I do it. Children do it. We silently pick up from the adult world around us and we model it.
Some, my friends, you see what I just did? I used a moment when there was a possibility to say something powerful. So that's a powerful thing to say to somebody FYI for your information.
Because a lot of times what's happening is we get so caught up in our inner drama, anything that I can do as a practitioner to help my clients see things in a different way. Because the reality is, here's a reality. When a person, a parent in their thirties or forties or more are still obsessing about their body and, and, and practicing self attack and negative self thinking and negative thoughts and self attacking thoughts about body and hateful thoughts about body. If we're still doing that as a parent, that's a great inspiration to really work on it more. So, so Mr and Mr. Client, I, I'm, I'm not saying this to make you feel guilty at all. I'm saying this because I wanna inspire you to work on yourself in a different way. I wanna let you know that there's a good reason for you to start being kind to yourself.
It's not like I'm asking you to go out and run an extra 50 miles. I I'm, I'm not asking you to, to eat some nasty food. I'm simply asking you to notice your internal conversation and your self attacking thoughts and begin to let some of those go. That's what I'm asking you to do. Is that really such a terrible request? And I'm asking you to do it on behalf of your kids that you intuitively know. They might be susceptible to that same thing because they live in your house and you're their parent.
So this gives us more wind under our wings to help our clients.
Here's another example. You told me, Mr. And Mrs. Client, that finding peace was the most important thing to you. Remember that, remember when I asked you what's the most important thing? And you said, just, I just wanna find peace. Well, how's that gonna happen if you continuously attack yourself with harsh words and judgment about your body? Because Mr. And Mr. McClean, you've noticed every time I catch you speaking ill of yourself or your body in a session, notice how I always correct you. That's what I want you to start doing for yourself. If inner peace is truly a goal for you, and, and you said it was, and I'm, you could change your mind, but you said that and you seem to be really clear and honest about that, then it's time to start practicing it and getting a little more serious about it. Your self attacking thoughts don't just go away by themselves. It's a practice. It takes your consistent attention. It takes your loving awareness, it takes your effort, it takes consciousness. It takes you turning on the light in your head and in your heart and in your soul and going, whoa, I gotta watch out for this. Because when I self attack and when I look in the mirror and judge myself, that immediately takes me to the opposite place of inner peace. So it's gonna take your commitment, Mr. And Mrs. Client, to watch your thoughts each day and gently move them in a different direction.
See what I just did there, my friends, I didn't say, you, you talk negatively to yourself, Mr. Client. You just gotta stop doing that. Like, I want an idiot. You know, you're gonna drive yourself crazy, you know, just don't do it.
Maybe some people can hear it when you say it like that, but not really. You want to inspire someone in that direction. You don't wanna make them feel bad for this bad thing that they're doing. Um, you don't want to make them more self attack for self attacking. So when I present it to them, I'm being clear. I'm being loving, I'm being honest. Like I really care.
I'm coming from my heart. I'm coming from a soulful place because I really want to see my client get better. I am speaking to them from a place of wisdom that my friends is what I'm asking you to do.
So, yeah, you can say, oh great, I gotta ask the four questions. What's stressing my client? What's their biggest stress? What's most important to them? Great. I'm gonna ask these questions. I'm gonna get to answer, oh, wait a second. Yes. These are the techniques, these are the distinctions, these are the skills. But then you as the practitioner, must bring Yourself into the place where you are modeling for them, the person that you would like them to be.
So I'm noticing their self attack. I'm noticing what they said is most important to them. And I'm connecting those two in a clear and a logical and a loving and gentle way and saying, Hey, let's handle this.
You said you want inner peace. I'm all for that. I'm in your corner. I'm your inner peace coach amongst other things. So is my job to raise my hand when I notice that you do something that is the exact opposite of inner peace producing and your constant negative self attack and negative self-Talk about your body takes you as far away from inner peace as a person can possibly be. And you, you know, something, your negative thoughts about body, about your body. You didn't invent that. Do you know how many people have negative conversation internally about their own body and their looks and their weight? Tons of people. So join the club and you know, each one of us is different and unique, but we all share this. And it takes work, it takes practice, it takes your commitment. So if you want inner peace, we gotta start moving in that direction in a more deliberate way. This is how you do it. And this is not easy. 'cause if it was easy, you would've stopped doing it. So it's gonna take a little work, and that's why we're working together. 'cause I'm gonna help you do this work. I'm gonna cheer lead you when you do this work. And I'm gonna let you know when I think you're going off course my friends. That's exactly how I'm talking to my client. I'm letting them know, here's my role in this relationship, here's what I'm doing. Here's what you can expect from me. And then I'm delivering on that now. And I presented that in a very gracious way to my client. And my client says, well, no, I don't like this. I just want a diet and I want you to give me the calories that I have to eat, and I just wanna lose weight. I don't, I don't want to talk about all these negative thoughts. My negative thoughts will go away when I lose their weight.
Now, if a client said that to me,
here's the first thing I would say. I say, okay, I'm gonna go with that for a moment. So you just told me that you don't wanna do all this nonsense about doing this inner work. You wanna just lose the weight because you know that when you lose the weight, all that negative talk is gonna stop and you're going, you're gonna be happier and you're gonna have inner peace. Um, I, I'm just looking at my notes here. Remember in the first session I asked you when was the last time you weighed your target weight? Now you told me you weighed your target weight three years ago, huh? So three years ago, did you finally get happy? Then what happened? Where was your mind? Where was your heart? Were you in inner peace? For how long? Why'd it go away? Hmm, isn't that interesting? So I'm gonna wait to see if that lands from my client, because basically what I'm saying to them is that what they believe ain't true. Because, and, and this is with many people, many people, not all, but a lot of weight loss clients have been at their target weight. So when I see that they're believing that when they hit their target weight, they're gonna be this happy, perfect, wonderful. Everybody loves me, I love myself person. I'm going, okay, well, when you were at your target weight, did that happen? And you're not there now. So what the hell happened? Maybe you thinking isn't accurate. Now, by the way, when you're saying that to a client, you are challenging their deepest religion. And their religion is toxic. Meaning their deeply held beliefs that they think is the way the universe works ain't how the universe works. So I'm doing my job. I'm letting them know, Uhuh, uhuh, uhuh, where you're going, ain't a good neighborhood, ain't gonna get you where you wanna go. So if my client says, oh my God, you're right, which I've had happen many times, some version of, whoa, they get it. Now, if the client's gonna say to you, no, I just want a diet. Say, great. I understand. I know you've tried this before. Maybe someone else can help you do this. I really want to help you get where you wanna go. In no way, shape or form do I believe that you getting another diet is gonna help you because that's what you've been doing for 18 years. So I wish we were a match. I wish we were on board together, but we're just not. I'm sorry. I'm gonna let that client go. That's it. That's it. And then what you're doing is you're training life yourself, the universe. You're telling the universe, here's how I work, here's how I believe. I always do my best to bring a client into the light, to bring them into consciousness. I treat every session as if it is my last session on Earth. And if I forget to do that, I remind myself to do that. And when I say I treat every session as this, my last session on earth, it means I deliver. I'm truthful, I'm honest, I'm clear, and I come from my heart and I pretend, Hey, if I'm gonna die, I wanna go out with a bang. If this is my last session ever and I'm gonna die after this. I wanna make this the best session ever. And making something the best session ever means I'm delivering a fierce, loving, honest truth. If that's what's needed in the moment. And a person either gets on board or they don't. And if they don't, then they don't. That's their choice. It's not a failure on your part as long as you tried your best. 'cause it's my job as the practitioner, my job as the guide, the coach, the mentor, the person who's raised their hand and said, I wanna help you to do the best that I possibly can, which I just did with that client. And if they still say no, I just want you to tell me how many calories I need to eat and write down a diet, and I don't wanna do any of this nonsense, that client's not a match for you. And they're not, they're never gonna get where they want to go that way. And they might need to go down that road another five, 10 years until they figure out that that doesn't work. It's okay. It's okay. So again, the idea is to feed back to your client to remind them whenever they're getting off course, you're reminding them of what they said is most important to them. That's all you're doing. You said, now I didn't say that. You said that It's so useful to enlist your client's own wisdom and their own words in helping them stay motivated and inspired. That was the purpose of this question. 'cause now you know some of the keys to their queendom or kingdom, and you're gonna remind them, Hey, remember when you said this is most important to you? Well, right now you're behaving as if that's the least important thing to you just saying. And it's my job to help you get what's most important to you. I'm committed to that. Sometimes you might not like me when I do that, but I still like me and I still like you.
You know, I got a quirky personality. Sometimes when I'm with a client, I like to keep things light, but at the same time I'm very serious. But at the same time, I care. I care about this work. I care about helping people and doing the best that I can. If somebody's paying me and somebody's coming to see me and somebody's, you know, bearing their fears to me and their heart to me and their soul to me, then, then I'm gonna do the best job that I can show my friends. Uh hmm. What's next is, uh, the four questions, part three, where we're going to talk about the last question, which is, where is the wisdom of the universe calling my client? That's such a big one. Um, it's probably, if I could only ask one question of the universe on behalf of my client, that's what I would ask, because that gives me the most important information that I possibly need to know. You're gonna hear more about that in the four questions. Part three. Thanks for hanging in there with me, my friends. Thanks for being on the ride. I will see you on the other side.

PART 3

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Greetings. Once again, everybody. This is Mark David, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating Your Guide On this journey. We have been talking about the four questions. Question number one, what's stressing my client? Question number two, what's their biggest stress in life? Their biggest fear. Question number three, what's most important to my client? Question number four, my favorite. Where is life calling my client? That's a juicy one. Where's life calling my client? What does this mean to me? What this means is how is the wisdom of life asking my client to grow, stated in another way? Where is a higher power calling my client to stated in another way? How is the divine, how is God asking my client to improve in character? In what direction is the spiritual compass of the cosmos directing my client? Or where is the hidden code of life calling my client? Whatever language you want to use that feels comfortable to you, but we're stepping into a bigger place. And what I'm saying to you is this question has a lot of juice and a lot of power. Because honestly for me, if I can know the answer to only one question with clients, quite frankly, this is it. Where's life calling them? Life with a capital L, to me, it puts you and I in an advanced PhD realm of practitioners, this is not the kind of question that you ask of your client. Hey, Mr. Client, where's life calling you? No, never would I ask such a question. Really, it it's, it's, it's just not what that's about. It's you tapping into that. It's you being a channel for that. A conduit for that is you humbly asking this question of the universe on behalf of your client. So you have to find the words that are most relevant to you in terms of how you express your own religion, your own spirituality, and cut yourself loose. Now, there's no way to check your answer against the actual answer. There's no right or wrong here. This is you actually training yourself. You're training yourself, my friend, to listen to a higher power, to listen to a higher wisdom, to hear something from
the grandness of life, the creative power that put us here. It's about us beginning to tap into that more and more. Because if you care to notice this world that you live in, if you care to do a cursory study of history, of philosophy, of religion, of spirituality, of great literature, it seems that as humans age and become more wise, we indeed reflect on this question. Once you've been on planet earth for a while and you've been paying attention throughout history, there have been people that are noticing that there's a hidden architecture to life, that there's something grander that is moving us.
And one of the great things that we can do is to tap into that many people. Some people, I don't know how many people out there, maybe, you know, one or two or 10 or a hundred, um, there's some people who are tapped into their soul's compass. They follow their inner guidance. They follow a quiet inner voice that tells them what to do. Perhaps you've had that experience in your life. You just knew what to do. You knew what was next. Maybe you don't always have that experience at all, and that's fine. It doesn't mean we're doing anything wrong, because I think life, uh, delivers its wisdom to us in different ways. Sometimes we're getting a clear message about what to do and what's next and who we ought to be and how we are here to grow. And sometimes we could be a confusing mess and the answers from the cosmos, from the universe, from God, they're not forthcoming. They're not so easy, they're not so obvious. Sometimes we have to walk in the dark a little bit. But I'm saying for you and I as practitioners, for you and I as coaches, as counselors, as healers, this is the part where you become a bit of a spiritual counselor, a bit of a religious counselor, a bit of a universal counselor. So if that has any interest to you, then this conversation should have a lot of interest to you. If this conversation turns you off, then toss it out and don't use it. However, I would love for you if the conversation is a little bit edgy for you to consider, consider the possibility that life is not random and chaotic and meaningless. That we are moved by powers that we don't understand,
and that there's a grander wisdom to the scheme of life that is hard for the human mind to comprehend. But we can be humble and ask a question. If you're a parent, you look at your child and you wonder about their potential, you try to see into their potential. In fact, many parents see the potential in their children. They see the gold in their children. They see what the universe is asking next of them, what life is asking next to them in terms of how they need to grow, what they need to learn. Okay, time for you to learn how to tie your shoes, okay, time for you to learn how to speak with more respect. Sometimes it's so darn obvious sometimes with you and your friend, with you and your partner, you just know, geez, you gotta learn some better manners. Gee, you have to learn how to communicate better. Gee, you have to learn to see where you have a little bit of anger towards this, that, or the other thing. Gee, you have to see where you don't effectively communicate. Gee, you have to see where you could be a little bit nicer or you can be a little bit more decisive. Whatever it is, you see that for the people closest to you oftentimes, and they see it for you. The interesting thing is, a lot of times the people that know us and love us, they see those places in us where life is calling us, where we need to grow. And we don't see them because, you know, we're stuck in the comfort of our own skin and doing our thing. And oftentimes we don't know until the world gives us feedback.
So to your client, you are the world giving them feedback to your client. You can choose to be a conduit for this question. Where, where's life calling my client?
You know, I'm sure there's times in your life where, where you, again, you knew what's next for you. So I just want you to capture some of those moments when you've known for your friends, known for your kids, known for your, your partner, your loved ones. Oh God, you know, life is calling you too. And usually the way we frame it is you need to learn how to be more polite. You need to learn how to manage your money better. You know, you need to learn how to eat healthier. You need to learn how to take better care of your body. And those all might be true.
Another way to language that is, you know something? I think life is calling you to learn how to feed yourself better and nourish yourself better.
I think the higher power the universe is asking you to grow into more responsibility.
I think life is calling you to really look in the mirror more and notice how you communicate with some of the people around you.
So it's not, I think you should do this, or my opinion is you should do this. Or I'm saying, you should do this. We're deferring to a higher wisdom and a higher power. What happens for me when I do that, when I frame it like that, is in a lot of ways, it takes some of the pressure and stress off me to figure out my client with my brain. Now, I love using my brain to figure things out. I do it all the time. I got no problem with that. And there's, I have discovered another realm, another dimension in my experience that we can tap into where wisdom is available, where information is available. And it's the same wisdom that runs the whole show, that has created what you see before you, every place and everywhere. So that's the wisdom we're tapping into my friends, asking life where your client is headed and then helping your client move in that direction. How could you freaking possibly go wrong with that? It's a bulletproof strategy. Where's life? Where's a higher wisdom calling my client? And you listen for that answer, and you help your client move in that direction. You're taking your marching orders from the brilliance of the universe. It's almost infallible. You're moving with the force of heaven. You're in alignment with the grandeur intelligence you are making your coaching practice, to me, more spiritual, more deep, more edgy. Certainly for me, more interesting. And I believe more powerful. I've seen it work as I started to come from this place more and certainly in my own life and more in my own career, my own profession, in my work with clients and with students. So if you're the kind of person who's a bit more spiritually or religiously inclined, this is good stuff for you. Grab it, consider it, noodle with it. Play with it. Practice it because it is a, it's an endless goldmine. I kid you not my friends of possibility.
Now sure. Can I ask the universe, Hey, where's my client headed? And I get an answer. Yeah, my client has to go rob banks. And that's how they're gonna make money and find their true passion in life. Yeah. You know, we could be off. Of course, of course, of course. So yes, we're being humble and yes, we're doing our best for listening. And part of asking the question is, is being clear, meaning clearing ourselves out, getting rid of ego, asking like, I just have that question always. And I mean, always, it's running on a low volume in the back of my mind when I'm sitting with a client. In fact, even when my client is not there, that question is unconsciously working in my head on behalf of my client. Where's life calling my client? I am ongoingly appealing to a higher power, a higher intelligence, a higher wisdom to guide me in this work. That doesn't mean I'm being all mushy and I'm not doing my job. 'cause a lot of times my job is being very directive. My job is saying, okay, we gotta look at your food allergies. We gotta look at your macronutrient balance. We gotta look at your meal timing. We have to look at getting more this in your diet, that in your diet, you gotta go get tested for this. So of course, I'm doing my job. This question is another tool, another tool if you choose to have in your toolkit. That for me, as I said, is the most powerful question I can ask. And I'm asking it of the universe, and I'm gonna say it, it probably works for me at least 99 times out of a hundred.
When I ask this question of the universe on behalf of a client, the right answer, a good answer, a useful answer comes through and it changes where life is calling you or your client today is different than how life is calling you or your client tomorrow or next year or whenever. Because we are growing and evolving and changing, and we are constantly being called, we are constantly being cultivated by the universe. You will notice from the time we come into this world, we are growing, we are expanding, we are learning, we are being challenged as humans to learn how to embody, to be here, to be sufficient, to be self-sufficient, to drive cars, to do math, to be able to count our change, to be able to handle our finances, to be able to communicate, to be able to make babies and be good parent. All of it. It's, there's, there's a lot to figure out. So we're constantly being called,
sometimes we forget that we're being called and it all just seems like a grind. Now I gotta do this, now I gotta do that. So when your client steps into your office, you are creating an invisible space because you're asking this question on behalf of the universe, you are creating a more sacred container.
So, so I will acknowledge that this question for me assumes a higher power.
If you're an atheist, perhaps you can language it that it assumes a hidden code, a hidden architecture.
But for me, as a person who believes in a higher power, this question assumes a higher power. So here's my bias. It assumes a hidden wisdom. It assumes that following our soul's compass is inherently good. And just, do we make mistakes? Do you make a wrong turn and hit a dead end? Sure, all the time. But that's life. We are lost. Sometimes we go down the wrong road. We get what we think is a good idea and maybe it was a good idea. And life is just saying, okay, nope, not this way. This question assumes also that straying from our soul's compass can potentially take us further away from healing and transformation and from reaching our fullest potential.
Back to that little acorn seated within that acorn enc coated within that acorn is the blueprint for the mighty oak.
Perhaps it is the wisdom of universe that is guiding the unfolding of that blueprint, because it's the wisdom of the universe that moves the sun and the earth and brings the warmth and creates the water and the nutrition and the cycles of the season and of time that created the acorn itself.
What has the power to defeat the source of all power? So this is for those of us, again, who are inclined in this direction. And it's a wonderful question to play with my friends. Just play with it. Be playful with life. Be playful with your role. You bet. I take my role seriously. No, it's a bit of a paradox. I take my role extremely seriously. Uh, it is a craft for me. It's a responsibility. It's a privilege. It's a big privilege to coach and counsel another human being, to be the person that they come to for guidance around the place that they struggle. That's a privilege. So I'm aware of that. And as part of helping manage and conduct that relationship, part of what I do is to keep things light as best I can when that is the right thing to do. So this question is a powerful question. It's a big question. It's a deep question. It's a cosmic sacred religious question.
But as you're experimenting with it, be playful with yourself. Be willing to be wrong sometimes, and as well, be willing to be, right. So where's live calling my client? Hey, you could be a gazillion different places. Let me just mention a tiny slice. Life might be calling my client to forgive, calling my client into more self-love, more self nourishment, slowing down life. Might be calling my client to embrace the feminine, embrace the masculine to do one's true work, to let go more of the past, to move on, move on from something to trust more,
to be more cautious. Perhaps life might be calling my client to just learn to start saying no more, or for someone else to learn how to start saying yes. More life might be calling my client to say, okay, it's time to embrace a true loving relationship. To open up to sexuality, to embrace spirituality or religion. Life might be calling my client to simplify life, might be calling my client to take on more complexity. Life might be calling my client to work harder, to be more open-minded, to be more open-hearted, to be happy now to spend more time alone, to spend more time social, to start living our real life. Now, life might be calling my client to be more outgoing, to be more contemplative. Life might be calling my client. I have kids to mature, to lighten up, to be more risky, to be more authentic. Get in touch with feeling to start over, to end a relationship, perhaps to move to a new location, to make more money, to make less money, to give more, receive more is it's endless.
That's why we listen. It's why you listen to your client. Because every human is different. You know, I could see in some other training, okay, we have to get the 500 things where life can possibly call our client. We have to make a list. And you have to choose from the list which one? Ugh, I bang my head again. No, no.
Life is not that cookie cutter, my friends, you, you know that you are being called if this is calling you to learn how to listen and to learn how to trust and to be willing to explore this part of your role. Because I'm suggesting to you as somebody who has been in this role for a long time and practicing this very thing that I am preaching to you, I'm over here raising my hand and saying, Hey guys, this really, really, really works.
It's a beautiful way to be in relationship with someone.
It's a way for us to get out of fixing consciousness. Oh, I gotta fix my client. No, just ask the universe, where's life calling my client? How is my how, how is life asking my client to grow, to evolve, to step into what's next?
Any small steps, any, any, any small steps that help move your client in the direction that life with a capital L is calling them. Any small steps actually are big steps that produce the fastest results. So if you want fast results and fast results don't mean weight loss 20 pounds in seven days, or I hate those things you see on magazines in the supermarket lose six pounds in two days. What, what, whatever it is, leave me alone. There's no science to that. There's, it's, it's such nonsense. And this nonsense enters our minds. So the good news, when you're speaking to the universe, inquiring of the universe in a humble way on behalf of your client, whatever answer you get, however life is calling my client, if I could eavesdrop on that, on listen, and then inspire my client to move in that direction, that's the way that you help your clients step into their personal power. And when you help help your clients step into their personal power, you are definitionally helping them step into their metabolic power.
I believe this is a foolproof strategy. Now, it doesn't always look exactly how we want it to look. Success generally speaking, generally speaking, success never looks like how we expect it to pretty much ever. And I'm talking success in anything. I have been around a lot of financially successful people, like really financially successful people. And, and I'm the kind of guy I love to inter interview them. And to a woman and to a man, they've all said they could have never had imagined in the positive and in the negatives, what success on that level of financial success, success would actually mean for them, who they would become, the challenges of it, the problems of it, the beauty in it that they wouldn't have even realized the benefits that they wouldn't have quite even know the little things oftentimes.
But the point is, we don't know what success looks like or ought to look like.
I've spoken to a lot of very wealthy people who their success is a burden and they're the first one to admit it, and it's making them crazy. Um, it's never quite how we think. But all I'm saying here is that
when you turn it over to a greater wisdom, then your job and my job is to trust how the universe is defining success for your client in any given moment. For us to notice what the little successes actually are. Yes, we're always going to do our best to help our client in the direction they wanna move. You wanna, you want to stop your binge eating? Great. I'm gonna do my best to help you do that. You wanna stop your overeating? You bet. I want to help you do that. You wanna love your body more, you bet. I want help you do that. You wanna lose weight, that you truly have weight to lose. You bet. I want to help my client do that.
And I'm also gonna be asking, where's the wisdom of life calling my client? Because sometimes with a weight loss client, the wisdom of life is asking my client to just let go of weight loss for a while.
Woo. That's a biggie, my friends,
in a weird way, that is the actual strategy to help them in the long run get where they wanna go. But it sounds completely strange, bizarre, retarded, and counterintuitive to the human mind. 'cause I wanna lose weight, therefore I should be doing things that help me lose weight. I shouldn't be not wanting to lose weight in order to lose weight or forget about losing weight in order to lose weight. But actually there's such a deeper, more profound wisdom to that. It's, it's incredible. So again, it's your job to eavesdrop on the universe and ask it on behalf of your client. How is life calling my client? What's next? There's another way to ask it. What's next in their evolution?
How is a grander wisdom guiding them in their personal and their soul's growth? I mean, really, what a spectacular question to ask, you know, for a great number of clients life is asking them to love your body. Now, this is for a lot of your weight loss clients. Love your body now. Be the real you now step more into your feminine now, not when you have the supposed perfect weight in shape. Step more into your masculine now, not when you have the supposed perfect weight in shape. Love yourself into change as opposed to hate yourself interchange.
That's for a lot of our weight loss clients, my friends. There it is right there. And for a lot of them, as I just mentioned, life is asking them to let go of weight loss for now and love your body now and just be the real you now, just because that's what the wisdom of life is saying. And just because your strategy, Mr. Mr. Client hasn't been working anyway, let's try something completely different.
Now. If I'm inquiring on behalf of the universe, where's life asking this particular weight loss client to grow? Where's life calling them?
And I get an answer that feels good, then I feel good. I feel more confident, I feel more empowered to coach and cheerlead and mentor and befriend and guide my client in that direction because I know I'm coming from the best place I can possibly come from. Might I be wrong? Sure, but you know something if I'm totally wrong,
is there no harm? Is there any harm done? If I've really been now coaching my client to love your body now, like is, oh my God, we wasted so much time on that. That's awful. Or, or to be, to be the real you. Now, like if I'm wrong about that, like how bad is that to step more into your archetypal feminine or more, or your masculine, or to love yourself into change instead of hating yourself into change? Are those things so horrible? No, you can't lose. Your client can't lose. They'll resist. They might kick and scream a little bit. They just want you to tell them, here's how you're gonna lose your 20 pounds in 20 minutes, or whatever it is that people think they want.
Now remember as I say this, I want my weight loss client who has weight to lose, to lose weight. I really want you to know that I want that for them.
But what I also want for them above and beyond that, and more than that is for them to be tapped into the wisdom of life is for them to be following their higher code, their soul's code,
and oftentimes life. And the wisdom of the universe, the creator. God ain't giving us what we want. Sometimes mommy and daddy ain't gonna give you the ice cream no matter how good it tastes, no matter how clear you are. I wanted this ice cream tasted good the last time, made me feel great the last time. Why aren't you giving me the ice cream now? I only had the other ice cream 20 minutes ago. What's the big deal? You know, we get like that. We are children sometimes in the eyes of the universe. Important to remember that where's, you know, you know, it's okay, excuse me, to say to your client
at some point, I might do this if I feel it's useful. And, and sometimes I'm just moving a client in a certain direction, but oftentimes I will identify for my client, Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, you know, I play a little game with myself. I just wanna let you in on how I do this work and what goes on in my head so you understand where I'm coming from. I play a game with myself, and I imagine that I can ask the universe, I can ask a higher power where it's calling my client to grow and evolve, meaning you in this case. So I do that for all my clients. I'm, I'm really trying to tune in and ask the wisdom of the universe. Where's life calling my client?
And I do this because I imagine that our destiny is well timed and it's planned by a grander intelligence. That's my religion, that's my belief system. So honestly, what I, you know, try this song when I tune into you a bit more based on everything I know about you so far, and based on what it seems like life is kind of whispering in my ear on your behalf. What I get is that life is calling you to, and then whatever it is, fill in the blank, whatever you've come up with. And then I'm gonna say to my client, how does that land for you? I'm interested. What happens for you When you hear me say that, how does that, does that ring true for you?
How cool is that? I've just revealed it. I'm checking in with my client now. I'm only gonna put this out when I feel the relationship is ready for such a conversation because, okay, I've been working with my weight loss client for two or three sessions and I see how uptight they are about losing weight. I see how they wanna lose their 75 pounds yesterday. I see how they've been going on for x number of years, and they're all wound up around weight loss. And they're all up in a bunch and, and they're just, they just got a lot of stress and anxiety and a lot of, huh, just a lot of noise in their head and a lot of disappointment.
And their whole life for so long has been, how do I change myself? How do I change myself? How do I lose this weight? How do I make this body different? Because what I have now is not good. This isn't good. I'm no good. I'm not lovable, I'm no good. Ouch. That's a lot of noise. So when I say to my client, you know, when I tap into the wisdom of the universe, what I hear is that this is a time for you to spend some time and relax and let go of weight loss for a few months
and just be with yourself and love your body more, and love your life more. And just put this weight loss thing just, just right here to the side. You, you can pick it up again, but just experience what it's like to be you without pushing this, without constantly proclaiming to your mind and everybody in your head and anybody else who will listen that you need to lose this weight. And if you don't, you suck. And life sucks. Let's just, let's just turn the volume off on that for a few months.
How does that land for you, Mr. And Mrs. Client? And now you have a conversation and now your client has something to say to you. Chances are, if you've tapped into the wisdom of the universe, and chances are, if your client is even somewhat open, they're gonna be on board with you.
You know, honestly, at some point, this worked for me at least nine times outta 10.
You do it from a place of love and care.
You do it from a place of mentoring your client. So basically what I'm doing is I'm stepping into a certain seat. I'm stepping into a certain persona. When I say this to my client, I'm stepping into a certain archetype. You know what? I'm being in that moment. I'm being a spiritual counselor. I'm being a religious counselor. You know what, I've also asked questions previous to this conversation to determine where my client is at in their religious or spiritual life. Hey, Mr. Mr. Client, can, can, can you tell me about you and religion, you and spirituality? Like, what are you, where are you, what do you do? What's that part of your life about? So I know if they're a faith-based Christian, I know if they're an Orthodox Jew, I know if they're just a person who likes Buddhism and Hinduism and yoga and, and different religious traditions, I know if they feel burned by their religion and, and they don't, they don't wanna listen to any of that stuff anymore. Like, I know because we've talked about it before. So if I know they believe in God, I'll, I'll speak like that. I'll say, Hey, when I tune into, when I tune into a higher power, when I tune into the way God talks to me and say, where's life calling this wonderful person sitting right in front of me? Here's what I get. So what you're doing when you say that is you're creating a listening.
The listening is, oh, he's speaking from his spiritual religious counselor. He's speaking to my religious self from his religious self.
I don't care where religion a person is, I'll, I'll find a way to language it as best I can, such that they can hear it.
I just wanna know what you believe in and how, how might you language it so I can effectively communicate what I need to communicate to you.
And then you have a conversation. Yeah, you know something that feels so true, but oh my God. Like, how am I gonna do that? 'cause I wanna weigh myself every day and like, oh, like what does that mean? Do I like never die? You know? Then people are gonna go into their fears and they're gonna have questions, and then you're gonna work with them.
Where is life calling my client? Where's the higher wisdom of the universe calling my client? How is it asking them to grow? Don't underestimate the power of this question, my friends, and do not underestimate the power of the answer that you receive. Please, let's play with this a little bit and talk about some case stories, case studies. Um, so I can give you an example of how this might show up for me. I was just thinking in terms of the four questions. Okay, I'm gonna talk about a guy, I'm gonna call him Robbie. Uh, he was age 38 when I saw him. Guy's actually a therapist, financially comfortable, uh, socially very well connected, friendly guy, popular, funny, generous, just, just all like a good guy. Um, came to see me for food allergies, fatigue, digestive weakness, brain fog. And he was binge eating sweets. Uh, and he was dealing with a 25 pound weight gain. Now, Robbie has been on an eight year search for a cure. So this has been happening since his late twenties or so. Um, he's done the diets, the supplements, the fasting Chinese medicine. He went through the whole traditional allergy medications. He gets intravenous nutrition, and he's got zero, just about zero relief from everything. Uh, Robbie very committed to healing himself. He's convinced he has a chemical imbalance of some kind. And he's, he's tries everything. Um, he especially feels ill after eating sweets or sugar. He follows a very healthy and limited diet of protein and vegetables. Once or twice a week is when he has the sugar binge. And the sugar binge really baffles him. It, it, it just completely throws him off because as he says, he has no problem eating protein and veggies. He's not jonesy, he's, he's not wishing he was doing something else necessarily. He knows this is good for him and what makes him feel good, and all of a sudden he just finds himself bing on sugar, uh, and none of the weight comes off no matter what he does. Okay, interesting. Right? Like, what do you do with this person? So here I am asking the four questions alone of, uh, asking the four questions. Okay, question number one, what's stressing the guy? What's stressing him? Okay, so as I'm asking him questions about him, his life, his life is pretty good work-wise, financially, socially, where's the one place of stress? His girlfriend wants marriage. He doesn't, she's clear, he's clear, and they clear that they really care about each other and they're clear that they're in a relationship and he's clear he doesn't wanna get married. And she does. And she feels very hurt and she keeps hanging in there, and they have a history of breaking up and getting back together and breaking up and getting back together. So this is a, this is a big source of angst and pain and confusion.
That's pretty straightforward. So here I'm then, now I'm wondering, okay, what's his biggest fear? Now? Now this was hard for me to tell at first, um, after several sessions, and I can talk to this guy a little bit because he is a therapist, so I can ask him weird questions. Um, so basically we drill down a little bit and, and his fear is that he's gonna be a nobody. Meaning that all of a sudden he is gonna lose all his clients and he'll be professionally invisible and personally alone, and nobody's gonna see what a good guy he is. Like, he's such a good guy and he's so good at what he does. He, he's just, he's just a successful human. Um, and his fear is that he'll somehow end up a nobody. People have fears, people have deep fears. They, these, these come from someplace. It doesn't matter where it comes from, but that's his, that's his biggest fear that somehow is gonna lose it all and be a nobody. And even though it seems irrational, given his position in the community such his life, we're gonna hang there for a second, what's most important to him? I asked him this question. He was very clear right away. He's got a, just his spiritual practice. He's a meditator. That's very important to him. Just growing and learning how to be a better person and becoming more aware. Um, these are the most important things to him. Great. Got it. And by the way, he puts time into those and he puts energy into those. So it's his lifestyle and it's also his profession. Makes sense to me. I get it. I'm similar in that way. Question number four, he's out of the loop on this one. Where's life calling my client? How is a higher wisdom asking him to grout? Okay, so here I am. I'm trying to be open. I'm trying to be humble. I'm trying to be a conduit when I ask this question, and you know, it just hits me so clearly and so powerfully. Uh, his relationship challenge got my attention big time. As I dug more into his relationship life, it turns out he has a trail of potential women always wanting him back to college. Like, this is his thing. Women always want him. Um, he owned that. He had a reputation as a Casanova in his teens, in his twenties. It's not who he is now, but he definitely, that was a part of him in the past. And to me, I'm thinking he's stuck in the same pattern with women. My hunch, my intuition, my sense is that life is number one, calling him to focus more.
You know, it's, it's interesting. Uh, it's like that's the first word that came to my mind. Um, there was a part of him that was all over the place. It was all over the place. And him talking about healing himself and working on his health, uh, which is understandable, he really wanted answers. But as a part of him that felt scattered, and the only other time i i, he, he felt scatter. So he felt scattered when he talked about his health, and he felt scattered to me when he talked about his relationship. He would go from this really smart, clear therapist, just, just smart guy to just, his voice change. And he, and he gets a little bit rambly and he bounces all over the place. And he loses a bunch of IQ points when he talks about his health and when he talks about his relationship. So for me, I'm also feeling that not only is life calling him to focus, somehow I'm just hanging with that word. And then it, and then I realized, yeah, it, it feels like life is calling him to say a clear yes or no to his girlfriend.
That's a way to focus because the energy of the relationship was that it was a leaky relationship. The container for the relationship was very leaky. They break up, they get together, she wants to get married, he doesn't. So somebody gotta make a decision. And more to the point when I started thinking about it, um, you know, what do I know? But it just felt like life is calling 'em to just say, yes. Come on, you know, you're the right age. You're 38, you've been there and done that. You've played around. You are in a good place in your profession, and you are in your late prince stage, and you're ma mature in a lot of ways. And in two more years or less, you're gonna be a king in training.
It's time, it's time. You got a good person, you got a good woman. When he talks about her, apart from their relationship issues, he has a ton of respect for her. I get a respect, a lot of respect. So that's my answer. Now, do I know this? Do I have any right to say that? I don't know, you tell me, but I'm asking this question on of the universe, on behalf of my client, and I'm, this is the hit I'm getting. Um, to me, life was also calling him to be more in his masculine. That's part of focusing, it's part of being present. It's about committing.
By the way, I was also thinking that sugar was probably his escape from discomfort.
So these are the things I thought about. Where, where life is calling him to focus, to say a clear yes or no to his girlfriend, and more to the point to say a yes. To step into his higher masculine, which is another way to say all that. Excuse me, to commit and to be present.
So here's my action plan with Robbie. I said, Hey, listen, here's what I think you should do. I just wanna lay it on the line for you, buddy. Um, I think it's time. I think life is calling you to make a move with your relationship. Your wobbly, your health is wobbly, your relationship is wobbly. The way you talk about your health is wobbly. The way you talk about your relationship is wobbly. Uh, things don't, things don't end up good. When we're wobbling a lot stuff falls down and messes get made. So I wanna suggest to you that you take a few weeks to decide if your inner out. And, and by the way, we had to negotiate, you know, I said like, take a week. And he is like, no, I need a few months. And so finally we got down to two weeks somehow, I don't know. Um, and I also asked him to give some journaling time and thought time to where in life do you need to focus more? Uh, for whatever reason that that, that word just came to me. So that's my intuition tuning in.
I wanted him to, we had talked a little bit about money. Uh, you know, to me, money falls in the realm of the masculine mind, the left brain mind. I'm not saying men and women there. Um, I asked him to find an investment counselor to help him invest and manage his money. He had inherited some money, uh, and there was a part of him that was thinking about his future more. So I thought, great, learn how to manage your money.
He owns his own house. He has a couple of roommates living in the house. He had been complaining about this roommate, that roommate. I'm like, okay, you're 38 years old. You don't really need these people living in the house. I said, you know, I want you to consider this. Tell your roommates to move out and have your girlfriend move in.
He, he, he was shocked when I said that. I said, I want you to start talking about, at least in your own mind, um, the possibility of engagement. So if you are in, in the relationship, then this is about engagement.
I also had an action plan with him. Um, you're gonna learn more about this when we get into our, uh, conversations around binge eating in a later module. Um, but I had him plan a better sugar binge. I had a, had him plan his binge. Um, most humans who are binge eating are binge eating. Just it's out of their control. When you learn how to actually plan it, you begin to have, um, you begin to have power over it. So I'm not gonna go into that specifically, but we started managing his sugar binging and we made it more aware, aware and clear and conscious. I also wanted him to, guy spent a lot of time doing a lot of soft exercise. He was, you know, doing some, some soft yoga. Um, but he's more like this kind of soft male meditative kind of guy. And I asked him if he'd be willing to do some, some exercise that was a little more grunt. Like I said, I'd love for you to do some like, spin classes or, or weightlifting. And, and he actually liked the idea. Um, and, and that was all part of, you know, a conversation that we have of like, what does the masculine mean to you? What did it, what would it mean to focus more on the masculine in your life? We talked about commitment. We talked about letting go of like loose energies and loose strings, especially his roommates who had been complaining about especially, you know, learning to manage his money. I'm, I'm putting that all under the left brain, masculine, logical, linear planning, doing, getting done, using will, using strength through hard exercise, weightlifting.
So this client and weight, his weight was a symptom. It wasn't the problem.
Our focus was on helping him work on his personal power. The guy had done so much and seen so many characters, seen so many people seeing so many experts. I I, I had no interest in giving him another supplement. Um, I wanna focus on his personal life because that's one of the things he actually really hasn't done, or at least in the way that I was doing it with him. So I, I had no interest in focus on, on any weight loss strategies per se. Because my assumption is, is if I can help this person be the person he's meant to be, then his body has the best chance to become what it's meant to be. This is about my client's life, not his weight.
For so many clients, my friends, we help them lose weight by defocusing on weight loss and getting to where life is truly calling us. The real freaking work.
You were not put on this planet to lose weight. You were put on this planet to step into your power, your creativity, your potential to fulfill whatever destiny was seeded inside you to become the oak tree. You're meant to become your natural health and your natural weight will be a byproduct of that. Yeah. Do we go through our stuff? Absolutely. So then we deal with it. But we learn to see the weight not as the issue. Not as the problem. The weight is a symptom that we're listening to. It's talking to us. What does it say? So I look at the weight, I look at all his health challenge, and I go, okay, this is just talking. It's just symptom telling me something's outta bounds. And given the fact that you're seeing all these experts anyway, and nothing's working great, let's, let's look in a different place for the solution. I'm not gonna look for the solution in the same place where you couldn't find a solution where you've been working damn hard to find a solution. It's common sense, my friends.
So here's the results for Robbie. This is good. Um, we did 18 total sessions of work together, and that was over eight months. Um, by the time, you know, honestly within two months, but certainly at the end, I was looking at a human being who was far more focused, far more clear, actually far more confident. His energy was strangely dispersed. Uh, at the beginning. He was really feeling good about himself and his future. He's engaged with his girlfriend. I've done this a lot in my, uh, practice over the years. Uh, I've, I've done a lot of relationship work. Defacto, it wasn't what I was asked to do or trying to do. His digestion had improved by about 75%. His in fatigue was improved by about 80%. Brain fog, 85% gone. Sugar binges are a hundred percent gone. He had lost 20 pounds. What was he trying to lose? I don't even remember now. You know, it was probably what, um, 30 pounds or so. 25 pounds. Doesn't matter. Yeah, 25 pounds. So he loses 20 pounds. That's his natural weight. That's where his body settled. Life is good. That was eight months worth of work. And it's not eight months of us sitting down and talking about his weight. It's eight months of us getting together and talking about life unfolding, talking about the strategies to move him in the direction of where's life calling you. Life was calling him to be more focused, more committed. Life was calling him to make a choice around the woman in his life. Life was calling him to say, okay, I do.
He needed someone on the outside who's raising their hand and saying, Hey, I'm just reading the signs for you, sir, Mr. Client. I'm reading the signs for you. I'm, I'm just looking at your journey. I'm looking at all the road signs and they're, they're speaking loud and clear to me. That's why you're paying me. Because the people outside of us are generally the people who can often see things that we can't see because we're inside us. It's just the way life works. Mission accomplished, what a success. And he didn't lose the 25. He lost 20 whenever it was. It's okay. Uh, let's talk about another case study so you can get a sense. I'm gonna call this woman Allison. She was 36 when I saw her corporate trainer. Very intelligent lady, hardworking, very responsible, very achievement oriented. Happily married for six years. She's got a daughter, age three. Uh, has a very busy and active family life. A strong social circle, coming to see me for the famous 20 pound weight gain. And that's happened over the last year. And she can't lose it with exercise. She doesn't like dieting, uh, and just doesn't work for her. It's not natural to her. She's never dieted before. She finds herself overeating during the afternoon and at night. She loves food and she's never really had any eating issues or waiting weight issues. You know, she might have overate once or binge ate once, but it's one of the few women I've encountered who's like, this is usually, this just hasn't been an issue until now. Um, always been fit, always maintain her weight, uh, is feeling very embarrassed and imagines like one of her big things. She imagines her coworkers are judging her because normally she's misfit and now she's miss I've gained 20 pounds. And that really shows. So she is horrified when she steps into work, you know, every day. Um, her husband don't hear a peep outta him. He's okay with her rate. Um, he hasn't complained. He still loves her. She's amazed and honestly doesn't mean a damn thing to her. She really wants to lose the weight, but she's clueless as to how, by the way, I just wanna tell you sheer numbers wise, is it just my practice? I don't know. But I'm gonna say about
8.5 out of the women that I've met in my practice who say that they've clearly gained weight, at least 85% of them will say to me if they're married, my husband doesn't have a problem. He says he loves me as he is. He's been really great. I can't believe it. I'm amazed. I'm so lucky and I wanna lose the weight. It just, I just take note of that. It could be higher than that. Um, in terms of percentage wise, yes, I've had clients who, you know, my partner wants me to lose the weight. But when it comes to women, I've noticed that a lot. Just saying, okay, what's stressing my client being a mom and working 30 hours a week, that is abundantly clear, that's stressing her. 'cause she wants to be a good mom and she has to work. Her weight is stressing her. She's got financial pressures in her 30 hours a week. She earns more than her husband. Um, he is living far away. Um, excuse me, she lives far away from her family. That's a big stress for them or for her actually. Uh, she's close to her family. She wants to help, um, wants her daughter around, her parents and her cousins. It's not happening. Uh, what's also stressing her is her husband's challenges around earning more money. So he's a software salesman and his salary is up and down. He gets a very small base salary and everything else happens on commission. Uh, husband is extremely motivated. He's no slouch. She respects him. She admires him. She knows he works very hard and he's at a point in his career and his job where simply put the money ain't coming into fully support them. So they as a household need her 30 hours a week.
So this is what's stressing her. What's her biggest fear? What's her biggest stress? Hmm. Okay.
I'm definitely getting that. She's very afraid that she's gonna keep gaining weight. You know, I asked her, has your weight stabilized? She says, yeah, but like, I don't, I don't know is anything can happen. So I just started noticing in my question, oh, you're afraid you're gonna keep gaining weight? Uh, she has said to me that she feels like she's losing control over her appetite sometimes, and that's never been an issue for her. And I can tell when a woman says that, that that spells trouble. Um, I'm not being sexist when I say that I am being what I believe is accurate based on my observation of so many women. Um, that's a cue for wow, I'm really afraid that I can keep gaining weight.
I asked her now, what's the worst case scenario if you gain weight other than the fact that you're gonna gain a lot of weight, like, like what's gonna happen? Um, she shared that if she kept gaining weight, that she's going to be unattractive to her husband and he'll leave her.
Also, interesting, I've heard this from a number of my married women clients who have gained weight interesting, who are in their twenties and thirties, um, now that I think of that. So yeah, she's afraid that this is the ultimate result. I will be unlovable if I gain the weight. I will be unlovable by the person who loves me and I love him, who has said to me, your weight is fine. But to the mind, Hey, you know, there's gotta be a limit. If I keep gaining weight and gaining weight and gaining weight, and then all of a sudden I'm like, a thousand pounds, come on, he's not gonna like me. That's where the fearful mind goes.
So that's what I think her biggest fear is. She's gonna gain weight and he's gonna leave her. I'm pretty sure we nailed that one down.
What's most important to her? That's an easy question I asked. She said, being a mom, she didn't hesitate. That came right out of her mouth. Um, most important for her specifically, is raising her daughter in a healthy and conscious and loving environment. She is all about health and healthy children and healthy minds and healthy hearts and healthy souls. She's, she's that gal. She just wants to raise a good daughter and a good human being. Uh, she's on and about that very clear. The big one. Where's live calling her. This one is an interesting one. So where's live calling her? Allison really wants to be with her daughter and stop working for some amount of time. She shared that with me. And she can obviously, because there little nuclear family needs her salary now. Her husband says, I think you should take a leave of absence. Let's sell one of the cars. Let's downsize into a smaller house and we'll get a smaller mortgage. And in the meantime, I'm gonna be working as hard as I am to up my salary. And they've already gone to their accountant and worked this out to the point where they determined this is already done. That this was a financially doable plan. Because her biggest dream right now, and she has said this, is I wanna be a full-time mom, but she's a good mama bear. And she's like, yeah, I wanna be a full-time mom, but not if we're starving for goodness sake. So I gotta work. And he's saying, okay, here's the plan. We don't need two cars. We don't need this house. We can get a smaller house, smaller mortgage in this neighborhood just as good. His plan is doable. And you know, it's not the most wonderful idea. Would she like to stay in the house she's in? Yes. Is she super attached to it? No, but she prefers it. Where's life calling my client To my mind. And, and especially as soon as she said that they've already gone over this plan. They've done their homework, it works. Even if for the next two years his salary doesn't increase, they can still do it.
So life is calling my client, I think, to take a deep breath, leave her job behind, and trust that they will be okay. Let life unfold. Give your husband the blessing and and, and let him be off to the races. Let him do his thing. Embrace your desire to be a full-time. Mom. Have faith that this is going to work out. This is not blind trust. This is a good plan. That actually doesn't put you at risk. It's just a little uncomfortable. It's just not exactly what I was planning to downsize, but it's totally doable. Have faith that the money will work out. Trust that you're gonna be okay. Notice the words for her faith and trust. That's where life is calling my client. Come on, here it is. Here's the road for you to get where you wanna go. And here's your husband going, let's do this. I stand behind you in staying home and being the full-time mom that you wanna be on top of that. She knows she can get her job back if she leaves. It also. 'cause I asked her and she said, yeah, 'cause they love her. You know, I wanna say a few more things about this client. Um, you know, I, I'm pretty clear that her overeating was about stress for sure. And the stress is about money. Work, job, husband, motherhood, all those things we just laid out. Food helps her relax and decompress. Feel bad, e food feel better. I got no problem with her overeating. She needs to overeat. It's helping her regulate her emotions. So I said to her, you know something, I don't even wanna help you stop your overeating because eh, eh, that's really not where the action is. The one piece of thing I wanna do with you, Mrs. Kle, is that yeah, she's a fast eater. That's the only place I wanted to work with her, was to train her to be a slower eater, to let her practice being a slow eater that will help somewhat with her overeating. But what I really wanted to do was step into her new life, step into their new plan. That's where the action was. So yes, I did coach her to feel more nourished by food, to stop fighting it, to stop feeling like this overeating is the problem. I asked her to let the weight be there for a while without trying to lose it. I asked her to go on a two month, no diet, diet. I said, let's put first things first. Put your next move first. Put your plan into action first before we worry about this weight stuff. Because honestly, this weight has come on during the last year, during the time when all these things have heated up. When you've been feeling the stress of wanting to be a full-time mom, of having to work, resisting that, wanting your husband to make more money, seeing that he's not feeling that disappointment, knowing that you wanna get where you wanna go. I don't wanna work on your weight. Let's just, let's just give that rest. We got a bigger fish to fry. We got more important things to handle. This is kind of what I said to her. And she jumped on board with me. I love it. I love it. That was a very successful, particular conversation I had. Um, so after we were working together for three months, this was a process, um, slick over job. And my work was coaching her around trusting her husband, trusting the wisdom of the relationship, trusting her own intuition, trusting the wisdom of her own life. You know, we did work around her becoming a slow eater, a more nourished eater. Uh, we, we had some really good conversations about her new expression as a mother, because now that she's not going to be working, this is a new identity.
So as much as I know you wanna be a mother, and she was able to own this, there was a part of her that didn't wanna let go of, you know, she's good at what she does. She didn't wanna let go of that, but she definitely did. But she didn't, but she surely did. So a lot of the coaching is around surrender and let go. That's a feminine quality of both men and women. Um, interestingly enough. So we only worked together, um, just four months. Um, but after she left her job, I kept in touch with this one. Um, three months after leaving her job, she had a 14 pound weight loss. Came off naturally, wasn't the 20, it was the 14. And she was very, very, very happy. Like very happy. Um, didn't even bat an eye that it wasn't 20, you know, because her body literally reached its natural weight. The overeating naturally fell away as she went through this transition time. Transition times are difficult for all humans, for most humans, for many humans. Transition times are not easy. Um, this woman did a wonderful job. She really took on what we were doing together in this relationship. This was a very rewarding client for me because she was just, she's a great client. Um, and I also think at the same time, because there was a certain simpatico, I took the risk in saying, you know, here's where life is calling you.
You gotta let go. You gotta trust. I said it just like that. Like, you've gotta do this. This is perfectly laid out for you. This is older brother speaking. I'm older than her and I'm telling her, Hey, from my vantage point, wow, you've got a good path in front of you. Just gotta trust. Just gotta have a little faith. Take a leap of faith. That's where life is calling her. And she went for it. I went for it in saying that, she went for it in believing it, but she wasn't believing me. Because on a certain level, if I'm truly tapping into the wisdom of the universe and feeding it back to somebody we know, the person knows
what's a human talking and what's a higher power talking through us.
If it resonates with your client, then they're owning it. They get it. Let's do another case study.
One more here just to, just to kind of really hit this home. Uh, client of mine also, very fascinating lady. I'm gonna call her Stacy, when I first saw her 53 years old interior designer, Feng shui consultant, I love feng shui. She loves her work. Um, very busy lady. She's financially comfortable, Very comfortable. She's been married for 29 years, very well spoken, very. She's a creative artsy type, very gregarious, very insightful. Um, I I, I don't know if it's me, like I just love talking feng shui. And she just, uh, foun of information. Uh, she's very health and diet conscious. She has a local cable television show on home design, um, where she talks about home design and she introduces Feng shui into it. Um, so she's very, very media conscious. She is very clear with me that she wants to have a larger audience, that she wants to get bigger in that way. She has one grown child. Her husband is very supportive of her career. She wants to lose 30 pounds. That's why she's coming to see me. She is, okay. Here's the deal. She is super, super embarrassed that she's on TV and she's quote unquote overweight. She has a belief that she cannot be more successful. She wants a bigger audience, is a local cable television show. She wants a bigger audience, and she can't have that bigger audience in her belief system unless she loses the weight, because nobody wants to sit there and look at a person who is quote unquote 30 pounds overweight talking about interior design. Apparently I didn't know that rule of the universe, but apparently it's true. Excuse me. She says, I can lose seven pounds with dieting, but I gain it right back. Okey-dokey. Interesting client. I really like this lady and I really want to help her. I wanna help my clients. But you know, it's like sometimes you just, you just really connect with certain clients. Question number one, what's stressing her?
Well, her weight is clearly stressing her. Not having a bigger audience for her show is stressing her. She says to me, she constantly used the term, I got a big appetite. I got a big appetite. She loves food. When she starts eating food, she says, I love food. I just got a big appetite. That's how I was raised. That's how I was born. My family we're big eaters. They love food. They celebrate food. I've got a big appetite. She loves her big appetite, and it's a stress for her. Um, also, she's very busy and never seems to slow down. She'll say to me, I don't have enough relaxation. She won't necessarily say that that's what's stressing her, but to my mind, just picking up little cues. Oh yeah. And I had to go do this, and I had to go do that. I, and then I came back exhausted. So I'm picking up, she, she busies herself a lot or she is very busy and she doesn't have a lot of relaxation. And she indeed collapses at the end of a lot of days. Um, very, very, very driven lady. Um, and loves what she does and still driven at the age of 53, very,
what's her biggest stress?
Not exactly sure. Not exactly sure. With this one, you know, 98 times out of a hundred I could figure out a person's biggest stress. I know she's super worried about her weight. I know she's very worried about her career not taking off. She's somewhat concerned she won't be financially secure into her old age. We talked about that. It didn't seem like a big stress. She did mention it. So I'm just gonna hang with this that I don't quite know that. So here I'm giving you an example where I don't have an answer, but I know she's really worried about her weight. I know she's worried about her career taking off. There might be something else that I just haven't discovered yet that might come out in the relationship, in the conversations, or it might not. What's most important to her.
I asked her this, and I'll ask a client this question. Eh, do me a favor. Tell me, like me and you, heart to heart, soul to soul. What's most important to you? Me and you, heart to heart, soul to soul. Notice how when I frame it like that, if she's gonna answer the question, she's gonna come from her heart and come from her soul, because she knows I'm listening from my heart and listening from my soul because I just said so.
And I looked her in the eye and I care. And she knows that. And she picks it up because like all of us, she's smart and intuitive.
And she said right away, she said, I just wanna be at peace with my body. I want to be at peace with this whole food thing. She's been battling with weight since high school. She really wants to get over this fight, but she has no idea how she's never had a time when she felt at peace with her weight.
So once I understood what's most important to her, I'm now thinking this might be her biggest fear. That she'll never have peace with food and body, and that she will continue to live in this particular version of suffering. Misery, unhappiness. Let's, let's be honest, that's what it is. That is a form of suffering and misery and unhappiness. This is to my mind, just so you know, I'm looking at this woman. She's beautiful, she's powerful, she's interesting, she's fascinating. She's got a good life. She's got a great relationship. She's raised a good kid. She has great things in front of her, and she's tortured about her weight since she's been young. She just wants peace with food and with her body. That's what's most important to her. I a hundred percent believe her.
Where is life calling my clients? As always, as always the most important question. This is an easy one for me. I'm looking at a woman who's 53, who is a queen, and she's sitting in her chair, her queen's throne. She's on tv sitting in her queen's throne and wondering, oh my God, you don't love me. I weigh 30 pounds. I'm not good enough. This is terrible. I'm so awful. Nobody's gonna love me. I'll never get anywhere in life. No, you're a queen. So dieting has never worked for you. You said, so this woman is attractive and well put together and doesn't look overweight.
I said that to her. I said, with all due respect, you don't look like you are overweight. You constantly use that term to describe yourself. You look like you look at how you carry yourself. Do people ever comment on how you carry yourself? You really, you're put together well on so many ways, how she dresses her accoutrements, how she walks, how she conducts herself.
She's got all the right moves, but she's got this tiny, not so tiny little nagging voice in her head that's been there. You know, at least since her early twenties. I, I asked her, did it start before that? She couldn't remember,
uh, what she does know. Oh, the, the last time she was at her target weight was right around when she was 21. And this had been going on since she was a young girl, since her teens was worrying about her weight. How's your husband feel about your weight? Oh, he loves my body. And she described him as patiently confused by her body image thing. He, he, he's literally, he's oblivious to her needing her body to look different so he could like her more. He is completely happy and content like is zero desire for her to change. And she says he's oh, so patient. And she says, he literally has no idea what's going on for me. Like, why I'm so upset my friend's life is calling her to step into her queen hood around her body. It is as simple as that.
More about where is life calling her? It's stepping into her. Queen means loving your body. Now, I'm not gonna try to help you lose weight, is what I told her. I don't wanna do it. I feel I would be doing you a disservice. I will be doing you a better service if I tell you, give it up, let it go. I'm sorry. You might think I'm the worst, you know, eating psychology professional in all of human history. Um, but maybe life is asking you to do something else.
It kind of means, and I went into a conversation with her about Princess and Queen, and I laid it on the line. You gotta let go of the princess stuff. Embrace this body. What if you had this body for the rest of your life? Can you own it with dignity?
Your husband loves you. You clearly, the people on your cable television show who are watching you, they have no issue with your weight. This whole thing you're making up about. You can't go big unless you lose 30 pounds. Who says that? Oh my goodness. We better tell Oprah, she should not be so successful because she spent most of her life trying to lose 30 pounds. And you know what happened when Oprah would lose weight and get, get thinner? Her viewership went down. Did y'all know that Oprah's viewership goes down when her weight goes down? It's phenomenal. I love it. She's less relatable, really. She's less relatable. Her persona changes, her personality changes. It's a little different. Interesting. Isn't that so? If Oprah could do it, you could do it. Simple as that time to step into your queen hood. That one, by the way, when I pulled that Oprah one out, I didn't know where that came from. But you know something when you're trying to tune into the universe, sometimes things come through you. And the Oprah thing flattened her. It's like that. Like if this was a boxing match, that was the knockout punch. If this was a session of enlightenment, that is what showed her the light. I love Oprah. Okay, so here's my strategy for her. I did this intellectual intervention around queen and princess. I drew a line in the sand for her. I'm gonna help you out. I don't want this to take too long. I said, you have to choose. I said, you're 53. I don't, I I I don't. I I really like you. I don't wanna see you waste another moment of your life. I want you to take some time. I want you to journal about, based on what we've talked about and based on what lives inside you, what does queen hood mean to you?
And we're gonna explore baby steps, things you could do each day to embrace the queen within. You're gonna be letting go of the scale. You're gonna be letting go of diet foods. I want you to take every diet book you have and either give it away, donate it to a library, throw it in the garbage, or if you prefer, if you have a wood stove or a fireplace, burn it.
She also had a lot of friends who were into dieting. I'm like, no more, no more diet, social experiences. Be with people or be with your friends without talking about dieting and weight. Take that conversation off the table. No more exercise. Take a dance class. You like dance? Take dance. Yeah, we talked about slowing down with food. Um, she has a big social circle. I asked her, do you have a friend that you consider this woman's a queen? This woman has stepped into her power. She owns herself, her body, her looks, doesn't matter what she looks like. She had an immediate yes for me. And I said, great. I want you to ask that woman, if she would do a little bit of befriending with you and a little bit of mentoring with you, you know, it'd be great for you to have a lady like that in your life that you can model yourself after. Okay, my friends, here's the results for Stacy. We work together for approximately six months, two to three sessions a month. She heard me about the queen thing and she, it, it, it was interesting. She was very resistant. Um, but I knew I had her. So I didn't, I didn't let her go. I didn't let her get out of it because she knew what she had to do. She knew she was resistant and she knew what she had to do. Why? Because when you tune into a higher wisdom on behalf of your client and feed it back to them, they can't deny it. They're seeing the light because that higher wisdom is speaking them. It's not me talking to her. It's the universe talking to her through me. And when she hears it in her mind and starts saying it to herself, now it's the universe talking directly to her. Sure, you heard it from me first, but now it's yours. What are you gonna do with it? So she knows it's what she has to do. Notice that she started seeing how much energy she'd been wasting heating her body and trying to change it for so many years. That was hard for her. So, and that happens with people once they start to see the light, they're like, holy s**t, I've been wasting all these years.
I always look to reframe that. I always will tell my client, it is never too late to change, and you can have an unbelievably fabulous life ahead of you. I said, some people never learn what you've learned. Some people take this to the grave and never transform. I say, you're one of the lucky ones. Let's feel good that you finally got this and figured this out. And you can let it go. And you can now begin to be the person that, that you know you wanna be. You know, something fascinating that came out of this that, that blindsided me. I had no idea. As she was stepping into her queen hood more and really embracing this, she realized that the TV show was not what she really wanted. Ah, I was very surprised. She was using it in part to force herself to lose weight. She was thinking if I could have a big audience that's gonna make me lose weight. So she sets it up that I could only have a bigger audience if I lose weight and I'm smaller. So therefore, having a bigger audience and being more famous will drive me to lose weight. Once she let go of losing the weight, she really didn't want to have a TV show.
Um, she actually had an epiphany that she wanted to do more traveling and teaching in regards to her work and, and just be working more. One-on-one with people, but internationally. And she had gotten invitations, but she didn't do them because she was focusing on her TV show. But she really didn't wanna sit in a studio talking to a camera.
And, and it was really like, she made the decision and she, and she was like, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna finish this series and then I'm done. And she was at peace with it. So, fascinating things happen when we finally step into our royalty. The wisdom of the universe starts coming through her and is now guiding her in the direction that she needs to go. And all of a sudden her life is changing, not because she's forcing herself in any direction, is now because she's letting go of so much of the stress, of trying to be a princess when she's a queen, trying to be something she's not. That's like a monkey. Trying to be a dolphin or something, is like, no, you are what you are. Just be what you are. She really finally let go of the weight loss thing and was embracing her body more. And it was a work in progress. It wasn't easy for her, but she was doing it more and more. Um, interestingly enough, she shared with me that her sex life with her husband improved dramatically for her. He was still having a great time. Um, she said for her it completely changed 'cause she's in her body now. She's loving herself. Now, if you can't love yourself, the sex act won't be good no matter what your body looks like. Um, she was far more at peace. Remember, that was the most important thing she wanted, was peace. She was more at peace in her life, and she felt she had found a whole new path. Now, my friends, I just delineated three case studies where I just used the four questions to guide me. So yeah, there are other strategies that I use. I talk about princess Queen. Yeah, I was doing slow eating here and there. But all that came from the framework of asking the four questions. What's stressing you out? What's the my client's biggest stress? What's most important to them? Where's life calling them? Can you see my friends from these three case studies? How I use those four questions as a template for me as a practitioner to guide me in this work? It gave me a roadmap. And with each person, that roadmap led us to a good place.
Ah, I'm so happy about this. You know, I'm sure you've been doing this throughout our conversation, but why not? Let's, let's, let's just say it, you know, ask the four questions about your own life, just for the heck of it.
What stresses me? What's my biggest stress, my biggest fear? What's most important to me? Where is life calling me? Where is life calling me? Ask that question. Ask it every day. Revisit it. I always have to revisit that question, you know, and, and it's, it's, I might ask that question 20 times a day. Where's life calling me in this moment? If I'm in a conversation that's difficult, if I'm in reaction to somebody, if I'm mad, if I'm judging somebody, if I'm feeling sorry for myself, okay, where's life calling me in this moment? Oh, oh, oh, what's the higher road? What's gonna help me transform? What's gonna help me elevate? What's gonna help me be the best person I can be in character?
Be committed to exploring. If you haven't done this already in your life, to a partnership with a higher wisdom, especially in your professional practice. See your clients as humans who exist on a continuum of growth and unfoldment. Your client is constantly growing into their oak tree. See the invisible workshop that everybody's in. So when I'm asking the universe on behalf of my client, where's life calling this person? I'm understanding that their journey is like an invisible workshop. The wisdom of the universe has 'em in a workshop. You know, workshops could be really fun, workshops can be strenuous, workshops can be tiring. A workshop is a workshop is a workshop. Notice how we put the word work in there, and we don't call it a play shop. There's moments of play and we all know in a workshop, but if you take a play shop, there's usually no work. Um, so begin to notice the invisible workshop that life has your client in.
And I'm always gonna give my clients little mini assignments. I'm gonna vent them based on their invisible workshop, meaning based on where a higher wisdom is calling them.
Ah, my friends, this is, I, I I hope you absorbed this. I hope this landed for you. I hope it was useful to you because I'm excited about it because it's been very, very, very useful to me. And you know, sometimes the work is complex. Sometimes the work puts us into the unknown. You have to be ready, you have to be versatile. Um, bring all of you to the table. I, as, as a practitioner, I use my mind, I use my scientific brain. I use my heart and the love that's in me. I use my intuition. I use my care. I use the part of me that's a best friend, that's a big brother, that's a mentor, that's a guide I use. The part of me that's a spiritual counselor, it makes it more interesting for me.
And I end up attracting clients who love it. And the ones who don't love it, they let me know and we move in a different direction and I find a different way to make it interesting for me and for them. When the work is interesting for you, how can it not be interesting for your client? When I'm excited about the work, my client gets excited. They see my excitement. They have a guide, they have a mentor that they're paying who's, who's loving on them and is excited about their journey. This blows people's minds because they haven't been blessing their own journey. Chances are they've been struggling for understandable reasons.
My friends, we are so fortunate to be doing this work. Thanks for hanging in there with this conversation. We just finished our conversation around the four questions. Next, we're gonna start to get into some weight loss, case studies, case stories. We're gonna talk stories about people and their journey with weight and what happens. Thanks once again. I really appreciate you and I'll see you on the other side.

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