MODULE 4

A MIND BODY APPROACH TO ENERGY & FATIGUE

Section 3

This is a results-oriented collection of simple-to-practice tools and distinctions to help fast-track your ability to get clients where they need to go.

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PART 1

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Once again, my friends, Mark David here, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. Let's spend some time and talk about some counselor tools, counselor techniques, counselor awarenesses, and just some guiding star principles. And we're gonna be doing this in three separate conversations. Now we're gonna be highlighting, uh, a number of the practitioner tools we've been learning along the way, and we will definitely be adding a bunch of new ones to this conversation. For sure. My friends tools are more than just tricks that we use to be effective, though I will say they can certainly be just that the tools we use are really part of an overall philosophy of the work itself. They're symbolic of how we see our clients and their challenges. A lot of times, the tools somebody uses says a lot about who they are and what they're about. So what I do wanna say to you is, thus far tools and techniques you've been learning are quite sufficient to do very full, to do very meaningful and effective work with your clients. Plain and simple, of course, my friends, you could always learn more. You will continue to dive deeper into your craft. You're gonna keep going, and as you see more clients, you're gonna learn more. That's how we continue our education. So as always, I want you to relax as best you can into what you know, stop stressing about what you don't know. Gotta start somewhere stressing about what you don't know. I believe that's called an energy drainer. Relaxing into what you do know is an energy gainer. If it is truly important for you to learn more than do so, really, and you'll never know everything none of us do. So the idea is the more relaxed you are about who you are, what you know, what you've been learning, and the more willing you are to simply start to use the tools that you've been accumulating here, best chance you have for success. Okay, so first and foremost, the tool and guiding star that I want to highlight, underline, say once more just for the heck of it, even though I'll probably remind you again in some small ways, is to always commit to your client's highest goal. My friends, this is the gold standard of how to work with clients. And it's the gold standards for all the guidelines And tools that you possess. I mean, that it keeps you honest, it keeps you in integrity with life, with your client, and it actually helps us be most effective with clients. I'm going to tell you that one of the misery points that many health coaches have, many kinds of practitioners have, and I mean as well in the medical profession, is it's easy to get lost in the smaller goal of a client. And when we get lost in the small goal of a client, we really can't see the big picture of the client's challenge. So yes, you wanna help 'em with their small goal, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Small goal for sure. Small goal is the doorway.
And once we walk through that doorway, we begin to understand, okay, where is this taking us to? You know, this is not just a great professional practice. I think it's also a great life practice. It's a great life practice in how you deal with friends, family, loved ones, and yourself. So I am always wanting my client to get where they want to go in terms of their weight, in terms of their energy, in terms of their overeating and their binge eating and their emotional eating. But these things are never the problem itself. They're usually a symptom of something else. So as you embrace your client's highest goal, that informs everything you do when it comes to their little goal. And remember, just because a human, a client says they want something, I want more energy, I wanna lose 50 pounds, sure. Doesn't mean they need it, doesn't mean it's in alignment with their best interest. Doesn't mean it's in alignment with the wisdom of life. Maybe it is, but ultimately that's your job to sniff out.
I have seen far too many clients, I bet, you know, people like this. You might be one of these people who have been focused, let's say, on a very, very specific body goal in terms of shape or weight loss goal or specific weight loss goal from a specific part of a of a, your specific body. And that's the focus, and that's the focus. And we don't get to the goal and we think there's something wrong with us. Meanwhile, we don't question the goal.
We don't look at it and go, Hmm, is there something else here for me to look at?
I promise you, if you begin to look at all the Humans you encounter in your day-to-day life, people you know, people you meet on the street, people who are the waitress or the waiter at the restaurant, whoever it is, see them in their highest goal, address them in that way. See the best in them. Yes, I'm always sniffing around for where my client is trying to slip out the back door. I'm always sniffing around for where my client is maybe not in integrity with themselves or with life. And at the same time, I am very willing to see my client in their fullest self. So when I'm looking at any client, I am choosing to imagine, it's not even an imagining, it's a seeing. It's looking at someone and seeing them in their potential. Seeing them just energetically in their power, in their happiness, in their relaxation, in their relaxing into themselves and who they are. I'm always looking at a client and I'm looking at them as if I'm seeing beyond their complaint and beyond their challenge. And I am looking at them as if they are the person they will be once they are transformed from the challenge that has been eating away at them. Now, again, that doesn't mean I'm not looking at them with their challenge. A little bit of a paradox. I'm seeing both people.
But when you're able to see your clients through
that kind of generosity, people feel it. It creates a little bit of a magic for the work. Okay, next, you know this one as well. I just wanna highlight it once more. Letting go of fixing. If you don't wanna get burned out working with people, if you say to me, I don't wanna be burned out working with people, if you're already a practitioner and you do get burned out working with people and you're no longer wanting to take on their energy long after they leave your space, long after they leave your office, then please do this one simple thing. Stop trying to fix them. There's a damn good chance. And I mean that you're trying to fix them. You want them out of their pain. You want them out of their suffering. Consequently, you're taking on their energy. Not that you're trying to, not that you want to. There's nothing wrong with you. You are just employing a strategy that actually doesn't help. It comes from a good place. I don't wanna see people in pain. I don't wanna see people in suffering. So fixing is a strategy that sounds good. And for sure, there are times when something equals broken and you fix it, your car is broken, fix it. Your arm is broken, put it in a cast, let's fix it. I got it. But when it comes to working with eating challenges and with a majority of nutrition related health concerns that have a human component, a personal component, an emotional component, a psychic spiritual lifestyle component, fixing is generally speaking, not enough. Not even close. When you try to fix someone, remember you're actually making it about you. If I fix my client, I'm good. If I don't fix my client, ouch, I'm bad.
The good news is, none of us are broken. We are whole human beings. We are whole sold on earth, and we're doing our best to have a better experience in this world. We're doing our best to learn the lessons that life is teaching us. And yes, we have our shortcomings, we have our challenges, we have our ailments, we have our unwanted behaviors, we have our diseases. That does not imply an inherent brokenness.
Again, it's a subtle point. If you haven't gotten it yet, be patient, you will. By the way, the more broken you believe you are, the more broken your client believes they are. And I mean this, the further away we are from any kind of peace and healing.
Believing one is broken,
is a debilitating
mental neighborhood. It's just it. It crushes us. It drains energy. It sucks the life out of the body and the life out of our soul. Because if we're broken, we're forever trying to fix ourselves. I'm never the real me. I'm never stepping into my power. I'm never stepping into the light of day because I'm always waiting for someday when I'm finally fixed. We don't even know what that means.
When you take away the broken part, all of a sudden you realize, here we are. This is me. Yes, I have an eating challenge. Yes, I want to lose this weight. Yes, I want more energy. Yes, I want stop binge eating. Great, but you're not broken. You're a whole human being who happens to have this challenge called binge eating. Got it. Let's get to work. So this is a shift in context. This is a paradigm shift. And what I'm saying to you, it is 100% non-negotiable, a powerful and necessary reframe. It's gonna make you more effective. Now, you don't have to sit there and explain this concept to your client, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever. Now you, because this is just how you are proceeding as a practitioner, as a coach, as someone who is here to help another human being. With that said, with that said, there is oftentimes, oftentimes with a client, it's your shot. It's your call. You need to use your intuition and your instincts. For a lot of people, this is a damn good conversation to have with them at some point. And it's usually after there's some connection made anytime from, let's say, the third session onward.
If I am noticing that my client truly has the consciousness of I'm a victim, I suck. I'm awful, I'm terrible, I'm broken. I'm never gonna be the real me. If that's the words they're speaking, and usually they're not gonna say that directly. I know some people actually do, but they're gonna say it in a thousand other ways. I really want you to learn how to sniff this out and spot this. Start by observing your friends, family, and loved ones, and the people that you know best. Who are the people that you know in your world. I really mean this practice, this, just, just observe. Who are the people in your world walking around thinking that they're broken, thinking around that they got something to fix. And until they fix it, they're screwed until they fix it. They're not the real them, and they're always in the back of their mind. They're looking for the fix.
So you need to spot that. And when I notice this in a client, I will wait for what I feel is the right moment, and I will do an intellectual intervention around this.
Hey, Mr. And Miss client, listen, I'm so enjoying our work together. I am so confident that you and I are on the right track, and I'm confident that you're gonna get where you wanna go. Here's the thing. I want to help you get where you wanna go faster. And in order for you to do that, I think there's something you need to shift. Here's what I'm noticing about you. And by the way, when I say I'm noticing this about you, um, this goes for so many people. This is the majority of people who are dealing with eating challenges. A majority of people who are dealing with health and disease challenges. Challenge that I'm seeing that you have is that you think you're broken.
You think you are kind of defective, and and you think, and let me just explain this to you, and you correct me if I'm wrong, but you think that at some point when you're no longer broken, well, I don't have this binge eating anymore. And when I get rid of all this, all these yucky fat on my body, then oh my goodness, lottery time I win. I'm gonna be the real me. I'm gonna be fabulous, wonderful. I'm gonna have all this energy. I'm gonna be confident. I'm gonna just bust out. And the world is gonna love me, and huh, things are gonna finally be good. But because you're not there yet, you're constantly looking for the thing that's gonna fix the you that's broken. And what I wanna say to you is that there's nothing broken about you. There's nothing to fix. I get you don't wanna binge eat anymore. Got it. And we're gonna work on that. I get that you wanna lose some weight. Got it. And we're gonna work on that. But having extra weight and being, doing this thing called binge eating doesn't mean that you are broken. My assumption, what I've learned, what I've seen, and this is passed on to us from a lot of religious and philosophical traditions, that we're all whole human beings on a journey in this world. And yeah, we got our problems, we got our challenges, but we're not broken. You could have cancer. It doesn't mean you're broken. It means you have cancer. Plenty of people are amazing. They're wonderful, and it's okay. The body gets cancer. Got it. So I hope you're seeing Mr. And Mrs. Client that it's, um, when we're walking around thinking we're broken, it, it disempowers us. And I think when you tell yourself you're broken, it's disempowering you. What if you woke up every day and go, I'm not broken, nothing to fix. Yes, I'm working on my binge eating. Yes, I'm working on my weight, but I'm not broken. I'm not waiting for some day to be the real me. You're the real you right now, and you happen to be dealing with binge eating and some extra weight.
How's this landing for you, Mr. And Mrs. Klein? So that's an example, my friends of an intellectual intervention around that. Do it in your way. That's an intellectual intervention. And for some people, it's hard for them to get, keep playing with it, keep languaging it for your client. And sometimes people need to just sit with it. Sometimes people need to marinate with it if they truly don't get it. That helps you understand that they're really steeped in believing they're broken.
So I will talk to them about it in another session. I'll ask them to do some journaling.
Who am I gonna be if I was not broken anymore? How would I show up? What would be different?
Who would I be when I'm all fixed? And then look at that list with them and show them all the things they could be doing right now that they don't have to wait for some future time. So when people get this one, it can be revelatory for them. It could be life-changing for them. You can give your client unbelievable value just in this one conversation. I wanna say, um, on that topic of giving somebody unbelievable value in one conversation. Forgive me if I've said this in another conversation that we've had a lot of times in a session. You know, a client might say to me, especially a new client, will say to me, gosh, you know, I've been in therapy, or I've seen all these practitioners for years and years and years, and in one session we've done more work than I did in years of, of therapy. And I go, great. Do you mind if I just tally that up to see how much you owe me? Um, you know, I might joke about that. Or if I don't joke about that to the client, I think to myself, I really take that in and I play with it, and I put a monetary value in my head. You know, what's that worth to someone to have a powerful breakthrough and see themselves differently in a very liberating way? Is it worth $10,000? Is it worth a hundred dollars? Is it worth a million dollars? It's priceless. Really is priceless.
You have to start to acknowledge to yourself, at the very least when you're giving value to a client in this way. Because in that moment, they might not have lost the 50 pounds, but in that moment, they've gained one of the most important insights for the rest of their life that will help, help set them free.
Okay? Next, relaxing into the journey. You are going on a journey with your client. You're just, you're just packing the bags. You're putting on a backpack. You got your GPS. You know, sometimes a GPS doesn't work. You can't get a signal. Sometimes it does work. So the journey is filled with unknowns. There's a lot of questions. There's a lot of mysteries. We're not always gonna know what's going down. We're not always gonna be able to see very far in front of us. Might be raining, snowing, hailing, a thunderstorm. It might be beautiful and sunny. You will go through everything with your client. You have to have a good toleration for all kinds of weather when you go on a journey with a client. So you can choose to worry and stress and be focused on fixing your client and making them all perfect, or relax, trust, do your job. Trust in life, trust in the universe. Trust in the journey with a capital J.
Again, this is my friends, as much of a life skill as it is a professional one. It's the same thing, really. Now, the reality is our clients tend to be in a little bit of stress, or a lot of stress, or a lot of upset, or a lot of fear, or a lot of anger, a lot of angst about their journey, understandably so. So you and I are here to model for them something different, something more effective.
There's seldom something that happens in my work with a client where I get all upset and I get all frustrated, oh, I can't believe we tried this and it didn't work. Oh my God. Or if my client doesn't do their homework, I don't, it's, I don't need to be upset about my client when they hit a roadblock, when they hit a speed bump, when they take three steps back. I embrace it. I use everything I can as an opportunity to grow. Great. We've had a setback. You know something? I think Mr. And Mrs. Klein, you just might be the first person ever in all of history who's advanced and then had a setback, huh? I wonder what to do. Oh, wait, this happens to every human being of all time, probably since all of history.
Yeah. We take three steps forward and a couple steps back. Sometimes you take 10 steps forward and no steps back. Sometimes seems like you take a big giant step back.
Welcome to life. It's not a straight shot.
Sometimes there's a little bit of a dip. That's okay. A big part of our work together, Mr. And Mrs. Client, is how we deal with setbacks. So, you know what? When we have a setback, we take a deep breath, we learn from it as best we can. What happened? What triggered that? What got in the way? What went down? Let's just break down the details that you haven't been binge eating for two months, and then all of a sudden, boom. Oh, got it. Very stressful experience. You bumped into your ex, you didn't know what to do, you got all upset, and later that night you were binge eating, huh? Makes total sense.
I've, you are forgiven, Mr. And Mrs. Client. Not that anyone is holding you hostage except for you, but it's okay. You're human. So this is where you have the opportunity now to love yourself in this setback and love yourself back onto the horse. So my friends, you're trusting in your client's journey, and at the same time, trusting in your own journey as a professional.
Now, as you know, things aren't always so certain things aren't always so clear. And we don't like uncertainty. We don't like not knowing things. We wanna know. I don't know about you, but I wanna know. I wanna know everything. And if I don't know everything, I don't like it. And when I focus on the fact that I don't know something, and I don't like that, I don't know it, that starts to drain energy at some point. And then I have to remind myself that the truth is, you and I, we don't always know the answers. We don't know what's next. We don't quite know how things are going to work out in life. We don't know how things are gonna work out with our client. You have great strategies, you have great intuitions. You give your client great homework assignments. You don't know what's gonna happen. We don't know what life has in store for us or our clients. We don't know what a higher wisdom is thinking.
But what we do know is that we don't know.
So why not welcome uncertainty? Why not have a big smile on your face? Because it's there anyway, and it's always coming through the door with your client. As soon as your client walks in the door, they might, might as well be walking with Mr or Mrs. Invisible Uncertainty.
You know, it's true. It's sometimes a little bit challenging. What do you do first with a client? Here's a new client. What do you do? What do you say? What plan of action do I take? Oh my goodness, this person has so many things wrong with them. Oh my goodness, this person is all stressed out. Oh my goodness. I don't need, I don't know if this person likes me. And if they're gonna come back, uh, yeah, relax into that. Relax. What's the worst case scenario? They're not gonna like you and they won't come back. Okay? You've been rejected before. No big deal. When you and I can more and more and more relax into the unknown, wow, we just become smarter. We become more effective because you are truly in physiologic relaxation response. You are in the optimal state to have your prefrontal cortex just lighting up the higher executive function, the wisdom function, the integrative function, the big picture, seeing smart part of your brain.
What I want to say to you is, hey, don't worry if you have trouble relaxing into uncertainty, because if you do, chances are you're like everybody else in this world. Um, it's a lifelong practice.
I've bolded the word practice. We don't call it a perfect, it is for sure a practice. Next, my friends, you're creating a container with your client. So symbolically speaking, metaphorically speaking, energetically speaking, your task as a practitioner is to create this invisible container for your client. That invisible container is made from some powerful stuff. You're creating a container of safety. You are creating a container of listening. And that's with a capital L. Deep listening, beautiful listening, generous listening. You're creating a container of possibility. You are creating a container that is, that is tightly held together by this thing called unconditional acceptance.
This container is made from pure celebration of your client's journey. When my client comes to see me, you know, I don't care how awful their story is. And I've heard a lot of awful stories in life from clients, from people, from friends, from whoever. Some people have it really hard.
Now, it's not that I'm gonna sit there and jump up and down and make animal balloons because somebody's had such a, such a miserable time in life, but I'm still celebrating their journey. When my client walks through my office, mean meaning I choose to make your life. Mr. And Mrs. Klein, I choose to make it right.
I choose to see that despite the nonsense you've had to deal with, despite the hurt, despite the upset, despite the difficult beginnings, despite the harms, and whatever was befalling you in the past, you've made it. You're still alive. You're coming to see me. You are paying me money to help you, to assist you, to guide you. That's good news. It says to me, and this is what I think to myself, that your journey is good. It's here to teach you. We are here to extract the nutrition from all of the mucky, yucky fertilizer of our lives. And when I can help my client extract that nutrition, I am doing a great service that has, it's just priceless. So the invisible container I am creating is, I'm not cursing my client's journey like they might be. And that's good news, because I haven't been on their journey. So I don't need to curse it. I don't need to resist it, resent it, hate it. I'm unconditionally accepting my client. They don't have to lose any weight for me to love them more. They don't have to have more energy. They don't have to stop binge eating, start binge eating, run faster, jump higher. I could care less. My job is to unconditionally accept them exactly who they are right now, because I'm modeling that for them, and they're gonna feel it. So I am inviting my client into that container, which is my worldview. So you are inviting your client into your worldview. I am suggesting try this on as a worldview. See how good it feels. It is a worldview where food is a great teacher. That's a container. Somebody's walking in. They're, they're just, they're, they're walking into your party.
All different kinds of parties you've walked into. There's some parties I walk into, I walk right out. It's not my kind of party. Uh, there's other parties I walk into and all of a sudden I, I, I could feel it. This is my kind of party. So the party I'm asking you to create, the container I'm asking you to create, it's a worldview where you know, you know that food is a great teacher. A relationship with food is a great teacher. You know that your client's challenge is a doorway. You know that there's always a brilliant reason for our unwanted symptoms or behaviors.
You know that you are lucky and your client's lucky that we are now, you are now together in this relationship, and you're gonna be exploring in a whole different way. And in fact, exploration and experimentation and doing the work and doing the practices are the keys for your client's. Healing and transformation. The container you're creating, the worldview that you are holding, that forms, that container is where a deeper understanding is always where we are trying to go.
So our job, my friends, is to vigorously hold this space, to hold this understanding, to hold that invisible force field.
You know this, we always pick up on each other's energy. You do this every single day. There are certain people you encounter, uh, just, just in that moment. As soon as you encounter them, as soon as you meet them, someone on the street, someone in the store, whatever it is, you meet someone at work, at a party, at an event, you just feel real good around them. Chances are they have the kind of container that is safe and empowering for you. There are some people, you just look at them, you sense them, and you know, right away, whoa, stay away.
Uh, their container is probably not very safe for you. That's fine. We know these, we pick up on that. Your client will pick up on that. Knowingly or unknowingly, doesn't matter. The work begins before anything is said between you and your client because you're creating a container. Okay, next, my friends. Let's talk about listening.
Talking about listening. That's kind of funny. One of the greatest nutritional deficiencies in this world, I believe, is the lack of vitamin L. Vitamin L one is love. Vitamin L two is listening.
You know, it's very reasonable to say that chances are one of the reasons that we have a challenging relationship with food, body, and health is that at some point, we really weren't listened to. We weren't heard. We weren't seen. We were not gotten. No one quite knew how to listen to us.
The job of the adult world, the job of the parent world, the job of the teachers in our early life is to listen, to see us, to get us, to help us feel that we are understood and seen. Now, that's not an easy task for an adult, by the way. It's very hard because not all adults had that gift given to them. So if that gift was never given to you when you were young, if you now have that gift to give, it's because you've helped yourself healed yourself, transformed yourself, develop yourself.
So chances are your client, no one quite knew how to listen to them. And when that happens, the result is we feel alone. A lot of young ones, a lot of the little people. And when I say little, I mean zero to, you know, in the teens, they feel alone. They feel misunderstood, they feel isolated. And they're carrying around the deeper booboo, the deeper hurt of feeling unmet and unseen. And then we bring that into adulthood.
So listening by itself for your client, you are really listening to them. You're focusing on them. You're not being distracted.
Why? Because you're being paid to totally focus on that person. This is a fascinating job. You are being paid to give 2000% of your attention when you are with your client, to your client, deeply listen to them. My friends value listening. Value their words. Value What's beneath the words. So when I say listening, yes, I'm talking about listening to the words, but I'm also talking about listening underneath the words. Listening for that which is not audible, that which one cannot hear unless one kicks in an extra gear. You know this, you know the people who are closest to you when they're saying one thing and meaning another. You know it. That's what I'm talking about with your client. Learn how to do that with your client.
So you have to have moments where you are so, so, so, so, so, so, so silencing your own mind when you're with a client.
Now, when you silence your own mind, your mind's not talking. Your mind ain't figuring stuff out. Your mind's not planning. Your mind's not wondering what you're gonna do next. A lot of people get uncomfortable with that. A lot of professionals get uncomfortable with that.
I'm not saying your mind has to be silent in an entire session. I'm saying there has to be moments, chunks of time where you are, there's no thoughts in your head. You're listening. You're taking in the person sitting before you. You are trusting in the listening process and seeing what it reveals to you.
I also just wanna say, listening doesn't happen with your ears. I mean, it does. Okay, I get it. So the sound comes in through the ears. Understood. But listening is bigger than just the ears. Listening happens with your whole body.
'cause if you're busy fidgeting, if you are busy not regulating your own physicality, you are sitting there, you're uncomfortable, your clothes are too tight, you are not feeling physically well in your body and you're being distracted by that, um, you can't really listen.
So you're listening by calming down, not just your mind. You're calming down your body.
And yes, you're listening with your ears. You are listening with your eyes too. You are listening with your heart.
You're listening with your gut. You're listening with your soul. You are listening with your intuition.
You are listening on a lot of levels. It's okay to listen with your heart. It's okay to listen with your intuition.
It's okay to silence your mind. People pick up on it and they can relax. When a human feels that they are being listened to, they light up.
They are being met, they are being heard, they are being seen, they're being embraced.
Listening is a gift that you give to your client.
Chances are they got a lot of people in their life who do not listen or don't listen well enough or deep enough. No fault. You are being paid to listen. Be a great listener. Be a generous listener. Next, celebrating successes.
Don't, don't skip over this. Don't think this is something little. And you go, yeah, I heard you, you said that already. I got it. One of the challenges that holds our clients back that they are generally not aware of is their inability to celebrate the small successes. To notice the small successes, to acknowledge the small successes. So really, you can't celebrate a success until you even know that you've had a success. And people are freaking stuck in a belief, a toxic belief for them what success looks like.
The chronically fatigued client thinks success looks like I got my energy back. That's a goal. That's the target they want to hit. I get it. And when they hit that target, yes, that is a big success. However, nobody just wakes up one day. Yes, thank you for giving me that pill, that one pill and all the energy is back. Thank you for doing that one thing. And my energy is all back. 99.99% of the time. It's a journey. And there are steps along that journey to get to the place where the big target is hit.
We think success equals I lost the 75 pounds. I lost the five pounds.
That's what success is. And meanwhile, your clients helping with your work, their digestion's getting better, their energy is getting better. Their mood is getting better. Their natural appetite is coming around. They feel better about themselves because they're, they're, they're eating better. They're more aware, they're more embodied, and they haven't lost weight yet. And they're down on themselves all of a sudden.
That is the problem to begin with. I mean, that your client needs to learn that there are small steps along the way of the journey. 'cause that's what every journey is. You are teaching your client to know what a success is, to acknowledge it and to celebrate it so you can get them into the present. 'cause everybody's trying to be in the future. When I lose the weight, when I have the energy, when I'm this perfect eater, and I have the perfect body in the perfect, in the way, whatever it is, and everybody's in the future when they hit the big success.
So in every single session, and this is what I want you to do in every single session, I want you to, to, to really be a bulldog, to notice a success that your client has had. You know, there are moments with a client, I, it's so many clients over the years. I'm constantly working with them on their language. And I, when, when, when a client is constantly self-deprecating, and self insulting out loud with their words,
they, or they make subtle insults about their body or their weight, or their looks, or their value as a human being because of their body or their weight or their looks or their eating, I will correct them. This does not define your value. This is a behavior. I get it, it's an unwanted behavior. You don't like it. But this doesn't mean you're some miserable, unlovable creature. It just means you have a behavior that you don't like. Then I don't blame you that we're looking to change. Got it?
So when I notice my client says something generous about themselves, I'll raise my hand and say, you know something? That's one of the first times I've heard you say, just refer to yourself in a, in a really generous way. Like, good for you.
Praise your clients, my friend, especially your women clients. Praise them when they have any kind of success. Find all the little successes as we celebrate the little successes, as we acknowledge them, as we see them, we become,
we grow in character. We become real human beings. And when I say real human beings, it's real human beings on a journey. It's one step at a time.
Your client's not gonna just hit the target right off the bat.
You know, you're training your client in a way of thinking and living. That's what you're doing. Because the truth is, when you're young, the adults around you, they're in charge of the feedback. They're in charge of the celebrations. Okay? It's your birthday. We're celebrating. Okay, you got a A on your test, we're celebrating. Good for you. And it's the big people, the parents that are always acknowledging, hopefully our improvements, they're in charge of the celebrations. Well, as you become an adult, guess what, you gotta take over that role for yourself. That's your job. That's your client's job. They have to adult themselves.
You know, it's not as popular these days, but for a long time, everybody was talking about the inner child getting in touch with your inner child. Nope. Majority of people actually need to get in touch with their inner adult, but in a good way. And the inner adult in this case means, yeah, you being on the lookout, you are being responsible to help yourself. Notice when you have a mini success, when you've taken a step, when you've taken a baby, step in the direction that you want to go of health and healing and wholeness and goodness, and betterment, and growth and transformation, acknowledge it.
It's kind of an invisible law. I think.
I find success, even in my client's failures. When my client has what they think is a failure. IEA setback woohoohoo. I don't let them hang out there for more than about 30 seconds of them explaining to me and feeling upset and miserable. I will course correct them very quickly.
There's always an opportunity. What? To stand by yourself to not self reject, to not kick yourself when you, when you're down to love yourself, even though you took a step back. Always bring out the kid analogy. Hey, you got kids. Got it. When they were learning how to walk. Did you smack 'em when they fell down? Did you resent them and reject them? And tell them that. Just go back. Go back to the womb. I, I want a baby that knows how to walk. We don't do that. That would be nonsense. But that's what people do to themselves. So acknowledgement of every single small success paves the way for the bigger ones. Invisible law of universe. That's what I think it is. Next, my friends, we already mentioned this. We're gonna highlight it a little bit more right now. You and I are here to model your modeling unconditional acceptance for your client.
You know, we're in an interesting business. We're in an interesting role because in the realm of eating psychology and our relationship with food and body, many, many, many people are simply in protest resentment of who they are and what they look like. Ouchies, they are in a trap, unfortunately, of conditional love. And their conditions for self-love and self-acceptance are often quite intense, quite perfectionist, quite impossible to achieve, and likely simply not a valid condition. Why do I say that? Because they haven't gotten there yet. Or they got there the way the body, the shape, and they gained it back. That's why they're coming to see you, because they haven't gotten where they've wanted to go. So they've had these conditions that they've set up. When I hit these conditions, I love myself, but until I hit these conditions, I hate myself.
Can you see the insanity in that?
It's not what an, not how an Olympic athlete trains. It's not how you raise your little ones. The thing is, this is a very seductive trap. Why is it a seductive trap? Because you learned it and you don't even know where you learned it because you've got it from the world. The world just breathes this one right into us. We are constantly being shown why we're not good enough. Turn on the tv, get on the computer, get on YouTube. You'll see all kinds of reasons to figure out why you're not good enough and why somebody else looks a hell of a lot better.
So it's a lifelong trap for many people. And the trap feels logical, it feels legitimate, and it feels true. Hey, I just want these conditions met and none. I'm gonna love myself. What's the big deal? I'm like, why take these conditions away from me? They're true. We worship our conditions like they are a religion. Like, like they're the 10 commandments that came straight from the highest deity. No, our job is to accept our client no matter who they are, no matter what they look like. That's your job. And I mean that really, you can want to help your client. I want to help my client. I want help my client in their small goal. Absolutely. I certainly want to help my client in their largest goal. That's clear. Sometimes I discover that my client's smaller goal is not such a good goal for them. But I've discovered that because I am in service to their highest goal, I am very open to helping them with their smaller goal. And the work reveals that.
So my job is to accept my client no matter what they look like.
You are not here to reward anyone for having a weight loss or having a different body or a healthier one. Will I celebrate that success with them? Sure.
But I celebrate that success just like I celebrate every other success. That is not the biggest success to me. My friends, I have had so many clients over the years actually hit their weight loss goal with me after a time.
I have never celebrated that success any bigger than I've celebrated every other success along the way. When they got back more energy, when their digestion improved, when their sleep improved, when they stopped overeating or binge eating, when they started realizing, oh wow, I feel better. I ha I, I, I, my, I have more brain power with this new way of eating.
So I'm celebrating everything. So by the time they hit their big goal, it's no different for me.
So yes, celebrate successes for sure, but always silently communicate to your client that they are lovable as who they are right now. So one of the important ways we learn, I mean, this is how we learn. This is how just about every mammal in nature learns. It learns by modeling the big people, the big animals around it, the parents, the tribe, the pack of dogs,
humans learn by modeling. And believe it or not, we still do that into adulthood. We especially do that when we step into the office of a practitioner who is here to help us in our relationship with food and body. Your job is to model a way of being and a way of thinking for your client. You're modeling unconditional acceptance. And the only, and all you have to do is just be in that energy. It's, that's it. You just have to live from that place.
It's a bit of a paradox because yes, you wanna help your client get where they want to go, and you unconditionally accept them right now for who they are. Just because they haven't lost the weight or stopped the binge eating or gotten their energy back yet, doesn't mean you can't still unconditionally, positively regard them. It's all good. Next, remember, remember, remember, you have to make your client right.
This means to always do your best to find the brilliant reason that's rooted somewhere in biology, psychology, or both for why your client has the unwanted eating behavior that's challenging them in the first place that they're here to see you for. They're overeating. You've learned this has a brilliant reason. Rooted somewhere in biology, psychology, nutrition, or both. All three, whatever your client's weight, generally speaking, has a brilliant reason for being there. It's not because your client is some godawful lazy creature. So I'm always looking to make my client right. Oh, here's what's going on. No, you're not a willpower weakling. No, you're not a loser. Yeah, I get it. You've been trying to diet for 25 years and lose the weight. But you know something, there's a brilliant reason why you're not losing the weight. It has nothing to do with, there's something wrong with you. The brilliant reason why you're not losing weight is because your calorie restricting so much. Your fat restricting so much. Your body thinks it's on a desert island. So your physiology, which is so wonderful to you and so smart and so filled with intelligence and wisdom goes, oh my God, she's on a desert island. There's no food. There's no fat. Better slow down metabolism, better store fat, better not build muscle. So your genetics are just taking over the show and hanging onto body weight because your body thinks it's starving. Now, you were never taught that well, like everyone else, you were taught less food, more exercise equals weight loss. And unfortunately, it's not true for the majority of people, especially the way we practice that. Yeah. Or there are a few people who do need to eat less and exercise more. Sure. But if that strategy would've worked, it would've worked a long time ago. So there's a brilliant reason why it hasn't gotten you where you wanna go. It's not your fault. So that's what we're helping our client relax out of fault. We're doing our best to help our clients step out of the self-blame, the self attack and the unwarranted unnecessary. There's something wrong with me. I'm bad. 'cause that's where people will go because we get very sensitive about our food and body challenges. So I want my client to understand their challenge on the most practical, psychological, scientific level so they can begin to empower themselves into transformation. We are taking them out of victim hood and we are placing them in the zip code called knowledge. Hey Mr. And Mrs. Client, you've been getting down on yourself. Here's the brilliant reason for your bingeing and your overreading, your emotion and your weight that I see going on for you. So it's not like it's your fault, it's just that we are going to start practicing the kinds of strategies that will actually help you get where you want to go. So all that self-attack, self blame, throw it out the window, not necessary my friends. This is a very effective and powerful approach that can yield some great aha moments for our clients. I mean that, okay, here's another one. Let's keep going my friends. Our job is to help our clients achieve the end results in the beginning. Always, always, always. This is particularly true with weight loss clients, particularly true with weight loss clients, particularly true with body image challenge clients, particularly true with many other clients. Whatever results you expect at the end when you hit your target, whatever your target is when it comes to food, body, health, or weight, see if you can achieve those end results. Starting today. Might not hit all of 'em, but we could at least get to, I bet 50% of them. So what I want to say to you, my friends, is this is a key fundamental, can't miss approach to use with any client. It is truly, truly, truly a game changer. It affirms that the road we take clearly informs the destination.
You are helping people better navigate their life on earth.
People are people's. GPS is is messed up.
They keep thinking everything is gonna get better. Some point down the road in the future. That's when I'm gonna be the real me. And we're cheating ourselves.
If you have that, if your client has that, don't worry. They didn't invent this. This has been around since, as far as we know forever.
When you help your client achieve the end results in the beginning and helps people detoxify from one of the most powerful, toxic, nutritional beliefs, uh, powerful, toxic life belief that happiness lives somewhere in the future down there, down the road, when I'm finally fixed, perfect, lose the weight, have the right shape, eat the perfect food, achieve perfect help. Have all this energy, have all the money, have the partner, have the house, have the car, whatever.
I think a majority of humans are here to learn this. I certainly am. We teach what we need to learn, my friends. So when I say this, this is as much for me as it is for my client. It is a great thing to be in a conversation that matters. This is, by the way, what the power of now really means. Power of. Now we're asking people to stop putting happiness off into the future and live in the now. They don't call it the power of later.
I don't think anybody would buy that book except for the procrastinators. Maybe. Oh my God, this book affirms what I believe. Oh, save this for later. We're helping our clients get into the now, by the way. Now, the power of now also is all about embodiment. Embodiment doesn't happen when you lose the 50 pounds. Embodiment doesn't happen when you stop overeating. Embodiment happens today. Today is when you start to step into your body. Embodiment doesn't happen just because your shape changes.
This is why people lose the weight and gain it back. They're actually not embodied, meaning they don't have an embodied way of being with their body, of being in their relationship with food that works for their body.
You know, by the way, this works especially well for clients with any unwanted eating behavior, any weight loss or body image concern. Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, okay, you know, who are you gonna be? Who are you gonna be when you hit the target? I really wanna know this. Tell me. Tell me how life is gonna be different from you. Describe to me the person you are going to be and the key things that will be different in your life when you hit your target, when you lose the weight, when you have the body that you want. Just, just, I want to hear this. This is important to me and this is important to you. So then you hear your client, I, I like to discuss this one out loud. Anything else? I'm gonna be the real me. I'm gonna be out there happy, celebrating. I'm gonna have more into intimacy in my life. I'm gonna take more risks. I'm gonna just be the real me.
Eight outta 10 things that your client says, at least is something they can start doing now. And then it's your job to point them in that direction.
This is powerful, my friends. I mean that, you know, clients. I wanna say a few more words about this. Um, clients will initially oftentimes resist this new way of being. They really will. What do you mean? Because really you're asking them to change their religion. So you might have to do a little bit of explaining. And I want you to be, as you see me saying it to you, I am trying to be clear with you. I'm being direct. I'm being somewhat masculine. I'm being somewhat strong in the knowing. I'm clear what I know, that people must achieve the end results in the beginning in terms of whatever they want from their diet or health strategy. You gotta start living those results now. So you're gonna get specific with them and explore what this means for each client. And I don't waver here.
I have never had a client ever, ever, ever that I've explained this to who said, no, I don't believe it. That doesn't make sense. It is always on some level, a showstopper for your client. 'cause they know you are right. And it's not just like I'm saying I'm right or you are gonna be right. It's life is right. I think this is how life actually works.
Okay? We've talked about creating a listening, creating a listening. When you and I, when you wanna emphasize an important point, a key lesson, when you really want your client to hear something that you have to say because you are knowing what you have to say can have a lot of power and a lot of impact, you create a listening for them in advance. What does that mean? Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, listen, if I were your brother and I'm a loving brother, by the way, if I was your brother and I'm a caring brother, by the way, here's what I would say to you right now, brother, sister. Okay? So just, just use, use the appropriate age or the appropriate sex here. You know, Mr. Mr Client, if I were your best as bestest friend, if you were my best as bestest friend, here's what I would say to you right now. So if there's an age difference, Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, I was your father. If I was your dad and I'm a good dad, here's what I would say to you right now. The person's older than you. Hey, Mr. Mrs. Client, if I was your son, if I was your daughter and I'm a good daughter, I'm a good son. Here's what I would say to you right now.
Of course, the key is to be sincere. When I say that, I mean it.
I want you to notice my friends, that
the beginning rookie mistake that so many people make when it comes to being a helping professional when it comes to the coaching realm is that we, I think we have to hurl a ton of information at people. And the more information you hurl at them, the more you know, the more they hear, the more they learn. No. What also happens is you might be very impacted by this work that you are learning. And there's so many juicy tidbits that you have in your mind that you just wanna shed 'em all with your client. You cannot use the fire hose approach. You gotta give your client sips of water sometimes, or a cup of water. You can't turn on the fire hose and say, here, open up your mouth. Here it comes. Not gonna work. So that is why I am alert as the practitioner, I'm aware because I'm listening to my client. I'm aware when there's a moment that's pregnant, when there's a moment that wants to happen, when there's a moment. Sometimes you've experienced this. You just get these moments where you just wanna say something to someone. Your loved one, your child, your parent, your husband, your wife, your girlfriend, your boyfriend. It's just a a pregnant moment. There's just an opportune moment to deliver something. So you need to value those moments. You need to notice those moments. You gotta slow down time a little bit and create a listening. If I was your best friend, here's what I would say to you.
It's a great tool. You know, use it judiciously. I don't say that to a client every session, I say it here and there. Whenever the moment feels right and ripe,
you have to learn how to sense that and go back into your own experience in life. In moments when that happened for you, in moments where you're in conversation with a loved one and just a powerful communication, you delivered a powerful communication, or they delivered a powerful communication to you. And it was framed by slowing down time and framed by creating a listening because of the way that person looks at you.
So I'm just not saying words here. If I was your brother or sister, here's what I would say to you right now. No, who cares. You're not just parroting words. You are adopting an energy, a persona, an archetype. So you become a good brother or sister, you become a best friend in that moment. You become a loving mother or father in that moment, and you literally speak from that place. You are taking on a role. You're invoking an archetype that you are speaking through. You do that all the time anyway. When you're at work, you're in your work person mode. When you're teaching a class, you're in teacher mode. When you're talking to your girlfriend or your boyfriend, you're in girlfriend or boyfriend mode. You're talking to your kid, you're in parent mode. When you're talking to your, your your cat, you're in cat owner mode, cat lover mode, whatever. Okay? So the key is to invoke that truly and speak from that place.
And it's really true. Your clients listening will be completely different. They're gonna drop in with you in a much more powerful or serious way. Okay, one more piece. Here's another one that I'll use sometimes. Um, I especially use this when reality TV first started coming out and everybody, it's like, it seems like everybody's watching reality tv. You know, Mr. And Mrs. Klein, if this was a reality TV show and I get to win $10 million, if I help you fill in the blank, lose weight, stop overeating what, whatever your client's issue is. So this was a reality TV show, and I get to win $10 million if I help you lose the weight in a truly sustainable way. Here's what I would tell you to do so I could have the best chance to win my money, my friends. I promise you, you say that people are gonna listen to you. They, they're all ears because they wanna win $10 million too. And they know, they know what you're saying. People will really listen to you on that one. Um, never fails. I've also use this one quite a bit and I'll use this one whenever I wanna get real serious with a client. I'll use this one if, yeah, I've used this one a lot. You know, Mr. And Mr. Klein, if this was my last session ever on planet, in, in life, and I wanted to go out with a bang, 'cause I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be going up to heaven after this session and I wanna make it the best and most impactful session ever. And I want to be memorable and I want to deliver the best value that I possibly could in my last session ever. Here's what I would say to you now. I'm only gonna say that when I have something really powerful to say to somebody, when I have something that I really want my client to hear,
I want you to remember the client, the fatigue client Meadow, who after, I don't know, I can't remember, two, three sessions. We ended the work even though we ended up picking up later. Uh, because it wasn't, it just did, wasn't happening. It wasn't really a good match. Meadow wanted to do what she wanted to do. She was very resistant. And despite that fact that I am now letting go of a client and losing a client, I said to her, listen,
I pulled this one since this is our last session. I'm even gonna imagine this is my last session ever on planet Earth. I'm, I'm a competitive guy. I wanna do my best. I like to bat a thousand. I like to hit the target every time I like to be a winner. That's me. So, given that this is our last session, and if this was my last session on planet Earth, here's what I want to tell you. Here's what I want to leave you with.
And I told her the things that I felt she needed to do and change in her life. And sure enough, she circled back. She ended up reaching back to me. Did I do that for that reason? No, I did that because I'm taking the high road, because I'm trying to stay in integrity with everything that I'm telling you I like to do with a client. I'm still supporting her highest goal to the last minute that we're working together. 'cause she's still paying me and I care and I'm gonna still deliver value to the very last moment. In fact, I'm gonna try to deliver my best value in the very last moment of our last session. Of course, I'm a little disappointed. This is this, this client's not gonna be with me longer term. Yeah, that's a little bit of a bummer, but I'm not gonna let that stop me. I'm not gonna let that become the focus. The focus with your client is always your client. It's not you. Oh my God. What is this gonna mean for me if my client leaves me? No. What does this mean for your client? What this means is, this is our last session. I'm gonna give you my best now.
Okie dokey. The divine message. Now you gotta use your intuition here as to when and if to bring this up with a client. I do this lots of times and I usually do this at some point after I have determined what my client's religiousness is. If my client follows any kind of religion, if they believe in any kind of higher power, then this is fair game.
Absolutely fair game. Um, and if your client, if you know, because you've asked about your client's personal, religious, spiritual life, if you know that they're an atheist, then we can change the words here. So I want you to use your intuition. And this is a question that when I, this is a conversation when I introduce it, it is serious and it is playful at the same time. Serious and playful at the same time. See if you could combine those, you know, Mr. And Mrs. Client, if you are challenge with fatigue, had a divine message in it, if it was a whispering from your guardian angel, if there was an important lesson that the wisdom of life, the wisdom of the universe, the wisdom of a higher power. If God was trying to teach you something through this fatigue, what do you think that would be?
If your client's an atheist, Hey, Mr. And miss client, listen,
there's an intelligence to life. There's a hidden code,
there's an intelligence to the body. Body's pretty smart. If the intelligence of life, if the hidden code of how things work, the wisdom of the body is trying to deliver a message to you. Just play with me here. A bigger message, a higher message terms of why your fatigue is here. It's trying to teach you something. Just play with me for a moment. What do you think that would be?
Atheists love this question as much as anyone else.
'cause they like to get behind things and see what's there. Don't worry, you can't go wrong here. If your client doesn't wanna play with this kind of exploration, they let you know in whatever way, shape, or form, and then just casually move on. Oh God, I don't know. Well, if you did know, pretend you know, play with me here. This is, this is not serious, but you're tapping in. What do you think some people really get into this? So there's no failure here if this is not a direction. And if your intuition proved wrong and your client really doesn't like it, it's okay. I've done this hundreds of times. I've never lost a client from this question. In the worst case scenario, somebody looks at me like you fruit cake. And then we just move on to the next thing. That's all. And I pretend nothing ever happened.
So it's fine if your client gets confused or caught off guard from this because it's a powerful game changing question for a lot of people. They don't think about it, especially for people who do have a religious or spiritual bent to them or side to them.
Now, if I notice this question really captures my client, I'll encourage them to think about this till next session and see what they come up with. Why not? This question lets your client know how you work and how you roll. So if your client jumps on board, then you know, wow, this is, we can revisit this. I can talk to my client from this place.
And by the way, my friends, the answers are not always of the absolute 1000000% utmost importance. We're not going for the right answer. There's no right answer here. For many people just grappling with the question, even if there's no clear answer by itself is very instructional because you're introducing a new concept to them, a new distinction to them that's potent,
that they're gonna find themselves asking this question in relation to many other things in their life, perhaps for the rest of their life. So the question itself
is medicinal is transformational, it's healing, it's an evolutionary instigator.
And yeah, we might get some really good answers and they could be very enlightening. Absolutely. But it's, but, but it's not so much to answer. I I want my client to grapple with this. That's what spiritual growth is. You, you, you grapple with things. That's what personal growth is. You grapple, you take on a spiritual challenge, you take on a personal challenge, you take on a character challenge and, and you, you work it. Huh? If the universe, if God had a defined message in my fatigue, what would that be? Huh? Who would've thunk? Great play with that question. Next, always want you to be able to highlight the impact of self-chosen stress. So at some point in the conversation with your client, they have to understand the basics of the stress response. You explain it to them. They have to understand that there are true stressors in life. Things that are stressful. They have to understand stress is not bad.
And there are certain stresses that we have more power and more control over because they are self-chosen ones, meaning they're optional.
The stressor called my ailing parent. That's not self-chosen. That just happens. The stressor called, you know, the house flooded and it's gonna, and the basement is all ruined. Yeah, you didn't choose that stress, but you've chosen the stress called, I hate myself. You've chosen the stress called I hate my body. You got a big say in that. So I wanna be constant and clear in my messaging that any self-chosen stressors or places of excess stress, anxiety, worry, fear, judgment, rush, push force can powerfully inhibit my client's health, weight, and eating goals.
I'm always gonna point that out. I'm always gonna point out where my client is choosing a stress that they have a say in. Now, it doesn't mean that it's easy to, oh, let me just un choose it because it's, it takes work. It is a work, it's a practice to let go of a self-chosen stress. So I will always let my clients know once I explain to them the basics and I've done an intellectual intervention, that their negative thoughts and toxic beliefs are powerful metabolic stressors. I want my clients to have a clear understanding that they can't just sweep their inner world under the rug. They can't be self flagellating, self hating, self demeaning, people self judging
and think that that's gonna help them with their weight, with their health, with their body image, with their energy, with their immune system. It's gonna take you in the opposite direction. Your strategy don't work, don't worry. You didn't invent that strategy. The world gave you that strategy. This is most people I know. And you have to see Mr. And Mrs. Client, that your belief that this body is unlovable is creating stress chemistry inside you, which is impacting your metabolism. It's impacting your appetite regulation. It can very well be impacting your calorie burning capacity. It will impact your food choices, it will impact your intelligence when it comes to making smart choices about how to proceed to get where you wanna go. 'cause you're gonna end up looking for quick fixes because you're in fear and anxiety and stress, and you think you're being chased by a lion and you're not.
So I'm always empowering when I deliver this information to a client, empower them with this. I am never looking to make my client wrong. Notice how I always say when I'm saying your self hate. And then I will always follow it up with, and by the way, you didn't invent this. Welcome to planet Earth. Most people have an internal conversation that has some degree of self-attack, self-hate and self-judgment. And a lot of people with eating challenge have a ton of that.
So you didn't invent it, but because it's landed in you like a virus, we all catch it. Its your job to begin to extricate itself from your system. So I let them know it's not your fault. I am always clear about the scientific mind cookies. I let my client know this is important. This is practical and is powerful.
You invoke the importance of the relaxation response. So yes, I'm talking about the stressors, but at the same time, I'm invoking the importance of the relaxation response I'm stating and in the positive Mr. Mrs. Client. So really what this means is this is about you learning how to drop into relaxation response more. It doesn't mean you're never gonna have any stressors again, everyone has stress. Stress is good. It helps motivate us, it helps get us going, it helps inspire us, it helps make us stronger. And the optional self-chosen stressors that we don't need are generally the ones that are killing us. So as you learn how to put yourself more into parasympathetic nervous system dominance, it's gonna help you get where you want to go. That means relaxing into life. Parasympathetic, parasympathetic nervous system dominance really means you learning how to trust more. Trust relaxes us. Faith that relaxes us, love yourself more. That will relax you, honor yourself in this journey that will relax you. Understand that you are not broken, that will relax. You understand that you're doing your best, that will relax you.
So it's about, yes, we're gonna keep working towards the goal of weight loss, getting more energy, getting rid of the binge eating. But you can, you don't need to stress into that. We can love ourselves into that journey more and more.
Okay, let's close out this conversation. Um, talk about a great technique practice to do with clients is to recommend books or readings for them. Now, some clients are indeed readers. They like to read, they will read or they'll do the books on tape things and they appreciate such suggestions. So really what I wanna say to you is this is about you tuning into a client's needs and interests and making suggestions based upon books that you have personally read and have perhaps even been meaningful for you.
So I'm not saying there's some great reading list out there that you're gonna pull from, oh, you have this Mr. Mr. Client read this. Oh, you have that read that I want you to pull from your experience because that's, that's gonna carry energy. So you're gonna make suggestion based, based among books that you've read in this training, books that you've read before, books that you're reading, now you're tuning into your client. Don't just give somebody a list of books is about tuning in. It's almost like, you know, I I discover something, you know, I know my friends well, I know which one would like a good science fiction movie. So I'll recommend, hey, you know, there's a really good science fiction movie for you. I don't give them a list of 30 science fiction movies. I'll give them a list of all kind of romance and, and, and war. No, it's, it's be specific for your client.
This can actually be an enjoyable part of your job because then you can discuss with your client what they're learning from their reading, which is why I encourage you to only give clients books to read that you have read, because then it gives you that opportunity. And that's not a have to, that's a nice to meaning. You might know of certain books that have really impacted other people and you're now trusting that that's a great book. So there, there are definitely books like that, that I know have impacted other people that I don't mind recommending, but it's then it's just a little bit more cha difficult to really break it down with your client and talk about it, but you still can. So the idea is to have, be able to have conversation from that. What are you learning, uh, what's inspired you? Any aha moments, anything you wanna share with me, what you're getting from this book? Now, I will say for clients who want general information or reading about the work that you do, forgive me for tooting my own horn here, but you know, my two books, the Slow Down Diet, nourishing Wisdom, are Great Places for People. Um, the Gift of our Compulsions by Mary O'Malley is I find across the board, especially helpful for women. She's got a great feminine voice. She's a, she's an elder, she's an older queen. Um, the gift of our compulsions is especially helpful for women who are fighting foods, fighting appetite, hating their body, binge eating, overeating. Uh, it's a, it's a very gentle, inviting, lovely book. Um, and in general, what I would like to say is any books by, um, Dr. Mark Hyman are great reading when it comes to the good research and information in terms of health, nutrition, and cooking. So he's got a bunch of books. Uh, honestly, they're all wonderful. So you just have to tap into those, see what they are, see what your client's interested in them. You cannot go wrong. His, his research, the science that he pulls is pretty impeccable. So my friends, we're still at the beginning of this conversation. There are several more conversations to happen around counselor tools and guiding stars.
As always, I appreciate you, I appreciate what we're doing. I appreciate the work together and I look very forward to talking more about this. I'll see you soon.

PART 2

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Greetings, as always, my friends. This is Mark David, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. Here we are continuing our conversation about counselor tools and guiding stars. We're in part two of three. Let's dive in. So this is all about highlighting the key tools and distinctions we've been learning, adding some new ones, and helping us be better practitioners. That's the name of the game. One of the key things you and I need to do when it comes to helping our clients have the best chance of having their best experience when it comes to their relationship between food and body, is for us to be consistent around our clients' key toxic nutritional beliefs. What I'm emphasizing here, you know, this toxic nutritional beliefs must be handled for a great number of clients if we're to truly help them get where they want to go. So, from day one, from moment one, from the first session, you're listening. You're noticing whenever your clients toxic nutritional beliefs shows up in their conversation with you at some point, and it's usually not past the second or third session. At some point, it is your job. As you start to identify their toxic nutritional beliefs, it's your job to point them out and remind them that this is the very thing they need to do to rigorously say goodbye to, so that they can step into their best self so that they can finally get where they wish to go. So this is all about you doing a rigorous intellectual intervention around every toxic nutritional belief that has showed up. As you know, food is the enemy. This one absolutely must, must, must, must, must be addressed. And I'm saying, you gotta be a bulldog around this one, my friend. You have to be constantly sniffing this out. It's not like you are showing your client where they're wrong. You are not showing them what a terrible person they are. You are helping them change from the inside out. You are helping them have a life shift. You're helping them have a worldview shift, because the simple belief food is the enemy will be creating a stress response every time your client eats plain and simple, and all the attendant downside of a stress response,
decreased calorie burning capacity, potentially decreased digestive capacity, decreased assimilation, impaired appetite regulation, impaired ability to access the higher prefrontal cortex, which is where we make our smart choices. A human being who is walking around with the religious belief, they believe it deeply in their bones. They worship this, they pray to this one, they don't realize it, meaning they put it up on a pedestal and they believe it is. So, they believe it is a principle foundational aspect of life of the universe that food is the enemy. It is a logical and biological absurdity. And this is one that you must point out to your client. Whenever you do an intellectual intervention, you're not making your client wrong. You are pointing out to them how they have inherited from the world, a toxic belief that they have absorbed that they did not invent, that millions and millions of others have. And that as they begin to notice this, to become aware of this and to consistently practice skewering it, letting it go, letting the air out of it, stop feeding it. Such a toxic belief slowly begins to starve and its slowly begins to die. And what is born in its place is life is our personal power. We have a rebirth. We begin to see what is really true, which is food is my best friend. Food helps me be alive, food is pleasurable, food continues my life. Food is a biological necessity for me to be alive here on planet earth. So it doesn't make much sense to hold as the enemy. That which is absolutely 1000% essential for the life of every human being. And every creature in existence needs food. It's as simple as that. So this is one of your big jobs, my friends. And as you help your clients identify their toxic nutritional beliefs and let them go, you are giving them tremendous value. And a lot of times what you're doing is you are helping someone reclaim their life. You're helping them reclaim their dignity because this is a belief that has no good to it.
It constantly has us living in a war. We are fighting a battle that no one has ever won. Absolutely no one. It is not a winnable fight because the fight is imaginary. The enemy is imaginary, and we're aiming our weapons at a ghost, but we think it's real. So we put all our energy there, we put our belief there, and our behaviors start to reflect that belief. So we skip meals, we limit our calories, we go low in fat, and we begin to lose energy. Literally, we begin to have brain fog. We begin to be fatigued. We begin to wonder why I'm not functioning as well as I know I should be. We begin to have unwanted health symptoms, and all of it can be traced back to the simple belief that is deeply rooted inside us, that food is the enemy. So you gotta be consistent here. You gotta, after an intellectual intervention that you do with your client, where you see is this landing for them, every time it shows up, you have to catch your client. You let them know, Hey, guess what? This old toxic belief is showing up again. And you have to take note. Food is your best friend. This is your job, Mr. And Mrs. Client. You have to start to practice that reality. Embrace that reality slowly. Because if you don't, for the rest of your days, you will be fighting and fleeing and freezing from an enemy that doesn't exist. You will be creating a biochemistry that actually does the opposite of what you want for yourself. So the good news is you can help yourself get where you wanna go simply by changing your inner world. Okay, another counselor tool in guiding star, my friends, is to notice where the energy is for your clients.
It's your job. It's my job. In the course of a conversation, in any given session with a client, especially the first few sessions, but in every subsequent session to notice where our client lights up, where are they inspired? Where might they, where does my client have extra interest and passion? Just where does the energy show up? You know what this is like, you know what this is like, just, just imagine any conversation you're in with anybody and you're having a conversation with them. And eh, it's kind of just going and it's going, it's going. All of a sudden some topic comes up, something comes up and, and the energy picks up. The heat gets turned up, the the likes are turned on. There's a little more animation. That's what I'm saying. Notice where the energy is. There's ener, there's visible signs of, huh, that tapped into something
Similar to that. It's our job to notice where our client has protests, where they have upset, where they have discomfort, where they have fear or resistance. That's energy. So the energy could be in the positive. Oh wow. You know, we just brought up the topic of, you know, my client in, in, in nature, my client in animals, my client in music, and they just got all excited. Wow, that's interesting. Good. Then I'm gonna take notice of that, that here's a place where my client might be able to use this energy source to help empower them more in our work together. At the same time, I'm noticing when my client, you know, they're talking about their husband, their wife, their boyfriend, their girlfriend, and all of a sudden, whoa, there's some energy there. And it doesn't, it doesn't look, it doesn't look too happy. It doesn't look too fun. Doesn't matter. Client will give away to you. They will let you know that something is an area of energy for them by a combination of their facial expression, a change in their intonation, a change in their body language, the words that they use, just their vibe.
You do this all the time. You are noticing this quite frequently, probably sometimes consciously, sometimes unknowingly in your normal conversations with people. You are simply learning how to get better and better and better at doing this with your clients.
So our job is to be curious when this shows up as it can happen around any possible topic or life domain. Simply put where there's extra energy, there's often some action, there's some good places to work, there are some clues there. That's so much of what we're doing in this work. We're looking for clues.
You know, one of our jobs is to help our clients access their own resources. Remember, you are just one of the resources for your client. Consider yourself an important resource. Why? Because they're coming to see you. They're sharing some of their deepest life challenges with you. They're paying you, they are giving you their hard earned money. You're a resource for your client. Congratulations. That's a beautiful position to be in. It is an honorable position to be in. And one of your jobs as a resource for your client is to help your client tap in to all of their resources.
Our clients just about always have other resources, and oftentimes, not always, our clients ain't tapping in to important resources that they can be using that's Gonna gonna help them along the way when it comes to whatever challenge they are here to see you for. So the point is, you and I are not here to do the job alone with our client. Our clients have to learn how to identify and mobilize their own already existing lottery tickets that they have in their pocket when it comes to them with helping with their food, their body, their health challenge.
What does your client's other resources mean? It could be family, it could be somebody that is, you know, a trusted friend. It could be their partner, their own resources could be local groups, local support groups, a local 12 step program, a local men's group, women's group. Any kind of local classes. When you're helping your client get back into their body and to embody what's available to them, that would be useful. What kind of good yoga studios, exercise studios that have a more friendly vibe to it, um, that are just a little bit more conscious in terms of helping a human being embody.
A lot of times our clients have people in their lives who can be loving on them, supporting them, befriending them, helping them on their journey simply with a weekly check-in phone call or weekly check-in texts or daily texts. You have to be on it to get a sense with each and every client, because every client is unique. Okay, what else does this person need between now and the next time I see them? Where are they getting support? Where are they getting connection? Who are they gonna talk to if they find themselves over reading or binge eating and dropping into upset, self-rejection, self blame,
dropping into guilt and shame. They might not be seeing you for another week or two. So who could they reach out to that can be of good use to them? So I'm always looking to help my client tap into their already existing resources. You are training your client how to manage their energy, how to manage their life, how to manage their relationship with food, not just by being a loner. We need other people. That's why your client is here to see you. Oftentimes we need help. Oftentimes we need coaching. Oftentimes we need a professional. And oftentimes we simply need to learn how to access the people around us. You know, sometimes what that means, it means being more real with some of the people close to us. Hey, here's what I'm going through. Hey, I'm seeing this coach who's helping me with my weight, with my overeating, with my binge eating, with my emotional eating, with my fatigue, with my whatever it is. You know, here's some of the things I'm working on. I, um, here's some of the things I'm, I'm kind of concerned about. You know, I would, I would love to have you, um, Mr. And miss Friend, as just somebody that you know, knows what I'm going through. Maybe I can share with you some of the things that I'm learning.
Who are the friends in my client's life who it would benefit from them to create more closeness with, create more intimacy, with more authenticity, more honesty. A lot of times people are isolating from the people that love them most from the people that can be the best support for them. I really want you to look out for that because when it comes to our eating challenges makes sense to isolate because I'm ashamed, I'm embarrassed. I don't like myself in terms of these behaviors that I'm doing that I can't seem to stop, that I have no control over in terms of what's going on in my inner world. Yeah, I understand that. I don't wanna be talking to all my friends when I'm not at the top of my game. And there are friends who are happy to speak with me when I'm not at the top of my game. In fact, they're more than happy. It's, it just creates more closeness. It creates more depth. And we start to create the world that we wanna live in, where we're making a little bit more love and making a little bit less war.
My friends, oftentimes it is important for us to educate our client about doing the work.
I often need to have an intellectual intervention with my client to educate them about doing the work, about doing work, about work. And when I say work here, I am talking about work on self. I am talking about practical work on self. A lot of us, understandably so, I wanna sit back and I wanna be fixed. You don't wanna massage yourself. You want to go get a massage. Makes perfect sense. We wanna sit back and be fixed. A lot of our clients, they want change in transformation, but they're not either willing to do the work or they don't quite get that there's work involved. Just, just tell me what, what to eat. Just tell me what to do. Just fix this. Tell me the thing. I need to know the technique. And it's more than that.
Work really means our commitment to effort. Work often means it's gonna be uncomfortable. Work often means doing that which needs to be done because nobody else is gonna do it because it's my client's life. It's their body, it's their inner world. You can only help your clients so much. They have to do the work. Work means focus. Work means looking in the mirror. Work might mean, okay, here's the nutritional change you gotta make as a really good high probability experiment that's gonna help you get where you wanna go. I know it is not easy for you to start eating a breakfast. You think that's more calories. You think you're gonna gain weight. Well, meanwhile, you not eating breakfast hasn't helped you lose any weight. And in fact, you've been complaining that you're overeating and you're binge eating and you're experiencing fatigue. This is why. So it's gonna take a little work for you to push through your own resistance to try this experiment for several weeks and notice what happens.
So, yeah, work could mean nutritional changes. It could mean a lifestyle change.
Work could mean a deeply personal change. Work might mean I am practicing slowing down when I eat. There's, there's, there's work in that.
So sometimes we literally, literally need to educate and coach our client up around the natural need and their willingness to do work.
My friends, you've gotta be on the lookout because if you allow your client to float, if you allow them to get lazy on you, or to stay in old habit around work, then your work with them is gonna be frustrating and unsuccessful and they will never truly make progress. So, just because you have a great idea and great suggestions, congratulations, you're gonna be talking to your client. Here it is session number one. And you're listening and you're listening and you're gathering information. And darn it, you feel good about this because you know exactly what you're gonna do in terms of suggestions, homework assignments at the end of this session to help them get where they want to go relative to their binge eating.
And you wanna make sure that they're eating more essential fat because you've noticed they're super low in fat and they're having some big binge eating issues. Well, just 'cause you have a great distinction, uh, sometimes it doesn't mean anything. 'cause you and I can tell our client what to do and my client can come back two weeks later and say, yeah, I know what you told me. I needed to, to eat more fat. You know, I, I just can't, I just don't like fatty foods. It's, it's too, it just feels too heavy in my system.
That's called not doing the work.
So I'm gonna talk to my client, I'm gonna let them know, listen, what you're saying makes sense.
And what you are saying is ultimately going to hold you back. What you are saying is you are justifying to me
the kinds of behaviors that you are doing that is creating the problem that you are paying me to help you get rid of.
I don't want you to bingey, you don't want you to bingey. Here's the challenge, Mr. And miss client. You kind of have a fear of fat and you think fat and food is gonna put fat on your body. And I'm telling you, that's not. So, I am telling you that if you go low fat, you're going to bingey. And this is not just you, this is most people. So here you are. You've been binge eating ever since you've been on a low fat diet. I understand that connection. It's gonna take you a little work to turn this one around because that belief is very strong in you. And trust me, it's not your fault. That belief, unfortunately, has been hammered into you probably from a young age directly and indirectly. So it's gonna take some work for you, Mr. And Mrs. Klein to deal with your uncomfortability. You're gonna be uncomfortable. Some work is fun and some work is uncomfortable. Sometimes you're working in your garden and it's a beautiful day, and other times you're working in the garden and it starts to rain and there's things you gotta get done and you're gonna get a little wet and muddy. It happens. So this is a place where you're gonna get a little muddy
and you're gonna have to work through this. You're gonna have to work through your own resistance. You're gonna have to work through your own fear if you truly wanna make progress. So that's what I'm saying, my friends, when I'm talking about allowing your client to float or to be lazy or to stay in their resistance and give you excuses for why they can do what you know is a darn good experiment. And people will come in with their resistance. They will sound smart, they will sound clear, they will be clever. They will give you excuses. I am not wanting you to punish your client. I'm never looking to punish my client, but I will always raise my hand. I'm always loving them into consciousness. But sometimes loving your client into consciousness means stepping into your adult archetype. Stepping into the loving but stern parent archetype. Stepping into the coaching archetype where you're doing a little bit of tough love for your client. Tough love is still love as long as it's truly coming from love.
People are afraid to do the work. It's understandable, it's predictable, it's human nature for a lot of people.
You are here to do whatever you can to help your client overcome their inertia. To that you have to love and inspire them into a different place. You have to call them into consciousness. You have to let them know in no uncertain terms that their job is to take the high road with themselves. And the high road means dealing with their discomfort. Yep. This is gonna be dis this is gonna be uncomfortable. Great. We know it. Let's do it. Let's go. Now, closely related to this,
but still different enough to make a distinction here. But these two always go together or usually go together, is to educate your client about practice, practice, practice. Practice means doing whatever activities you've given your client to do, whatever practice you've given them.
There's certain things we need to do consistently over time as a way to improve and advance and eventually step into greater healing and awareness and self-mastery. Now, for many clients, practice is a requirement. Slow eating, for example, is a practice
not speaking to oneself with harsh self-judgment and self attack is a practice.
Letting go of the constant judgment of others is a practice paying attention to food when previously you go automatic pilot whenever you eat and you kind of disappear. And disembody, staying present and aware with food and learning how to nourish oneself with food is a practice. You don't do these things once and go, ah, didn't work.
Yeah, I went to my Spanish lesson for the first time. 'cause I wanna learn how to speak Spanish. You know, I didn't work, still can't speak Spanish. Bummer. Nevermind. It's a practice my friends. So I'll always li I always listen to my client when they say, yeah, you know, I tried it. I couldn't do it. I always got a big smile on my face. I go, great. Thank you for your effort. Guess what? Welcome to the human race. You are not the first person, nor will you be the last who hasn't been able to successfully eat slow after one week. You've been a fast eater for most of your life. You know, because I've told you all of the downside to that practice, to that unconscious habit. You don't want to be overeating anymore. The solution is simple. You don't need more willpower. We're not gonna go find more willpower in a can, in a jar, in a supplement because there's no such thing.
What we're going to do is we're going to put you in the right mental, emotional, biological condition to have the most natural appetite regulation, which is eating in a relaxation response, which is eating in a place where you are getting your full cephalic phase digestive experience. You are taking in taste and pleasure and aroma and satisfaction and the visuals of the meal. You are taking enough time to eat. And because you are, you are giving the food attention and you are eating more slowly and slowly. Doesn't mean boring. Eating is sexy, eating is sensual, eating is a pleasure. Who wouldn't want that?
And when you bring that to the eating experience, your appetite will be naturally regulated because your brain and gut, brain, head, brainin and gut brain have enough time to communicate, to distinguish what's in the meal, to break down informationally, what is in the meal? Have I gotten enough? Have I met the nutritional profile that I need right now? Your body figures that out. It just needs you to let it have a little bit of time and a little bit of parasympathetic nervous system dominance to make that happen. Guess what, my friend, that's a practice. That's what I'm gonna tell my client. So I'd be very serious and forthright around talking to my client in this way.
And I'm very serious and forthright around enrolling my client
in doing practices that can have a real impact. And following up with them in each and every session to see how it's going. It doesn't matter what their answer is in terms of my deepest response. There are gonna be ups and downs. There's gonna be times if my client is practicing enough, they will eventually see the benefit. That's what I'm banking on. So I'm here to just keep my client on task. And the way you keep them on test, you're not pushing them, you're not motivating them, you are calling them into consciousness. This is the work, this is the practice. There are no shortcuts here. In fact, I take that back, Mr. Ms. Client, this is the shortcut. Every other method that you've tried, whatever it is, hasn't worked. How do I know? Because here you are seeing me for this challenge. So I'm telling you, if you want a shortcut, this is actually the shortcut. That doesn't mean it might not take a little time, but this is the most direct road to get you where you want go.
So again, some examples of practice is gonna come around slow eating, monitoring, negative self-talk, staying present with food, eating in a relaxed state, letting go of judgment, learning how to take the high road in life, receiving pleasure and nourishment from food. So much more depends on the client. You are here to keep an eye open for that. So you have a response, my friends, you have a brilliant response. You have a powerful response. Any single time a client tells you, yeah, I tried that, that didn't work. As if to imply, ah, gimme another trick. That didn't work. No, that works really well. As a matter of fact, you just didn't do it. You tried once.
It's a practice daily, you get better and better at it. Just like Mr. And Mrs. Klein, any foreign language you've learned, any musical instrument you ever picked up, any sporting activity, any skill you've ever developed. And because you know your client, you, you know who they are. You know what they do. They might be an amateur artist, they might have some athletic event that they're great at. They might be wonderful at yoga. How did you get so great at yoga? Well, you've been practicing, okay? Anything you've ever done that you've gotten good at, you might be a good parent. You're, you're on your fourth kid. Yep, you've been practicing.
That's what we have to do for you, Mr. And Ms. Client, when it comes to your relationship with food and getting where you wanna go next, my friends, we have to remember that we are here to coach from the archetypes. So first and foremost, first and foremost, when you coach, there's one person I want you to be first and foremost. And that's you. You be you when you coach you be you. In fact, the more you you can be. Now, obviously, you're not gonna be the same you that you are when you go out with your girlfriends or boyfriends drinking and you make a raucous and you act like you're in high school because there's certain people you could do that with. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about you being you. I'm talking about you not sitting on your high horse and thinking that as the practitioner, you have to be above and beyond your client. You have to be some perfect person. You have to be enlightened. You have to have everything together. You have to never over binge eat, emotionally, eat or feel perfectly about your body. No, just be authentically you. Be natural. Let it flow. Let your personality come out. And, and, and at the same time, please know that you is a far more diverse person than you realize.
You are many personas and personalities. And you and I have the opportunity to speak for many personas or personalities or archetypes. I'm using those terms interchangeably. So my friends, I'm asking you to begin to play more here and to expand your repertoire and to experiment. Because the more archetypes you can speak through, the more effective you can be in your work. It is, it's fun, it's interesting, it's fascinating, and you're becoming a better professional and you're becoming a better, a better person.
So already chances are, if you're a practitioner, there's a certain archetype that you have been using every time you talk to clients. I don't know what that archetype is for each of you. A lot of people become sort of this, this dispassionate, uh, uh, very mental, you know, picture of what they think a therapist is, and they become removed. And you think your job is to fix someone. Ouch. Never. Don't go there. Please. In the realm of coaching your job sometimes is to literally come from the archetype of being a best friend. Sometimes your archetype is going, oftentimes your archetype is mentor. That I wanna say is your default archetype is mentor or coach. If you've ever had a great mentor or a great coach, you know what I'm talking about. If you've had a decent mentor or a decent coach, you know what I'm talking about. Sometimes in a session, you, you, you, you hear me do this. I think in this training, sometimes I'm talking to you like a best friend. Sometimes I'm talking to you like a mentor. Sometimes I get into my teacher head. When I get into my teacher head with a client, I'm like, okay, here's how it goes. Let me tell you about essential fats. So it's really me saying, okay, student, sit down. We're in the class. Take notes. I'm delivering information to you. Now, it's not because I'm being arrogant. I am simply educating my client. And I know in that moment I'm educating, I know I'm delivering information, and I know I'm delivering information that I want my client to know. That's really important. So I'm gonna be a good teacher and deliver it to them. And I'm gonna stay in the teacher role.
A lot of times with clients, I it's a younger person and I'm gonna be their father. I'm, I'm literally in that role. I'm literally coming from that place. I gotta tell you something. I've done that with clients who are close in age to me as a little more tricky. But sometimes, you know, it doesn't matter how old your client is, sometimes they need a little, some good, some good parenting.
I'll notice that this is something you learn. Have you done this before? I mean, think in your own life, whether it's with a friend, a loved one, somebody that, you know, all of a sudden you're talking to them. And if you're a woman, you just become really motherly towards them. If you're a man, you just become really fatherly towards them. You're, you're almost feeling like a parent no matter what age they are. That's what I'm talking about.
You know, sometimes I'll just speak to my client from a very scientific perspective. I will talk a lot of science because it's right in the moment. It feels good. My client needs some, some scientific mind cookies. They need to have their left brain satisfied, stimulated and fed. That is fine. People oftentimes need that when they do give it to 'em in the best way you can. A lot of times I'm stepping into my cheerleader archetype. My client just, just needs a little bit of pompoms. That's okay. And what that means is, wow, wow, Mr. Great job. I am so glad you had that breakthrough. I am so, you know, you worked really hard for this. Congratulations. Good for you. You know, really, you have been working towards this and you did it. And you know, if something, you're gonna even get better and better at this. I know that. That's me being a cheerleader,
sometimes you're just gonna be a little bit of a friendly dis disciplinarian.
Many times I'm gonna step into my tough guy archetype, tough guy, archetype. I step into when I'm with an east coaster, when I'm in, when I'm with a person who's a tough guy and I'm noticing they're pulling out their tough guy, and I'm gonna pull out my tougher guy, not as a competition, just because I'm aware of the archetype. And I'm aware that oftentimes what a tough guy archetype needs is somebody who speaks a similar language. I'm not gonna be in that archetype the whole time, but I can pull it Out literally in three sentences in a moment. You know, every once in a while a client just gets all, they get all resistant. No, no, no, no, no. There's no way I am putting away that scale. You know, I gotta weigh myself. I'm sorry. And I'll look at them and I'll say, you've been weighing yourself forever. What does that do for you? Has that gotten you where you wanna go? You told me you have been trying to get to your target weight and stay there for 27 years, and you haven't been able to do that, and you've been weighing yourself every day. So what I'm saying to you, Mr. And Ms. Kle, is you're paying me to help you get where you wanna go. So it makes sense for you to try things my way, especially if it's different from your way, which hasn't been successful. With all due respect.
That's an example of me being tougher than my client.
I'm being smarter than them. I'm heading them off at the pass. I'm being more logical than them, but I'm being tougher than them. I'm not letting their approach bully me into backing down. And by doing so, I have served that person. It's not an ego contest at all. I'm looking to serve my client. And every archetype, it's always about can you serve your re can you serve your client? You know, sometimes there are certain people who, certain clients I'm with, that I'm being a noble reporter for them. I'm just letting them know, listen, you know, I know like high quality food and organic food has never been an interest of yours, and it's not been your focus. And you know, your symptoms have been getting worse and worse over the last few years as you've told me. You know, your immune challenges are more, your digestion is a little bit worse. Your skin has been having problems. And you know, I just want to tell you, I've just seen over the years that when people switch to a more quality diet, something, something happens and good things tend to happen. So, you know, it's, it's a lot of us look at people who eat healthy and they're often fanatics, or we think they're hippies. You know, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm not asking you to be a fanatic. I'm not asking you to be a hippie. I'm just telling you from what I've seen, quality makes a difference. So I'm reporting to them
as opposed to in that moment, trying to be a teacher for them. See the distinction so you can play with the archetypes and especially play with the ones every once in a while that you are not so comfortable with. Because as you get comfortable with the ones you're not comfortable with, you Get, get more comfortable, you get better at the business of helping your clients, which is the best way to build a practice, by the way, okay, here's a favorite of mine. Put death on the table. Put death on the table. Now this is a great tool to help get more real, more open and more expansive with a client. And it is particularly useful for clients who are approximately 50 years old and up approximately 50 years old and up. I'm usually gonna pull this card, usually with any client coming to see me, 60-year-old and up. Why? It's because many, many, many people are stuck in weight loss. They're stuck in weight worry, they're stuck in food worry. They're stuck in their perfectionism around their body, and they're 50, 60, 70, 80, and it ain't getting them anywhere. And time is running out. You're not 18 anymore if you're 18 years old. Okay? I got a lot of patience for you when it comes to how long it's gonna take you to unwind your body image challenge. Because guess what? You're still young and the world conditions us in a very difficult way. So it oftentimes takes, takes, it, it could take years to slowly step into our power. And if I'm dealing with a client who's 50, 60, 70, 80 years old, time is running out. That's just a fact. I got no problem saying that. It's true. I'm not making this up. Um, and I'm very clear, whatever you're doing, Mr. And Mrs. Klein around all this worry, around all this staying stuck around the weight and all the ways you're torturing yourself, that's wasting their years. And they got less years than they ever have. So how do I put death on the table? It generally sounds like this. Again, I don't do this with my younger clients. I might have done it a few times over the years, but it's only when I have been, you know, dealing with a true eating disorder client who is, who is playing the edge, um, in terms of, wow, they could do some serious damage to themselves. So for my client, 50 years old enough, okay, Mr. And Ms. Client, I, I got a question for you. How long do you wanna live? What do you mean? How long do you wanna live? Pick a number, gimme an H. How long do you wanna live? Give me, gimme a gimme a five year age range. Like, I don't know. Well pretend you knew. Pretend you're the master of the universe. Pretend you're writing the script. It's your movie. You are making this up. How long would you like to live? I, yeah, you know, I would, I would, I'd like to do between 85 and 90. Great. Here's what I'd love for you to think about. In fact, in an ideal world, I'd love for you to journal about this.
What exactly would make those years worth living? So you're 65 right now. You wanna make it to 85, 90. How do you wanna live those 25 or 30 years? What are those 25 or 30 years actually for? What are you gonna do? You're gonna play ice hockey? Are you going to watch tv? Are you going to garden? Are you going to work with young people, work with animals? Are you going to mentor people? Are you gonna study me? Like, are you gonna work? Are you gonna reach out? What are you gonna do? What is actually the rest of your life for in the most practical ways? And perhaps in the most personal ways, in the most spiritual ways, in the most religious ways? You tell me. What's the game plan? So I would love for you to think about that, really do some journaling about that. Like why not is your life
and next session, you know, I just come back and, and, and bring in that information and let's just talk about it.
You're putting death on the table. You're asking your client to wake up out of their stupor. The stupor is they're focused on their weight. They're focused on food. They're focused on losing five pounds here or 10 pounds here, and that's where all their life energy is going. That is not acceptable. I I literally don't accept that. I'm sorry. It's a waste of your time. Okay? I get that. You wanna lose a little weight, fine. That'll be your hobby. It's not gonna be your life though. Is that the purpose of your life for the next 25 years to try to lose this weight? And then what are you gonna do? You're gonna be 90 years old and go, I did it. I can I, yeah, no, who cares? Like, really, who's actually going to care about that? Here's another thing. I do have your client write an obituary. Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, check this out. I want you to write your obituary. So again, and, and this one by the way, I will do with young people. And I have done this when I used to, um, teach junior high school and high school kids. I've done this with 15 and 16 and 17 year olds. And it is, it is, it is good. It's really good. Uh, it's so juicy. They love it. Okay, Mr. And Ms. Client, so this is for any age group, um, especially in older age group, but for sure younger people as well, that you want to just kind of help them step up and help them expand and help them become more conscious and aware. Okay, Mr. And Ms. Klein, here's what I'd like you to do. I want you to write an obituary, your obituary. But, but here's what it is. Pretend you've lived to be a hundred, you hit the century mark. And not only have you lived to be a hundred, but you lived the life that You wanted to live, not only did you live the life that you wanted to live, but you're gonna be writing from the perspective of someone who's on their deathbed, who's conquered all their demons, who's healed their inner booboos, and whatever your relationship with food, body and health and weight is, you've done it. You've gotten where you wanted to go, you transformed as you did it. And you're literally lying on your death bed going, damn, I crushed this in your obituary. What I want you to do is write down, what did I learn? 'cause here you are, you're a hundred years old, you're ready to go. You feel good about yourself. What did I learn about food and weight and body and life that helped me get to this brilliant place? Or I live life to the fullest. I conquered my demons around food and body. What did I learn about those? What lessons happened for me that helped me get to this amazing place?
See where we're going with that, my friends? And then your client comes back in and you have them read it to you, Hey, or if they don't wanna read it. So tell me what you learned about that. What did you notice? Any insights, any ahas, any openings? Just what do you wanna share about that?
It's usually a pro a pretty profound exercise, believe it or not, especially for the young people.
They love this exercise because it causes them to expand and to think and doesn't scare them because they're immortal and they know they're not gonna die for a long time.
Okay, here's one way of saying it. So here's my assessment. Mr. And Mrs. Client, you're gonna die. We're all gonna die someday. So no matter what diet you follow, no matter how much you exercise, we're all gonna get buried, right? So given that, how do you wanna live your life? What's gonna be important to you? What's, what's the purpose of eating right and being healthy?
Is it useful to expend so much energy on dieting and weight loss? I know it's important to you and I really wanna help you. But let's put first, let's, let's put things into a bigger perspective here. So, how do you wanna be living these remaining years? How do you want the rest of your life to look? What higher purpose can a good diet and a healthy body serve you? What gifts are you here to give to the world? What are you giving to the world in these final years? What's your life for?
It's such a juicy conversation.
Okay, let's talk about this. Dealing with a stuck client. Oh, this is so good because so many people say, I'm stuck. I've said it a million. Well, maybe not a million times, maybe half a million. I don't know. Dealing with a stuck client. So clients are often gonna come to us saying, I'm stuck. For whatever reasons. They feel stuck around weight, they feel stuck around food. They feel stuck around unwanted eating habit. And they are clearly feeling stuck. Stuck is a feeling for many people. It not necessarily a fact might be, I don't know. But it's certainly a feeling, and correct me if I'm wrong, but people who feel stuck, invariably feel confused and don't know what to do next, right? Makes perfect sense. That's why I'm stuck. I don't know what to do. So there's this feeling of, damn, I don't know what to do. I'm stuck. I ain't moving forward. I'm in the same place. I don't like this place. I've been in this place a long time. Gimme the hell outta here. I'm stuck. Okay, so part of the human condition happens to, oh, so many people, maybe it's happened to every person ever far as we know. So here's my first suggestion here. Let's, let's, let's play here. My first suggestion is I never buy into a client's belief that they are stuck.
And what I'm saying is I'm not here to, yes, I hear them saying I'm stuck, but I don't immediately go inside myself. Oh my God, they're stuck. What do I do? How do I unstick them? That's where most people go. Rookie mistake. Oh my God, my client's stuck. Ah, they're stuck. I know exactly what they mean because I've been stuck. In fact, I'm stuck right now in this part of my life. And stuck is the worst feeling. How do I unstick my client? So all of a sudden you're looking for all these strategies. I don't know what, my clients really stuck. I don't know what stuck really is. I got some ideas. So what I'm saying to you is, first and foremost, don't assume that it's your job to now get them unstuck.
Because being stuck is oftentimes a very fascinating self-diagnosis that needs a reframe. Allow me to say that again. Being stuck is a fascinating self-diagnosis that often needs a reframe. So yeah, I'm gonna acknowledge my client's state, I'm gonna acknowledge their feeling, and I'm going to help them reframe, oh man, Mr. And miss client. I get it. If I had a nickel for every time I felt stuck, gosh, I'd be living in the biggest mansion in the world. So I totally get where you're coming from.
So I'm acknowledging my client, I'm making them right. And for such clients, I'm gonna let them know, you know something, here's what I wanna say. Maybe you're not as stuck as you think you are. Maybe you're on a plateau.
Now, I'm a nature boy. I don't know if you've actually ever been on a plateau somewhere out in the wilderness or somewhere out on a hike, but a plateau's a kind of a cool thing. 'cause they're generally pretty flat. And you generally have a good perspective when you're up on a plateau. There's plenty of places to picnic. There's plenty of places to pitch your tent. In fact, oftentimes there's other things on the plateau. Oftentimes there's a pretty view. You could see all the nice wildlife and the birds in the air. By the way, my friends, this is especially important for weight loss clients because stuck for a lot of weight. I'm stuck at this weight. You're not stuck at that weight. Stop that. It's the wisdom of your body happens to decide that this is exactly where your body needs to be right now. Now we're gonna look at your diet. We're gonna look at everything, and we're gonna see is there indeed tweaks that we can make that will help you get where you wanna go? Okay, well look, I'm happy to help you see what tweaks we need to make, what changes we might need to make to help your body get where it wants to go. But that doesn't mean you are stuck.
It means we got some work to do. We're gonna look at some places now. You can be working with a weight loss client, and you've been working with them for a while, and you've helped them lose 29 pounds and they came to see you to lose 50 pounds. So they got 21 pounds more to go, but they're stuck at this 29 pound weight loss. Well, guess what? They're not stuck as their definition. What I'm gonna tell them is, no, this is where your body wants to be right now. Let's hang here. We're gonna hang. Why? 'cause that's what the body's doing. We're gonna trust the body. We're gonna trust life. And now it's your job to hang out here and learn to love yourself in this place. Because maybe it's not about being stuck at all. Maybe this is where you need to do a little bit of learning right now. That's that. That's kind of my guess. Who says you are stuck? You say you are stuck. Body doesn't say that. Body's saying, thanks for doing all these great tweaks and these great changes. I just lost, you know, 29 pounds and I found a good place. I like it here. You don't like it, but your body does. So we're gonna trust your body because your body tends to be smarter than you about a lot of things. We're gonna go with the wisdom of life. We're gonna go with the wisdom of the universe here.
You know, there's other people, sometimes they feel stuck in life.
Usually when we're stuck in life,
things aren't moving as fast as we wanted to. Sometimes we are on hold, sometimes we are gestating, sometimes we are incubating. Sometimes we are getting ready for change. When a caterpillar crawls into its cocoon and is hanging out in its cocoon, do you say, oh my God, it's stuck. Get it out of there. Cut it open.
No, it's not stuck. It's incubating. It's turning to mush. It is transforming. Can't see it. We can't see the wisdom in it. If you don't know anything about a caterpillar in a cocoon is getting ready for change. In fact, change is happening. It's just not happening in the way we think it should be happening. It's not happening in the way we think it needs to look. The universe is not conforming to our humble demands. When we affirm I'm stuck, then you know what? We're stuck. We feel stuck. It's a feeling. And we try to do everything to get out of that feeling. And meanwhile, we're not stuck. We're just, okay, this is where your weight is. Okay? This is where your life is right now. There's no action right now. There's nobody to date. I know you want a relationship and there's nobody showing up. Okay? Instead of looking that like you are stuck, maybe there's ways you need to learn how to be with yourself. Maybe there's ways that you need to prepare yourself more in a good way. You know, what do you need to focus on for you? And that's who, who, who says you're stuck. So we're making a perceptual shift. We're helping our client re language here, my friends. So one thing you can do is have your client journal a restoring experience. Why am I incubating at this time?
What is the wisdom for me in my life of things being on hold?
What lessons am I being asked to learn right now in this plateau? What might I be resisting in my life? How is there really a deeper wisdom going on and that I'm not truly stuck? That's their journaling exercise for a stuck client.
Especially want you to catch this around weight.
Because some people are gonna claim when they first see you that they're stuck at their weight. Now, yeah, maybe they have weight to lose and based on their work with you, you're gonna help them.
But I'm also listening for how much they're doing this stuck thing, if it's an issue. 'cause sometimes, you know, people just might use it as a throwaway line. Oh yeah, I'm just stuck at this weight. And they're not really feeling stuck per se. They wanna lose some weight. Okay, I get it. But I'm really talking about the people who, who present as stuck, who feel stuck and stuck is their, that's their complaint. Because oftentimes we feel stuck. And really what it that stuckness is, is it's life unfolding and it ain't unfolding in the way we want it to unfold. And granted, your job as the coach, in part, is to be a catalyst. So sometimes our clients, yeah, they need new input, they need new ideas, they need a few new distinctions, they need a few new things to do that you're gonna give them that will help them move energy. So fair is fair. So you are in part one of your roles is to be a catalyst.
Now, helping a stuck client, sometimes it's just helping them reframe their stuckness. And sometimes helping a stuck client is like saying, Hey, have you tried this? Have you tried that? Okay, you feel stuck at this weight. Let's look at your diet. Let's look at your eating speed. Let's look at all these factors.
You know, sometimes people just truly get in a rut and they need to mix things up. So I'm gonna find gentle ways to help move my client just into a sense of opening to do some fresh things, some new movements, some new exercise, a new social activity, some out of the box activities, some travel. 'cause sometimes they, sometimes people do need to change things up and they might need to change things up in a completely different area than the one they're working in right now. Meaning, yeah, they might be stuck around their weight, but I might help them try to get un Any other places in life where you're feeling stuck right now? Mr. Ms. Klein, just wondering, just wondering, any other place where you wouldn't mind getting a little bit unstuck? Because I'm gonna listen for that because sometimes stuckness in one place will affect stuckness in other places. I might be able to help my client with a little bit of, with relationship advice, I might be able to help them with a little bit of parenting advice. It just kind of helps move energy. So the bottom line is the affirmation. I'm stuck, I'm stuck. I'm stuck. Oftentimes does more harm than the actual stuckness. And we're looking to reframe it so the client doesn't keep locking it in.
This might be a good topic for you to kind of listen in again and see what you pick up from this. Because there's a few distinctions here about how to deal with stuckness and a stuck client. Because my desire with any client that's feeling stuck is I want to change that energy. Because when a client is convinced that they're stuck, it's, it's hard to move them. That's why they're feeling stuck. Because it's the affirmation. I'm stuck, I'm stuck, I'm stuck. Where oftentimes, once again, no, we might be in a plateau or, or in a holding pattern. Life just wants you to incubate gestate. That's oftentimes the reality. And sometimes we need to just mix things up, just a little bit of spark, little bit of different stimulation, add some new possibilities, new practices to your client's life. So yeah, things are a little different. Okay, next.
This is always a great one. When your client comes to you, um, they come to you because they've fallen off the map. They lost momentum. You know, they get excited and then they don't follow through. Or they try their best to do their homework assignments, but they failed or they get stuck and they don't wanna do anything and they feel bad about themselves and they go into old habit. They might even avoid what you ask them to do, even though they agree to do it and they don't wanna talk about, and they a little bit of shame, little bit of guilt. So I wanna do an end run around that, meaning I do not spend a lot of time with my client. Well, why didn't you do it? What happened? We're always, always, always wanting to go, okay, Mr. And miss client, let's use this as a learning experience. So yeah, sometimes it's useful to find out what got in the way. Like just briefly, Mr. And Ms. Klein, what do you think got in your way? Oh God. I don't know. I just couldn't do it. I was just resistant or gosh, I was really busy that week. What? Whatever. It doesn't matter. You know, Mr. Mrs. Klein, I get you tried your best, you know things happen. I know your intentions are good. You know, we can talk all day about why you couldn't do X, X, X, and x. The homework, the exercises, the suggestions. Here's what, let's use this as an opportunity to dig a deep breath and just push the reset button. I don't need you to self reject. I don't want you to feel down about yourself. I don't want you to go into punishment. I don't want you to go, oh, screw it. I'm gonna just eat whatever I want to eat. No, we're gonna, we're gonna do a whole different thing. We're just gonna push the reset button. We're going to begin again and start fresh. You're gonna jump into the same homework this week from a new place. I get it. We're gonna just get back to the practice of eating slow. We're gonna get back to just doing the work and you're gonna recommit. And honestly, if you come back next time and tell me you couldn't do it, I'm gonna probably tell you the same thing. We gotta push the reset button. You gotta forgive yourself and you have to take a deep breath and say, okay, I'm gonna do this next time.
So you're not punishing your client because chances are they wanna punish themselves. Sometimes it's actually easier for them to punish themselves than to actually do the homework. The assignments, the practices that they know are gonna be difficult for them or they're just afraid to do because they're just ingrained in their habit. And it's really hard for some people. It's hard, my friends, it's just hard for them. So I'm never gonna get down on my client. I'm always gonna say, let's push the reset button and use this opportunity as a learning experience. I don't need you to punish yourself. I don't want you to punish yourself. That doesn't work. What does work is if you say, okay, yeah, I'm not feeling so great about myself because I couldn't do this. Guess what? We're gonna try again. And I'm right behind you. So it's literally a fresh start. 'cause you know, a lot of us need a fresh start at different times during the day, during the week, during the month, during the year, during our life,
freeing up the love. I don't think we've really talked about this. This is a fun and interesting place to go with a client. And you're gonna have to use your intuition here. So here's my assumption, here's my postulation. And you're gonna see if this, if this lands for you. Love, love, love, love is what so many people want on a deeper level. Humans want love. Humans wanna be love. Humans wanna feel love. Humans wanna give love. Humans wanna make love. Humans enjoy feeling some self love. But we often limit that love to some very small definitions. Yep, yep, yep. I'll have love when I'm thin. I'll have love when I'm super healthy. I'll have love when I have the perfect diet or the perfect body, or I have these perfect behaviors, or my life looks like this, or my body looks like that, or my house, whatever. So we place our limitations on the love. So I will often notice where love may be obstructed in my client's life, and help them explore what it might mean to free that love.
Example is my client withholding love from a parent. Here I am, I'm listening to my client. I'm listening to my client, and they're talking about their parents. And here they are. They're talking about their dad. And yeah, they see their dad often and their dad's a part of their life. And they's a lot of complaint. There's just a lot of complaints, a lot of complaints, a lot of complaint, lot of complaint, lot of complaint. And I'm sure those complaints are legitimate sometimes, sometimes for some people, huh? Really what needs to happen is you just, you just need to love on that person more. Uh, we don't need to solve anything. We don't need to fix anything. We don't need to change that person. I get your complaint. I understand. Ugh, it's an old guy. why.you just love him. Why don't you just decide to love him? Here's who he is. Here's who he is. These days ain't gonna change. Why? Because he hasn't. Why? Because he says he is not gonna change the thing that you want him to change around. So what if you just loved him? Oftentimes, we're withholding love from a parent. Sometimes we're withholding love from a sibling.
A lot of times we're withholding love from a partner. My client is talking to me, and yep, they got relationship stuff going on, and they're just going complaint, complaint, complaint, complaint. And a lot of the complaints, if not all of them, are legitimate. And sometimes it's not about working out the complaints, it's just about freeing up some love. Hey, Mr. And Ms. Client, let me ask you this. Is there any place where you could just love your partner more, love on them more? Uh, I get these complaints right now. I totally understand. I'm sure you're right. Absolutely, positively. I don't know. For some reason, it just feels like there's a little more love that needs to go into the system here. Sometimes parents get really frustrated around their kids, and really what's needed is, is just more love in the system instead of complaint. Is it someone from the past that needs to be getting a little more love? Someone at work? So I'm listening for who my client is in reaction to. I'm listening for who my client is judging. I'm listening for who they're complaining about. And if it is indeed a person that, that, that, that there's some relationship there, that there is a fundamental place somewhere of connection and association and love, then gosh, let's free it up a little more.
So it's your job to sniff this out based on your conversations, what you notice about your client, you notice where the energy is with your client, and from there, you're gonna have to invent strategies or homework assignments that move them in a new direction. So freeing up the love sometimes means just speaking the truth to somebody. It might mean forgiving them. It might mean honestly communicating with them. It might mean just reaching out and throwing out an olive branch. Taking a risk in love. Oftentimes, here it is. Give the thing you wanna get. I'm always coaching my clients who are in relationship, who have a complaint about the relationship. At some point, I'm gonna ask, just, just asking Mr and Ms. Client, are you giving the very thing you want to get? Are you giving the thing you want to get to the degree you wanna get it? Are you giving it to that degree? That's the showstopper right there for most people. Because if you ain't giving what you wanna get in a relationship, then makes sense that you ain't getting it right. So a lot of times there's an opening there. Sometimes freeing up the love means, okay, Mr. And Mrs. Client, it, it just might be your job to be the one who just creates a little more intimacy and creates more connection and throws the olive branch and just is the one who opens their arms and gives the big hug and takes the high road.
Sometimes freeing up the love means just, just letting something go. Letting go of a grudge. You know this, my friends. Oftentimes, when you free up love in one area of life, how could it not free up love in other areas? It just, it gets the juices flowing and it, it always yields a positive result. Next, my friends, sometimes it's a nice playful place to go inside yourself to ask the question, what's my client's polarity when it comes to masculine feminine archetypes? When it comes to masculine, feminine polarities? What's my client's polarities? So I'm calling this a place to play and explore and practice first with yourself. So I want you to ask yourself, what's my client's polarity? What would I guesstimate is their percentage of masculine and feminine archetype?
And from there, I'm gonna ask the question. Let's say it's a male client. I'm gonna ask myself the question. Hmm. Is my male client calling for more of the masculine polarity? Are they calling for more of the f feminine polarity? Maybe neither, maybe both.
It's a question I'm asking the universe on behalf of my client, how can I help my male clients step into more of his evolved masculine archetype? By the way, for majority of clients, whatever their actual male or female biology is, I'm always gonna ask the question, how can I help my male clients step more into his evolved, evolved higher mask and archetype? How could I help my female clients step into more of her female archetype, feminine archetype for female clients? The question is, is my female client calling for more of her feminine polarity? Does she need more than masculine polarity? Neither. Both.
It's a very, very fun place to play because you are going to often get some interesting insights into your client. And from there you are going to invent homework assignments.
What would help them get more into their feminine? What would help Them get more into their masculine? You've seen how I've done this with different clients already, different case studies. Next, I wanna remind you to please, please, please, please do not over explain to your client about how you work. Don't overexplain overexplain. That's the word I want you to underline about how you work. What do I mean? A lot of times we want our clients, this is a bit of a rookie mistake. We want our clients to know upfront. Here's my philosophy, here's my deeper beliefs about eating psychology. Your weight is really a teacher. You might not need to lose any weight. Mr. And Mr. Ale, and this is before your client has said anything, um, we want people to know exactly how we see things differently. Um, and we see things differently from others when it comes to food, body and weight. And we're gonna look at your masculine and uh, uh, feminine polarities. And we're gonna actually see if you really have weight to lose. Because you know, a lot of people, they say they wanna lose weight, but they don't even have any weight to lose. And woo, your client's head is gonna explode. They're gonna run for the hills. Do not try to over teach your client about your approach upfront. It will likely confuse people and end up putting you on the defensive when you have to explain what you mean. And they're not gonna be able to get what you mean. Your job is not to deeply explain to your client your entire approach. They won't get it. It's not their job to get it. They haven't had the education. You have things that you take for granted now that you know, that are boilerplate inside your mind because you've been hearing me say it a number of times. You've been practicing it for yourself. You've been integrating it into your life. It's, it's becoming second nature for you. The client has no idea.
So the idea is to slowly, gently, slowly, gently, gently, slowly invite your client into your approach. Over time, you want to sneak them in.
Again, if you don't fully understand this concept, here's what you can do. Think about a first date. Think about ever going on a first date and you're seriously looking, you're looking to get married. And here you are on a first date, on your first date to you. Tell that person everything about yourself. Oh, by the way, I just need to tell you, you know, I, I am looking to get married and you do need to know that. Um, I do snore at night and I do need to, you know, wash my clothes, uh, every other day. I just gotta think about clothes washing. And I don't like, you know, unnatural, uh, laundry detergent. Uh, 'cause I don't like the fragrances in them. And also, you're going to need to know that I enjoy, you know, traveling, but I really don't like to fly. And, and you're gonna pull out all this information and the person's head is gonna explode. No, you slowly invite them in. You start with the goodies first.
You don't try to teach them about your religion on the first date, per se, and your deepest religious beliefs and how you see the universe and how you see life and how you see men and women and nature and animal and what, no, you're slowly built. So yes, I want you to be confident in what you know, while understanding that your client needs to proceed at your, at their own pace. So it's a bit of a dance, my friends. It really is a bit of a dance. But I'm just saying upfront, don't overexplain about how you work. You could be very general with people. Yeah, you know, I'm, I'm thanks for being, you know, I'm, I'm really glad you're here. You know, as you know or you might not know, um, my training is unique. My experience is a little more unique. I do take a different approach. And my approach when it comes to, let's say it's a weight loss client, my approach when it comes to weight loss is we are going to look at any and all the factors that are gonna truly help you get where you wanna go. So a lot of people, a lot of practitioners out there, they're one trick ponies. They just want to diet you and exercise you. And chances are you've been doing that and it hasn't gotten you where you want to go. Fortunately, I, I have a lot more distinctions in my pocket than just diet and exercise when it comes to weight loss. So there's all kinds of dynamic eating, psychology distinctions, mind body nutrition distinctions. We're gonna cover the easiest places to work first. And we're gonna keep at it until we find what's gonna truly help you get where you want to go. There it is. You let them know you're different. You let them know you have a different approach. You can't explain it to them because you can't educate them and with hundreds of hours of information and study in two minutes or 10 minutes or 30 minutes.
But they're gonna gradually learn by how you speak to them. The questions you ask of them, the comments you make to them, and the work you do with them, they're gonna learn. That's the whole point. Next, I want you to be willing in any session to check in with your client at any time during a session. So, as it's talking about during a session, check in with your client. Be willing to check in with your client. Feel free to check in with your client at any single moment. What do I mean by this? Here's what I mean, especially new practitioners, but I notice a few old ones get stuck in this too. Practitioners can often get insecure, Insecure. I'm in a session, I'm, I'm just getting a little insecure. Totally understandable. Or they're simply not sure how a client is doing in the moment. Like, I, I really don't have a read on my client. I don't know what's going on for them. I don't know how things are landing for them. I don't know where they are at with the work that I'm doing with them in this moment. So it's fair game for you. At any point in a session to kind of raise your hand and say, Hey, Mr. And Mr. Client, just lemme ask you something. How is this landing for you? If you've just explained something to them, you've just done an intellectual intervention. Anytime I do an intellectual intervention, anytime I've had a teaching moment with them, if I'm helping them skewer the toxic nutritional belief that fat and food equals fat on my body, and I've just explained to this, this to them, how did that just land for you?
It's a great question to ask. Oh my God, I can't believe it. I I've just, I I, I've never heard this. It's just I was taught you don't eat fat. Do you understand how the science has changed? Now, do you understand? So how's this landing for you? Or another way to say it is if you literally don't know how a client is doing, Hey, Mr. Mr. Klein, just, I just wanna check in with you. How are you doing right now? Is this working for you? Is this making sense right now? Was what I just said helpful? Are we moving in a good direction for you?
'cause sometimes I'll be in a conversation with my client that might feel a little edgy. We might get into the part where we talk about sexuality. We might get into the part where we talk about religion and their religious beliefs. We might get into the part where we're talking about relationship and, and they're getting visibly uncomfortable, but they wanna talk and we're sharing and we're making connections.
How's this working for you, Mr. Mr Alein? Is this helpful? Are we moving in a good direction for you? Yeah, well, it's really uncomfortable for me to talk about my husband, my wife, my whatever. So you're checking in.
I will even ask this question. How's this working for you, Mr. And Mrs. Client so far? I even asked that question when I know. I know. And you know this too. You know when the flow is going good. You know, when you're making an impact, oftentimes for those of you that see clients, you know when something's going good, you know, when you just hit the bullseye and said something. So a lot of times I will just stop and say, how's this working for you? Simply because I wanna get my client to acknowledge that this experience is indeed a good one for them. I want them to say it. Is it for my ego? Not at all. It is for the relationship. It is for them to hear themselves saying it. People need oftentimes, so often they need to be celebrating the successes. They need to acknowledge, yes, this is working. Yes, I'm getting something out of this. Because you know what, we tend to really overemphasize the other place. So many people, we overemphasize, this ain't working, my diet's not working, this is not working, this strategy's not working. And your client is coming in with a long list of strategies that haven't worked for whatever their problem is. So guess what one of the remedies is when something is working, we make sure
that the world hears that. And the world means that, that it's spoken into this space. How's this working for you, Mr. And Ms. Client? Oh God, this is so great. I'm so happy we're talking about this. Oh, good. Glad to hear that. That's what I thought. But you know, I like to ask anyway.
So they've just gotten to acknowledge the positive. It keeps momentum going. It's a great counselor trek.
Sometimes I'll, sometimes I will be playful with my client. A lot of times, sometimes we really need to coach our client into accessing their own wisdom and insight. One of your jobs as the practitioner is to deliver wisdom and insight and education. For sure. You gotta do that. It's your job.
And yes, you can give your advice and opinions and distinctions all session long. That's a good thing. And please, please, please remember to make sure that you have moments where you are helping your client self resource.
You are helping your client access their own wisdom. So a lot of times my client will say something like, oh God, you know, something, it was working really well and I wasn't overeating. And then all of a sudden, three days in a row, I reverted. I just reverted again. And I, I I, I just, I found myself overeating. Like, I, I can't believe it. Like what do I do now? Sometimes I just might say to a client, Hey, you know, that's a great question. Before I answer that, let me ask you something. If you were me right now, 'cause we've been together, what, five sessions now. If you were me, what would you tell you? Huh? If you were me, what would you say to you right now in answer to that question?
So they're turning to me for advice and I'm putting it right back in their court. What would you tell you right now if you were me? And I'll say that with a smile on my face. 'cause it's playful. But at the same time, I am making them work. I wanna see what they come up with, then I'll offer my advice. Then I'll offer my thoughts. Well, I don't know. That's why I'm asking you. I don't know know. Well, come on, pretend that you know, you are a pretty smart cookie. I've been observing you. You got a lot of wisdom, you got a lot of IQ points, you got a lot of brain power there. Just give it a try. I promise I'll, I promise I'll give you my thoughts on this, but I just wanna hear what you have to say. So I will play in this way. I'm not torturing my client, but I want you to be aware that there are many moments where it's a teachable moment with your client to ask them to access their own wisdom. Very important, my friends, very important to help us set our clients free to tap into their power, to tap into their source, to tap into their self resourcing. It will actually empower your client. You're not going to lose your client over there. Oh my God, I could be my own coach Now that, don't worry about that. That's not gonna happen. So you can really be, I'm, I'm a little playful when I do this, by the way, because when you're playful, it lets your client know that you're not taking it so seriously. But I'm still being a little serious. So we're riding the itch.
Okay? You, I would love to remind you, my friends are the conductor of the session. You are the conductor. It's your session that you are conducting on behalf of the client. Are they paying you? Absolutely. But they're paying you to be the conductor. You cannot forget that. What do I mean? Sometimes our clients can talk a lot. Now, how I like to say that is some clients have a lot to say. Some people just have a lot to say. And what I want to say is that's great. No problem.
Certain clients need to talk, they just need to talk. They need to move a certain amount of verbal energy sometimes in every session. That's how it goes for them. That's one of the jobs that you are serving them in. That's one of the ways you're serving them in. Because there are people, and, and I I just really wanna say this straight up. They literally just need someone to talk to, which really means in a weird way, talk at. They're not thinking about you as they're talking to you. They know you're over there listening. They know they're paying you, and they're gonna talk and talk and talk. Because for a lot of people that actually moves energy. A lot of people, that's a stress reduction and it is part of how they
metabolize emotionally. Okay? So I I'm not saying there's something wrong with that at all. I'm saying some people, that's their archetype. Uh, and, and, and here's the thing. Some clients need to be managed in terms of how much they are speaking. Otherwise, they might leave you with actual little time to do some work. And they're gonna just talk and talk and talk and talk and talk, and you actually won't be able to do work. So you gotta be a little clever here. And by clever I mean guesstimate. And this is sometimes based on getting to know your client. Do you have certain friends like this? Just, just think for a moment. You have certain friends who, they're just talkers and you have certain friends who are a little more quiet. In fact, they give you space to talk. There are certain friends you might have that they just need to talk and talk. And sometimes when they're finished talking, they actually like finish talking and now they could actually listen. Um, so you're learning about your clients, like you learn about your friends, and you need to conduct the session. So please don't have even the tiniest bit of hesitation to conduct, manage and be the leader of the conversation. So you have to determine when your client needs to stop venting and downloading, which is fine and important for many clients. And you casually intervene because you know what time is of the essence here. You've been talking for 25 minutes. So usually let's say it's an hour session. I'm not gonna let my client go past minute 25. That's just, it's if you want a rough guesstimation, that's what I'm gonna say. That's, that's the outer limit for me, generally speaking for an hour session. Is that arbitrary? Absolutely. But I'm mentioning that to you. Just if you need a, a number, that's the number I'm gonna make up about 25 minutes because then it gives us the other half of the session plus an extra five minutes to do some work.
Well, God, God, you know, mark, my, my client, he just talks and talks and talks and talks and talks like I, I can't get a word in. Yes, you can. Let me teach you how to interrupt. Okay? Your client's speaking and they're speaking and, and, and they're speaking and you're listening and you're going, my God, we're now, I'm minute 30. Mark said 25 minutes. It's when I should stop. And this client's not gonna stop talking. So here's what I would do. Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, well time out for a second time out for one moment. So I'm literally raising my hand. I'm, I like right now, my hand is up. I'm raising my hand. Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, time out for one moment. Time out for one moment. Literally just like that. That's how you interrupt somebody who doesn't stop. I, I just want to say, and they will stop time out for a second. And I will say that three or four times because usually by time number four, they, they stop sometimes by time, number one, but not always. Some people, I, i, line four is probably the limit, you know? And then you state it in the positive. I got a big smile on my face. Hey, I am just aware of that. I'm just aware of our time and I really wanna make sure that we get to all the things that I'm wanting us to cover in this session. I know that you have a lot to download 'cause you gotta, you know, you got a rich life. There's a lot happening for you. So, so just so you know, that's why I interrupted you because I wanna make sure that we get some good work done here in this session. Does that make sense? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm so sorry. I just talked a lot. No, no, no. You don't need to apologize for that because, 'cause there's a lot on your mind and you got a lot to say. I totally get it. And I'm just here to manage our time so you get the best value from it.
See that we did it. It's not an insult. You're not hurting somebody's feeling. You are managing their time. Time is money. Money is time in this sense. They're paying you. So you're managing it, you're conducting it. That's your job. Assume it, take it.
Let's finish up this part of the conversation by saying, my friends, be professional with your clients, but at the same time, how do you be yourself with them? How do you relax into being you and being in your professional role at the same time? That's what I want you to play with. That's the edge I want you to experiment with. Well, how do I do that? I don't know. You're learning how to be a professional. Maybe you are already a professional. So you know, some qualities of a professional. You're hearing some of the distinctions you're hearing some of the archetypes to talk from. And I want you to relax and to be you at the same time. So you're learning how to weld those, marry those together. It's an exploration, it's a journey. It's a growth process. There's no, oh, here's how you do it. You push this button and you eat some kale and then you'll be able to, no, you play with it. Remember my friends, you have to do this. You have to enjoy the journey with your clients. You have to enjoy the relationship as best you can. You find you. It's your job to find the places where you can enjoy the experience, where you can enjoy the journey. Because when you do that, you're enjoying it. You communicate that you are resonating, that you are projecting that into the atmosphere, into the container between you and your client. And it infuses the work. It makes it better for you for them. Never allow yourself to be afraid to lose a client ever. This is so helpful because it ensures that you will always be empowered that you meet, that you will stay real, you will stay honest, and you will stay in integrity with yourself in integrity with the universe and in integrity with them.
You should not be afraid To, to lose the money or lose the client. Your commitment is far bigger than that.
I also wanna remind you, you never need to overthink things. If you find yourself overthinking, then you're overthinking. And it's time to relax a little bit into uncertainty.
And a lot of times we'll overthink because we're trying hard because we're good people and we wanna be helpful. So if you're overthinking, you're not doing anything wrong. You're trying, it's coming from a good place. It's just that don't stay in overthinking neighborhood for, you know, more than two or three or four minutes. Not a good use of your time. And here's another great strategy. Really be willing to reach out to colleagues and peers to ask for help and advice and support and fresh ideas when it comes to a client. So you ought not be isolated in your work with clients. You need to hopefully have friends that you are gathering from this training. Friends, peers, people you can reach out to in the online forums, people in your personal world that are professionals related to this realm. You need to be able to, to, to do that. It makes it interesting, it makes it fun. Some of my most satisfying professional moments over the years have come when I was really closely working with other practitioners and able to just ask advice and able to give advice on clients and able to hear, okay, you know, what's your difficult client? What's going on for you? Uh, it's a fun way to improve your craft and to make it a communal experience. Um, I don't do this anymore. I, I actually do this as a teacher because my main role is teaching these days. I have friends who are teachers that I'll reach out to that I'll talk about the teaching experience too. I'll ask them what they're up to, what their edge is, what their challenges are. Uh, I'll share, you know, what's up for me as a way to be in professional commiseration with others as a way to make it interesting and fun.
My friends. I hope this conversation was helpful for you. We have one more part to Counselor Tools and Guiding Stars. It's coming up next. Can't wait to finish it up with you. I appreciate you as always.

PART 3

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Greetings. Once again, my friends, Mark David here, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. Let us finish up our conversation about counselor tools and guiding stars. And I would love to start this part of the conversation off with what I think is a, is a lovely and juicy and important topic. And it's all about dealing with setbacks. Now, setbacks I think, have a really bad name in this world 'cause it sounds like a setback. And a setback is a setback. But quite frankly, most humans I know have had setbacks and it seems to be a very particular and predictable part of being alive in this world. So it's a pretty darn good bet that you're gonna have a lot of clients who make great headway. They make good headway, they make decent headway. And at some point, whether during their work with you, which is likely or after their work with you, they're gonna have a setback or two or three or more. So what I wanna say is that when it comes to our eating challenges and our relationship with food, I think too many people are looking at setbacks as this horrible thing. It's terrible, it's dire, and it's a sign that we've now erased all of our good work and we've fallen into this dark black hole. And this is so terrible. How could this possibly happen? And who could have seen this coming? Who could have seen a setback coming? After all? We tend to think, well, when we have a setback, that we're the first human in history to ever have a setback.
I guess what I wanna say is it's very easy to take this experience called setbacks and um, turn it into something far worse than it actually is.
So I think one of our main jobs as practitioners when dealing with setbacks is pretty clear and straightforward, which is to always make sure that you help your client reframe any setback that they're experiencing from something bad into a great and important opportunity to grow and advance. That's your job. Our job is to help our clients see in a very simple way, in a clear way, as I'm explaining to you right now,
we're coaching them, we're mentoring them, we're being a smart adult. We're helping reparent our clients. When we tell them, Hey, Mr. And Mr. Eline, guess what? Setbacks are normal. They're natural, and they occur everywhere in human life. And in the natural world, the best eaters, the best athletes, the best business people, the healthiest humans, the sharpest minds. Everybody experiences setbacks.
You know the challenges in the realm of eating psychology. And when dealing with people around weight and overeating and binge eating and emotional eating, people think that a setback is so serious because I wasn't binge eating for weeks and weeks and weeks and now I binge eat. So are these really setbacks
or is it just part of the journey? Isn't it just part of life and part of the process? That's part of who we are. Because no matter who you are, no matter how healthy your relationship with food is, the healthiest people I know in terms of their relationship with food, yeah, they overeat here and there it happens. Circumstances conspire, nobody's perfect. We go through emotional upsets. Things happen. Um, it's that time of month we get out of, we get up and we, uh, jump off the wrong side of the bed.
It makes perfect sense that we can take 2, 3, 4 steps forward and a step or two back. Sometimes you don't have to sound the fire alarm, you don't have to scream from the rooftops. There's a whole different way to be with a setback and that's to give it a big hug. So for me, what I suggest you do is to coach your client to vigorously. I mean this vigorously and clearly redefine a setback as this. It's an opportunity to stand by yourself. It's an opportunity to not abandon yourself. It's an opportunity to double down on self-love and self-forgiveness.
It's an opportunity to shorten. This is important to shorten the timeframe in which we normally find ourselves self attacking, self-loathing and self shaming. 'cause usually when people quote unquote relapse or binge eat or ov eat or emotionally eat or gain a few pounds, we can go into self-hate for months. We can go into self-hate for possibly longer. And what we are looking to do is to shorten the time where we are living in self-harm and self-rejection stated in the positive. A setback is an opportunity to mature ourselves, to strengthen our sense of self, to practice what we know is best and true, which is to love ourselves into the journey. It's an opportunity to take the high road with yourselves. You know, the more you as the practitioner can see setbacks in this way, by the way, the more help you can be to your client, my friends. This is so, such an important distinction. It really is. And what often happens is practitioners get upset when their clients have setbacks. And one of the reasons practitioners get upset is because we make it about us. Oh my God, I thought I was previously doing good work with you. You had success, you had a breakthrough, and now you had a setback. Oh my god, what does this mean about me? This is an emergency. We gotta fix this. Oh my god, no, we don't have to fix it. It isn't an emergency. Overeating is not an emergency. Binge eating is not an emergency. Gaining 2, 3, 4 pounds is not an emergency. Whatever it is, it's not an emergency. It is an opportunity to not abandon ourselves. It's an opportunity to not go down the same hmm, not so productive road that we normally go down, which is to pull ourselves down and to kick ourselves when we're down. So simply put a setback is an opportunity to step up for your client, to step up and stand by themselves. I don't know how else to say it. This is very, very simple in concept. It is not necessarily easy to practice, but I hope you're getting here that the concept is, oh, so simple.
'cause people are gonna have setbacks. It is part of the human condition. And when a setback comes up, I just want you to be with your client. I want you to take a big deep breath. I want you to have a smile inside a knowing smile inside yourself. You don't have to be laughing and smiling at your client for having a setback. Even though I'm going to step into a more loving parental role archetype with my client who is experiencing a setback. Because this, this gets back really to in so many ways how we learn to deal with setbacks when we were young. And how most people tend to learn from the world is we self-attack. We self reject. We talk to ourselves about what's wrong with us, why we need to be punished, why we're no good, why we don't measure up, why this is so terrible. We catastrophize,
which ends up becoming a self-fulfilling personal prophecy and metabolic prophecy because that creates more stress, that creates more upset, which will continue to impact our appetite regulation, our calorie burning capacity, our digestion, our energy level.
So in a clum, when it comes to a client who has successfully lost weight with your help, and let's say they go through a period of excess eating and they gain a little weight, you know, honestly, your job becomes even more important. This happens to people, they lose weight when they work with you. They're so happy. Maybe they finished the work or maybe they're still seeing you. Something happens and they gain some weight.
This is such a great moment for most people. You can, it's, it's a great moment for you as a practitioner if you've never been involved in this, to watch where your client goes to watch the terror that they go into and the fear. Because that's where you and I have to call our client forth from. We have to help call them out of that place. It is a place of extreme reactivity. It is a place of immaturity. It is a place of I'm going to die. And they're not. So you have to help your clients see that this is an important growth opportunity for them. If they're freaking out, then they still have not truly found their center, their self-respect, their inner dignity, their authority, their soul. So once again, in other words, it's a big opportunity to stand by yourself.
First of all, you have to stand by yourself as a practitioner and not take it personally. It's an opportunity for my client to stand by himself herself and not go down into a black hole of self-hate. If you are dealing with a client who is of king's age or Queen's age, or king or queen in training age, then I am going to ask them to step into their age appropriate archetype. Mr. Miss a client, I get that you've gained a few pounds, I get that this is horrible to you. I get that this feels like a setback. Here's what I see happening for you. This is a very powerful opportunity for you to revisit yourself. This is a powerful opportunity for you to see what happens when you don't get your way and something goes wrong and there's an upset. You catastrophize, you go down a drain, you go into self hate, you lose yourself, and you deserve to treat yourself better than that. You are X number of years old. You are a queen. You need to step into your royalty. Who is going to follow a queen who sits in her throne and when she gains three or four pounds because she had a rough week, starts freaking out, starts getting her panties all in a bunch while she's sitting on her throne yelling to her subjects, oh my God, this is so terrible. You all must hate me. I'm such an awful queen. Let me just beat myself up. You don't even have to do it for me.
That's not befitting of a queen, that's not befit of a king.
If it's a young person, then I'm not gonna obviously pull the king or the queen card. But I am going to let them know this is a growth opportunity. Do you know any single person in your life that doesn't have a setback? Any famous person, if I'm dealing with a 20-year-old, any famous person that they follow, A musician, an actor, an actress, a famous athlete, they all have setbacks. It's part of their story. They all lose at some point.
They don't win the trophy. They don't win in the finals, they don't get the gold medal. They might not even get a bronze. Yeah, it's disappointing. And yes, you gotta get over it and you gotta get back on your horse. And you have to treat yourself with self-respect. You have to treat yourself with dignity because this is going to happen in life. You will have setbacks like any other human being, welcome to the planet. So setbacks, my friends are asking us to do some deeper work on self. They are like in this work, they're like finishing school. It's a deeper level of polishing and refinement.
Setbacks are asking us to get more exquisite, more specific, more on it in terms of standing by self, self respect, self dignity, self love learning. How here I am in a setback. This is a place where I normally might pee in my pants and freak out.
And now we're gonna do something different this time now we're gonna create a new neural pathway. Now we're gonna create a new behavior. Now we are going to call ourselves, you're going to call yourself Mr. And miss client integrator awareness and maturity. You can do that. We can do that for ourselves. We can help each other do that for each other.
So I don't care what the setback with your client is, this is essentially the work. Hey Mr. Miss a client, I get you're upset and you've just explained all of this to them. Let me ask you a question. What do you think you can do at this time to be more of a support to yourself instead of kicking yourself when you're down? Like what? What practical steps can you take now that now that you've binge eaten two days in a row after not having binge eaten for months? What can you start to do? Practical things that you can do that will help you stand by yourself? So I'm gonna ask my client what they think they can do differently.
I'm gonna ask them to do a little work here and dig a little deeper.
This is an important conversation to be in with your client because once they have this understanding, and this is why I don't mind if a client has a setback when they're working with me because it's part of the work
and my friends, you cannot take it personally. You the practitioner, you cannot take it personally because if you do, you're gonna be sitting there, you're gonna be all upset, you're gonna be uptight, you're gonna be stressed, you're gonna be turning red, you're gonna be embarrassed. Like it's your fault that somebody else had a setback. That's silly. It's not your responsibility. What is your responsibility is for you to keep yourself zipped up, for you to stay in your power, for you to not make this about you. I mean that you getting all upset because your client had a setback, makes it about you.
This is about them. This is about their journey.
And our clients are here to learn and grow. And here is a powerful opportunity to learn and grow that you can facilitate your clients through. Okay, next.
Where is life calling my client? You know, this is the fourth of the four questions. It's a powerful one. It's a big one. It's a question you ask of the universe on behalf of your client. You ask of a higher power, of a higher code of God, whatever you wanna call it. And I will literally have this question in the back of my mind in every session because you know, there's certain things gonna stay the same in terms of where's life calling my client? And there's certain things that might shift a little bit. So when I ask, where's life calling my client? Is it calling her to be a king? Her a queen is a calling him to be a king? Is life asking my client to step into their power more? Is life asking my client to slow down? Is life asking my client to step up in a relationship? Is life asking my client to let go of a relationship? Is life calling my client more into the feminine, into the masculine? Is life calling my client to step up when it comes to how they treat themselves with quality food?
So it's a bigger question on the one hand, and this is you, the practitioner. You're practicing your craft in every session. You're constantly tuning into a greater wisdom. You are constantly opening yourself up to be a conduit for that wisdom. We're really listening to see how we can help our client in their larger goal, of course, as a way to help them in their smaller goal.
So as always, intuition is a key intuition. It's a key ingredient in working with people in the realm of food, body and health. Asking this powerful question, where's life calling my client in an ongoing way. It keeps you the practitioner listening and learning to use your intuition better and better to use your ability to tap into the invisible wisdom of the universe better and better. And you're gonna listen for the answer and then you're going to start to move the relationship with your client in that direction
on, on the one hand, it's really that simple.
Yes, there's a little things that we all are busy with in our life and there's also the bigger movements that each of us are going through. At any given time in life, we're probably learning something of interest. At any given time in life, life is calling us in a certain direction or directions.
The workshop called life definitely has an agenda for us. Your just eves dropping on the universe and tapping into that. That's all. And that's a lot. But you gotta ask and you have to consistently ask.
And when you ask, you're appealing to something greater. We're not just trying to squeeze it out of our own heads. Because if we think that we are doing all the work, then we are in error because we are not doing all the work. Life does the work,
okay, my friends make every session your last. This is a way for us as practitioners to better ourselves, push ourselves in a good way and access more of our authentic and true self. When I'm in a session as a way to motivate myself, you know, as a way to play, as a way to inspire myself, I pretend this is my last session and I wanna go out with the best session possible ever. What would I do? What would I say? How would I conduct myself? How would I speak with my client? Who would I be? How am I showing up? Now, it's not about making the session dramatic, I just want to tell you that it might sound like a very normal session. Has nothing to do with drama, it has nothing to do with I have to do something really big with the client. It is about making it real. It is about making it dynamic. It is about making it honest. It is about making the session thoughtful. It is about me being present as much as I can and speaking to my client in the best way. So that what I have to say lands for them. It's about you and I as practitioners tapping into a more timeless place inside of ourselves and then serving people from that place.
When we do that in my belief system, the universe takes notice. You're given your best. What goes around, I believe tends to come around. When you give your best,
the best on the other side has a much better chance of showing up. If you're being the best practitioner you can be, chances are your client is gonna have more momentum to be the best client that they can be. Meaning to get the most value from the work with you that they can get, extract the nutrition from it so they can begin to move in the direction that they want to go in.
So I really love doing this. And it's not from a heavy place, it's from an inspired place. It's from, I'm going out with a bang.
Let's talk about calling a ceasefire. Now, this is a bit of an intellectual intervention. It's a more specific intellectual intervention that I don't think I've really gone into this directly yet. So let's spend a little time in talking talk about this. Now, you know, oftentimes our clients need a wake up call. Plain and simple. A lot of clients come in, they need a wake up call, they need the alarm to go off a little loudly, maybe even very loudly. Some clients really need a whack on the side of the head. They need to get their tree shaken a bit. So I'm on the lookout for those people because there's certain people I have learned just over the years, I'm not getting through to them. And the reason why I'm not getting through to them is that there's a barrier that, uh, is in the way.
So with that in mind, what I want to say, what's that barrier? I want you to notice your clients who are living in a hell of a lot of low self-esteem around their body who have a constant, constant self attacking, selfs, shaming, inner dialogue. Some clients, some clients will identify that this is clearly the state of their inner world. Some people that they're just gonna tell you, they're gonna demonstrate it, you're gonna see it, it'll be obvious. They're not afraid to let you know other people, you, they're not necessarily going to proclaim this, but honestly it might be written all over their face and in their language, or they might keep it well hidden. And you have to catch them. You have to notice this and you will notice it as you're with them in a first session. And you're asking all the questions that you ask.
So I'm scanning for the client who is, seems like they're locked in, stuck in permanently living in self attack, self attack, self attack, self attack. And there are many people like that. I'm always amazed and they're in every age group.
Once I notice that, once I see that and they're in self attack around their relationship with food, they're in self attack around their body. That is a cue for me to do an intellectual intervention. I will be letting my client know in a firm clear and decisive way. This very one simple principle, Mr. Mrs. Client, it is time to call a cease fire.
Now, believe it or not, this is often a conversation that I will have in a first session with a client that I see has been living in self-attack. Self-hate, self-judgment around food. It is constant and it's been going on for a while. And this person is an adult. They are of queen in training age king in training age or king or queen age especially.
I am going to bring up this topic. Well, I do it with younger people, sure. But when I notice this person, my intellectual intervention with them is all around letting them know, Mr. And Mrs. Client, it is time to call a ceasefire. Now, by the way, this kind of intellectual intervention for many people is a big showstopper. I've done it hundreds. I mean this hundreds of times. Here's what I mean. Here's an example of an intellectual intervention calling a ceasefire with a client. So Mr and Mr a client, here's something I wanna say to you to help you get exactly where you want to go. 'cause I really want to help you. I happen to be on your team in a big way. I like you. I think you have a lot of potential. I know you do. And I want you to find peace with food and body. It is time, really, it's time. Life is, you know, I don't know about you, but for me, life is too short to live with unnecessary unhappiness, really. So here's what you need to do first and foremost, and I really mean this, you need to call a ceasefire. You need to call a ceasefire. Lemme say it a different way, Mr. Mr. Klein, you need to call off the dogs. What do I mean by that? What do I mean by you need to call a ceasefire? You need to call off the dogs. You, you've kind of intimated this, but I could see it, I can get it. You are relentlessly attacking yourself with harmful words and judgments that are absolutely unfair and unkind, and it doesn't work and it doesn't yield a benefit. And all it does is it continuously gives you a lifelong invisible black eye. Or two. The reality is, Mr. And Ms. Klein, if any of your friends talk to you, if your friends talk to you, like you talk to you in your head, they wouldn't be your friends. You would boot them off to boot them out of the house in a moment. So you, when it comes to you have to say stop, you have to call a ceasefire because you have been in a long term self attack mode and it hasn't gotten you where you want to go. And I just wanna say something, I'm really serious here. I mean this, you have to step up and make a choice. You, you, you have to stop being so mean and nasty. I mean, on the outside, I get it, you're a nice person, but on the inside when it comes to you, you're a meanie. And it doesn't do you or anyone else any good whatsoever. You have kids. Guess what? Who are your kids gonna model off of? You think your kids don't pick up on the subtleties, on the invisibles, on the things that are beneath the surface. That's everything they're picking up on. So if you wanna be a good role model for your kids, just because you're not talking out loud to yourself doesn't mean they can't hear.
So here's the deal, Mr. Ms. Klein, only you can call the ceasefire. You've been punching yourself in the face every day and it just gives you a lot of pain. It drains your energy and it's not working anymore. So I just wanna tell you, calling a ceasefire doesn't mean you are gonna be perfect about it. I don't need you to be perfect 'cause it's not gonna happen. Because creating a peace treaty takes a little bit of work. It takes vigilance, it takes commitment, it takes maturity, it takes daily effort. And that daily effort gets easier and easier as you gain momentum. So you have to make the choice, I'm gonna call this cease fire. I'm gonna wake up because it's almost like this automatic tape that runs in your head. When you get up in the morning, you go right into self attack. When you eat, you're going into self-hate, self attack, food, worry, body worry, weight, worry, it exhausts you.
So that's your job. It's to call a cease fire. And it is to work to create peace every day. Notice your ceasefire. Notice how it's going. So Mr. Ms. Klein, how's all this landing for you?
So you see my friends, this is, this is a way for you from the very beginning. You're letting your client know how you work. You are actually turbocharging the work because some clients, like I say, there's so much noise in your head. I mean, think of people you've met in your life. There's some people you meet and they're clear and you can have a conversation with them. They're present and there's other people you meet and you know, they're stuck in their head. You know, there's a, there's this whole conversation going on, and if you start to talk with them about food, about body, about weight, you could see the pain, you could hear it, you can hear the self attack, you can hear the self rejection. And all of that is oftentimes the tip of an iceberg. So I'm asking you to learn how to better and better by practicing spot the people who are really steeped in self attack.
When you introduce this in a first, second, or third session, you're putting your client on notice. You are setting the tone for the work. You are setting yourself up and your client up for success
no matter what great strategies you do. They might be fast eating, they might have poor macronutrient balance. They might not be attention when, might not be paying attention when they eat. But the bottom line is, if the audio program that's playing in their head of self-rejection and self attack is so loud and so consistent, it's gonna be hard for them to make any forward progress. It really will. And a lot of people just need this. I mean it, this is, um,
in a lot of ways this is just a very authentic way of being with people. You can call this coaching, you can call this counseling, you can call it therapy, you can call it whatever you want. It's being honest with another human being and it's using a conversation that matters. It's using honesty and directness, spoken with love, and spoken with clarity to help people step out of darkness, to help people wake up. 'cause otherwise, your client's gonna stay asleep and you're gonna be banging your head against the wall trying to get them to move forward. Now, I will often have this conversation again with a client in a first session. If I notice they're really gripped in self attack, I will speak from my heart while I am speaking from conviction. At the same time, you know, intellectual interventions are arguably some of the most powerful tools when it comes to the counseling and coaching fields. And they are vastly, I mean this, my friends vastly underrated and underused. And in traditional psychology, they're oftentimes ignored altogether.
And the people that do them are simply the, the therapists and the professionals who are well practiced and they have a lot of experience under their belt and they just understand, they get it.
Intellectual interventions are extremely important in the field that we are working in, in the place that we are trying to help people. You want a quick fix? This is, this is the road to the quick fix. This is, this is the fast road. This is, this is the speedy lane you wanna go in the fast lane. This is it. Intellectual interventions, and in this case an intellectual intervention around calling a ceasefire on self attack.
So you're talking soul to soul with another human being. You're having a conversation that matters. You're speaking from your teacher or your mentor or your spiritual guide archetype. But you're doing it, it firmly
because sometimes you and I, we just need to reach into our client's inner world really to truly assist them. You gotta, you gotta do a little bit of a surgical strike. This is a surgical strike.
This is a preemptive strike because the reality is, until the noise in the mind of a human can be turned down a bit, the voice of wisdom cannot be heard until the noise of unconsciousness and hate and self attack and blame and self judgment. Until that noise is turned down, we cannot find happiness. It is impossible. We think illogically and foolishly, because we have been taught this by the world, that if I turn up the volume loudly enough on self-hate and self attacks, somehow that is gonna make me be a better person. And it's gonna help me not overeat or binge eat or emotionally eat, or it's gonna make my body change. It's gonna somehow make me have a better body image, and it's gonna motivate me to run all over the place and burn calories. So then I will finally burn calories and burn fat. And then people will finally love me because I have figured out a way to hate myself so much that the result will be love.
You hear how crazy that is, right? But your client doesn't know that. They literally don't know that you know it. You are holding wisdom where you sit. So your job is to deliver that wisdom in a clear, firm, loving and powerful way all at the same time. So it lands for your client. Of course, they're not gonna be perfect in this, but you're putting them on notice. You are letting them know, this is the road we're going down.
You are giving them an opportunity to truly help themselves. If they don't wanna go down this road with you
at this time, then what they're saying is, I'm not ready to help myself. That's what they're saying. And that's fine. Some people are not ready to help themselves. If you lost a client, and I've never lost a client around this ever, and like I said, I've done it hundreds of times. Really what the net result is, people can't believe you're saying this to them. People can't believe that. You see how self rejecting and self attacking they are, they thought they were just doing it silently and nobody was noticing. Really, they're living in the confines of their own mind, thinking that they're invisible and, and the noise can only be heard by them.
That's why our job is to listen deeply as you recall. That's why our job is to be quiet,
to hear beneath what our client is saying so we can begin to pick these people out and raise our hands so they can get where they wanna go faster. And where they want to go is to step into their power, is to step into self-love is to step into a happy and satisfying relationship with food. Perhaps they wanna step into their natural way. Okay? This is how you get there. You wanna be your best, most natural self. Then follow the rules that a best and most natural self would need in place in order for the best and most natural self in us to flourish the best and most natural self in us flourishes when it is nourished, when it is fed, when it is receiving love and consciousness and attention.
The best part of us doesn't flourish when we self-attack self-hate, self reject, and constantly have that radio station on. It just doesn't work like that. So you have a powerful tool here, my friend. You have a very, very, very powerful technique, trick, guiding star.
And it makes the work interesting.
You gotta make this work interesting for you. And of course you wanna make the work interesting for your client. This makes it very interesting. This makes it juicy. This lets your client know we are in for a very good ride.
And when I'm saying this, I'm always assuming my client's coming along with me. I never think, oh my God, if I say this, this is gonna go really bad. I, I don't even think that for a moment. I don't allow that kind of reaction just energetically. I'm just like, no, that would be so silly. Why would you, why would you put up an immune response to me delivering such an important piece of information to you, alerting you that you're in a war with yourself that's killing you, that's costing you so much time, energy, life force, and money that's harming you, that's not, not elevating the people around you. And I'm raising my hand and saying, Hey, check it out. You're harming yourself.
That's a big gift you can offer to a client and it turbocharges the work like nothing else.
You know, very closely related to this, my friends, is we are here in part to call our client into consciousness. So I'm always doing this. This is not something I pull outta my pocket every once in a while. It's something, it's, it's always there. Um, and I'm always as waiting for the right opportunities to call my client into consciousness. Consciousness being means being awake. Consciousness means being aware of you and your life. Consciousness means we are here to learn and grow. And life is about learning and growing. So we are looking at life and all the situations it presents to us as learning and growth opportunities. Therefore, we are willing to see ourselves. We are willing to be humble and understand that there are places where we are not fully aware, not fully conscious, not fully mature. Places where we need help, places where we need to do some work on self places where we might have some shortcomings, places where we might even have some character faults that we need to look at. Look back on your life and notice who you were five years ago or 10 years ago, or 20. And notice who you are. Now, notice that there's a part of you that has grown in consciousness.
So stated in a different way. You have to notice when your client is continuously taking the low road, when they're blaming others, when they're judging self or others, or they're sharing about any situation in life where you notice that they're not quite coming from their most mature place. When they're not coming from a place of good character. When they are not stepping into the light, when they're not taking the high road. And let them know you're not smacking them, you're not hurting them, you're not harming them, you're not attacking them, you're not proving them wrong. You're calling them into consciousness.
I'm pointing out to my client in a direct and caring way. I might say something like, wait a second, Mr. And Mrs. Client, you're so much better than that. You really said that to your husband. You really said that to your wife. You should go back and apologize. You're so much better than that. I might say something like, you know, Mr and Ms. Client, there's a place here where I think you really need a course correction. I think there's a place here where you can take a better road. And when I say better road, I really mean higher road. And when I say a higher road, it's also a road that can actually take you where you want to go.
Or you can say something like, you know, Mr. Ms. Klein, I have some advice I want to give you that I think could be really helpful, really helpful. And I'm gonna be your big brother or big sister here for a moment. And just tell it like I see it, because I think you have a great growth opportunity here.
Your job as a coach, your job as a mentor, as a guide, is to call your client into consciousness. You are helping them learn, perhaps one of the most important life tools they will ever have.
I'm suggesting that stepping into greater and greater consciousness, stepping into the light more and more is what helps us become the people we want to be. Personal power. The more you step into consciousness, the more you have an opportunity to step into your greatest metabolic power.
I am constantly noticing my client. I'm constantly monitoring them. I will generally not let my client be slippery for talking about their relationship with their partner, with their kids, with their parents relationships, at work, with friends, their relationship with themselves, their relationship with food, whatever it is. And I see them being asleep. I see them not stepping up. I see them not being mature. I see them taking a low road. I see them being a little bit of a cheat or a liar or lying by omission or being a little bit sneaky or being a little bit slippery.
You bet I'm gonna raise my hand some clients. I'm doing that every session. It's fun.
You know, at the same time, here's another wonderful strategy that I highly recommend you adopt with all your clients, which is to always assume your client's intelligence. Always assume that your client is intelligent enough to follow you and to follow the work. So even though you are more trained than your client in the realm of eating psychology and mind body nutrition, and even though you're the practitioner and they're the client, you must assume your client is intelligent. And because they're seeing you that they have all the wherewithal to hang with you.
You assume your client can hear important truths and distinctions. I assume that I, if I speak an important truth and distinction with clarity, consciousness, and love, that they will hear it. They might not get it in the moment, but they will hear it. It'll be catalogs, it will be noted, and it will be time released at some other point.
I'm assuming that my client is open to what is just and good and can truly be of help to them.
I'm even gonna assume that my client can be a fast learner. Because reality is, people will often surprise us, especially the younger people. I really mean that. Um, and remember, I really want you to get this, that the truth, when you speak it with love and consciousness and clarity, it's always heard. It's always noted. You have had I have had things that people have said to us a long time ago that we heard, we remembered. And then somehow years later, you get it years later, it makes sense.
What a gift that person gave us. They don't even realize it. We didn't realize it at the time. We realize it now. You have that power, you have that ability. That's why you have to trust in the truth. You have to trust in consciousness. You have to trust that when you speak a truth with love, you have delivered value. You have done your job, you have done something good.
You gotta believe, you have to assume your client's intelligence
because then you're creating a container where their intelligence can actually come out. Because for a lot of people, they haven't been held in that way, seen in that way, related to, in that way. For a lot of people, especially early on,
when you speak to your client as if they are intelligent and it's an energy, it's an attitude.
They pick on it, they pick up on it knowingly or unknowingly. They pick up on it, they get it, they feel it, and it creates a sense of safety. It creates a sense of openness. It creates a sense, actually, of excitement for your client.
'cause they're being held in a higher esteem. What a good thing true it is. You're gonna have certain clients that are quicker than others, faster than others, smarter than others, doesn't matter. I don't care. You still assume their intelligence. I'm not comparing one client to another.
I'm assuming that my client, because they're here to see me, that they're able to hang with me. That doesn't mean I'm gonna just say anything I want to anybody at any time. No, we're always looking for the right timing. We're always looking to say things in an appropriate way at the right time. We're always being aware of that. You have to be intelligent in how you deliver, what you deliver and when you deliver it.
But my point is, we are holding our clients in intelligence as if it's front and center. And as if they can grasp and embrace whatever it is we deliver to them that we're truly inspired to deliver to them. Make sense? My friends?
Remember this one. Using your client's experience to prove a point. Mm-Hmm.
You know, this is often the best way to prove a point by using someone's experience. Some examples, Hey, have you ever met someone who has the ideal body and the ideal looks, and they're still unhappy and they're still dissatisfied? Have you known someone like that? That's for the people who are obsessed about losing weight here, there specific amount of pounds. Hey, have you ever met someone, anyone who eats perfect all the time? They never overeat. They never binge eat, they never emotionally eat. Have you truly do? Do you have absolute a hundred percent proof that that person even exists?
See, I say that to a person who's just practicing perfectionism and they freak out every time they, they deviate from their chosen diet or they overeater they binge you. They emotionally. Hey, Mr. And Mr. Client, have you ever had any kind of experience in life where your constant self attack and your self judging thoughts somehow created the ideal and happy outcome that you are trying to achieve? Is that how you would teach a young person to create a successful outcome by just self attacking and self judging yourself so hard that somehow the result is gonna be a happy one and a positive one and a successful one really? Has that ever happened for you?
So I'm always looking, if I'm proving a point, I'm seeing it's, it's a bit of a throwaway line, but it's a very, very useful technique. And it goes along with assuming your client's intelligence. They've been around the world, they've seen a few things. They've been around the corner a few times. Access their experience, access their wisdom, access their intelligence to prove your point that you are clearly seeing is important for them to hear and to know this is a great way to serve your clients.
You know, one of the things you and I have to look out for, and this is I think in our professional world and in our personal world as well, which is to let your client have their experience.
Let your client have their experience. What does that mean? So, you know, this is sort of a heads up because a lot of practitioners, especially new ones,
have a tendency to wanna make things all better For everyone, all better. No more boo boo. We just wanna rescue and save and be the perfect practitioner. So everybody loves us and our clients love us, and everybody lives happily ever after. So, such people like us, maybe, you know, we're, we're, it's, it's being a helper in the true sense of the word. So it's not a bad thing. It means you care. It means you care. 'cause you don't wanna see people in pain and suffering. That's great. However, however, just 'cause you care and just 'cause you think you're coming from a good place doesn't mean it's a good idea. And doesn't mean it's actually yielding a good benefit. That's why I'm raising my hand here and letting you know that this same subgroup of people often believe that it's their job to make people feel better, to take them out of pain and discomfort, to make everything nice. And you have to learn how to let people have their experience before you try to take it away from them. Sometimes your client needs to be in discomfort.
Let it go. Just 'cause they're in discomfort doesn't mean you have to rescue them outta discomfort. The only reason you're trying to rescue your client outta discomfort is because you're uncomfortable with their uncomfortableness. I mean that, I'm not kidding. That's why you do that if you do that. Sometimes my client's angry, sometimes they're upset, sometimes they're confused, sometimes they're uncertain, sometimes they're hurting. And they simply need to be in that experience without us rescuing them in the moment.
Now, it doesn't mean you're gonna let your client live somewhere where they don't need to be living for a really long time in this total confusion.
But before you start to, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let me make it all better. No, don't cry. Don't be upset. Don't be angry. No, somebody's angry. They're angry. If somebody's crying, they're crying. If somebody is confusion, upset, whatever it is, if you are the kind of person that wants to rescue someone out of an uncomfortable emotion, then it's your job to notice that. To see that and to understand that you need to come from a different place, a better place, a higher place, a more mature place. Because your client needs to learn how to regulate their own emotions and their own experience, which means they need to simply be in that experience without us rescuing them in the moment. Sometimes, not all the time. Sometimes we need to witness people as they go through their difficulties rather than try to take away their difficulties, which you can't do anyways. Are you gonna work with them around their difficulties? Are you gonna try to help their difficulty be less difficult? Of course, But I'm saying there's a move that comes before that oftentimes, and the move that comes before that is giving a person space.
Don't be a rescuer. Don't spray your client with pain relieving
whatever before they can actually feel what they're feeling. Go through what they need to go through.
Don't shortchange them in this way.
As I said, this works, I think in the professional realm. It works in the life realm. You know, if you're a parent, your kids are gonna go through pain, they're gonna go through upset, they're gonna go through difficulty. You can't take it away from them.
You have to learn to help them be with their pain and their discomfort and their upset and their anger. Not say, don't be angry, don't be upset. Don't cry. That is the old and outdated way to manage emotional metabolism. Oh, don't bingey, don't overeat. No, that doesn't work. It's a little bit deeper than that. It's more complex than that. So this is you maturing as a client, as a person, and as a professional and allowing your client to mature as a person by you not having a hair trigger response to pull somebody outta their experience so they're not feeling upset, pain, discomfort, anger, jealousy, blame, rage, whatever it is. We've gotta let your client hang there just for a little bit.
Let them stew in their own juices. Let them be in the experience before you do anything to try to take it away from them.
I hope that makes sense for you. Okay? I will often in a conversation with a client, especially when it's the first session, or two or three, doesn't matter when, but I certainly notice this most often in a first session where somebody's gonna say something and I have to put things on hold and then circle back relative to what they just said. So you have to learn to put some certain things on hold and eventually circle back. So here you're in the first session, you're with a client and you notice, wow, there's a very juicy place to work. You know, it's a right place for them. It's a obvious place that might be calling for attention. It's a place that really caught our attention. You know, I'm just, my clients coming to see me for their overeating and their digestive issue. And you know, I just happened to notice that when I was asking about their home life and asking about their partner, my client, his energy changed and I could see his energy drop. And I really noticed, wow, there's something going on in his marriage. But you know, something, he didn't come to see me for his marriage. He came here to see me for his overeating and his digestion. And for me to start talking about his marriage in a first session isn't a good idea for most people. So I'm gonna bookmark it. I'm gonna put that one on hold and I'm gonna circle back at some point when that conversation seems relevant. It's not relevant right now because he's overeating, he has digestive problems. I'm gonna work in the simplest places first. I'm gonna work in the most obvious places first. I'm gonna look in the realm of mindbody, nutrition and nutrition first to help this client. And then if there's still challenge around overeating and digestion, yeah, I might look to the places in life where my client is in stress, and clearly it looks like it's around relationships. So that might be the time to circle back after we've tried these other strategies and we've built up momentum and we've built up a sense of trust and connection. You see what I'm saying? My friends just 'cause you see something, just 'cause you notice something that, you know, this big intuitive light goes off in your head. Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. This is important. It doesn't mean it's important right now because sometimes your client just ain't ready. The relationship is not ready for certain insights or certain conversations. More trust, more familiarity needs to be built. So it's fine to simply notice these, put things on hold and circle back at a future time when your intuition and your smarts tell you now's the time.
So in other words, my friends, patience, insight, be willing to wait, be willing to wait for the right moment. Timing is everything You've been learning that you've been getting that so far in this training. You're starting, I, I'm, I'm really giving you my best insights, opinions, experiences on how to build a relationship with your client that is successful so that the relationship has roots. And I, I don't wanna see clients for one or two sessions. That's not my thing. I don't like that. I like to be with clients for, you know, at least three or four months for most clients. Now, occasionally, will you get someone who is just truly meant to be a short termer? Yeah, I've had those for sure. You've heard me speak about one in our conversations around binge eating the dentist who really, who truly needed one session. That, for me is the exception and not the rule. So the point is, I am giving you my best insights on how to build relationship with your client and build a foundation of success for the complaint they're trying to see you. They've come to see you for. So we have to learn about the timing of what we share, what we bring up with a client. So you're always gonna start with the easy, obvious places first. You're not gonna start with the more deeper aspects of a person's life. At the end of a first session, I'm gonna say generally speaking, hardly ever. Now that's gonna differ for some of you who are already in practice. You have a certain kind of momentum, you attract a certain kind of people that might be different. But if you're just starting out in this work, then please know that you don't start out with the heavy duty stuff first. I, I think that's, I think you get that, that's intuitively correct.
Okay, here's something I love to do with clients, which is to invoke my client's spirituality and or religion. So at some point, I usually know this at least by the second session, at some point, find out your client's religion or their spiritual leanings, whatever it may be. I'm always encouraging you to feel free to be curious here and to really learn about this part of their life while directly or energetically, you gotta let them know you're not judging them or pigeonholing them once they share about their spiritual life. If they say to me, I'm a orthodox Jew, I'm a fundamentalist Christian, I'm a Buddhist, I'm a nudist, whatever it is. Like, great. Wow, cool. Um, what's that like for you? Are you, are you, do you, do you go to church regularly? Temple regularly? Like, like I'm, I'm just interested in, in, in people's, you know, spiritual and religious bent. Like how is it a part of your life? How does it show up for you? So I'm just being fascinated by the topic and I wanna learn more about my client in this realm. And if this is true for you, then learn about it. Because what I'm trying to tell you is straight up it's gonna, the more you know about your client, the more effective you're gonna be. The more you can have this tool in your pocket, what's the tool to be able to pull out the spirituality and religion card to have an understanding of your client's spiritual and religious leanings. So when appropriate, when useful, when helpful, when right. You reference that, you bring it to the table in service to help them get where they want to go.
So I'm gonna notice whatever the opportunity might be to call upon my clients spiritual or religious beliefs in a place oftentimes where they're not practicing what they preach or practicing what they say they believe in. You know, I've had clients who are, um, very, very, very deep faith-based Christians. And when I hear them beating up on themselves,
I might come back with, Hey, you know, I noticed you're really beating up on yourself right now. What would Jesus do? What would Jesus say to you right now? Would he be beating up on you? That's all you gotta say. People get it. That is useful to someone that is helpful to someone that's helpful for me, that's helpful for my client client. They know exactly what I'm saying. I don't, it's, it's, that's all I have to say to that person. They get it right away.
There's no argument, okay? If somebody's more accustomed to the word God, is that how God wants you to go about treating yourself? Do you think that's, that's what God is asking you? Do you think that's God's plan for you? Just treat yourself like that.
If I know my client is someone who prays,
isn't that a good opportunity for you, Mr. And Mrs. Client, to go pray instead of judging yourself like that or speaking unkindly to yourself?
I might say to a client, you know, if one of God's special angels was whispering in your ear right now, right now, what would they be saying to you?
I'll say that in a session to a person that I know, like that's their language.
If they're stuck, if they're feeling sorry for themselves, if they're in all kinds of confusion, and if I want to help them resource
themselves and resource their own resource that they told me is a powerful resource to them, then I wanna help my client better resource their resources because then I'm doing a fabulous service. Then I am truly giving value. I hope you can see that you don't have to believe in your client's religion.
What I will tell you is I always believe in my client's belief in their religion.
I believe in their belief in it. I believe if somebody is dedicated to it, committed to it, inspired by it, if they draw from it, I believe that. And I think to myself, good for you. I don't have to believe exactly how my client believes why it's not necessary in this realm.
What I do need to do is to understand my client, to be sensitive to them because I'm interested in people's relationship with a greater power. I ask 'em about it. I'm also more concerned, truth be told, with helping my client because that's what they're paying me to do. So the more I know about the key domains of my client's life, religion, and spirituality being one of them, the more I can help people plain and simple. I have done so much good work with clients as I am invoking their religion and spirituality and reminding them to call upon it.
I've had clients over the years who were steeped in a very disordered relationship with food and steeped in a very disordered and harmful relationship with their body, and they're deeply religious. And the focus of the work became,
how can you really step into your relationship with God in a way that really helps you in this realm? What do you have to do? Because this isn't, this isn't just about you and food. This isn't just about you and your body. This is about you and your relationship with God is what I will say to those clients who have a relationship with God because they didn't think about bringing God into this particular aspect of their life. Because that's what we do. We forget. We forget to practice our religion or our spiritual understandings in the places where we have the most difficulty. It's as simple as that. So you're here to remind your client. You're not playing with them. You are supporting them in who they say they are and what they believe. That's a beautiful thing to do.
It's a great way to practice loving people, supporting people unconditionally accepting people,
even though their religion might not be yours, or their terminology or their languaging around what they believe might not be yours. It doesn't matter. It really doesn't.
So for me as a practitioner, I've asked myself over the years to grow bigger than my need to have people believe what I believe and, oh God, no, you can't talk about this topic with people. Of course, you can talk, you, you could talk about this topic with people all day. If they want to talk about it, they don't want to talk about it. They don't want to talk about it. It's really not a big deal. And it's wonderful when you understand your client and when your client understands that you understand
the importance of their religion, their faith, how they relate to God in their life, or a higher power, whatever terminology they use, when they get that, you are in their court around that. Even if you are not going to the same church, temple, whatever, you're really serving your client,
my friends, I always want you to be willing to give your strong opinion and or advice. Be willing to give your strong opinion and or advice. Now, this might be a little tricky,
but here's what I wanna say about it. Sometimes, sometimes as a practitioner, you're gonna have some strong feelings come up. You're gonna have some strong opinions and some strong ideas that just really pop for you. I could be in a session, I could be just very cool and calm and collected, and things are just cruising along and whatever my client brings up, boom. All of a sudden, wow, I got a real strong feeling about that. I got a strong opinion. I have a strong idea. So the first thing I do is I notice them when they come up. I consider it. I don't blurb it out right away. I see and ask, am I being a good clear channel here? Is this strong feeling and strong opinion? Is that just my own personal reaction and my own stuff and it actually isn't very useful and evolved?
Or is this something that is actually more wise and more useful and important? And my client needs to hear this.
So your strong opinion and strong feeling about something, it might be right on, or it might be something that ah, best not to share because it's just your strong opinion and you got your buttons pushed by something your client said about whatever. Um, so I want you to have that willingness. I want you to check in with yourself. And if so, if you're getting a message, wow, my client really needs to hear this, then I want you to feel free to give your strong opinion from a place of strength without overpowering your client and without making it about you. You know, Mr. And Mr. Client, I, I have to say this, there's something I feel, I feel pretty strong and clear about that I wanna share with you here.
And then you deliver it. So you're letting them know, I feel pretty strong and clear about what I wanna share with you. I have a very strong opinion here, Mr. And Mrs. Client. It might be the way that they're somebody that they're in relationship with at work, at home is talking to them.
You know, he, he, here's a typical example of where I might have a strong feeling or opinion. If I hear, and my client is telling me that they're getting walked all over. And indeed, if they're the kind of person that tends to be a little bit of a psychological doormat for others, some people are like that. They tend to be the kind of people. They're nice guys. They're nice girls. They get walked all over. Now my clients telling me a story where I'm going, oh my God, you've just been walked all over and you don't realize it. Yeah, I'm gonna get a little angry on behalf of my client if I feel like there's an injustice that's been done to them that they're not quite getting. You know, Mr. And Mr. Client, I got a really strong opinion here. I just have to share this with you. The way that person talked to you. That's not right. That's not okay. I'm really angry right now, but I'm angry for you. If I was there, I would've been really angry. So I'm just raising my hand over here and saying, can, can you see? Would you agree that that's not acceptable? Lemme see what your client has to say. So I'm giving an opinion, but in the bigger sense of the word, I'm helping my client with their highest goal. And their highest goal is to help them become the person that they are truly meant to be in this world. They're fully expressed, empowered self. And if I see my client is getting walked all over and that's part of their journey and their growth process, then I'm gonna raise my hand and let them know, because that's an important place for them. Because guess what? If you're the kind of person that gets walked all over, you will feel that in some way, shape, or form. If you don't feel it in a moment, if you're not able to empower yourself, if you're not able to manage that experience and draw boundaries, say a no, put up an immune screen, then the result can be unwanted symptom or unwanted behavior. What do I mean? Unwanted behavior, overeating, binge eating, emotional eating, unwanted symptom fatigue, moodiness, digestive issues. Why? Because you're carrying around an unprocessed stress.
So my friends, you're checking in when you have a strong opinion, you're checking in with yourself first to see, am I being a clear channel here? And if so, share it without making it about you.
Yes, you're making it about you. You know, I have a pretty strong opinion here. Okay, I made it about me. I'm letting my client know. Yeah, if you're picking up that this is a strong opinion, it 'cause it is. And now I say, and here's what it is. And it's about them and their life and their experience and their world. Okay? Here's something I feel pretty strong about, has that opinion, which is for you and I to encourage conscious community for our client.
You know, our clients often need to be around people who can uplift them, inspire them, and help them be better people. Plain and simple. Not all of us have that. Not all of us have enough of that. Our clients come to see us. They have challenges, they have issues that they are dealing with. I wanna make sure my client has all the resource they need to get where they want to go. And I don't mean just to lose 27 pounds.
Who is my client? Who wants to lose weight? Who do they hang out with? Who do they socialize with? Who do they spend their time with? If you want to get a sense of who somebody is, look at who they hang out with.
So our clients often need to be around people who can
lead them down a better road, be more inspirational for them, be the kind of social system conscious community who, who's just more uplifting than not. So when I say conscious community, I mean people who are like-minded, like-hearted, like soul on your same soul plane, your same soul family on a similar path or journey. People who support us in where we are headed.
Plain and simple. People who have that as part of their nature. Yes, I'm a supported person, yes, I wanna see you be your best. I'm not in competition with you. I'm not trying to pull you down. I'm not gossiping behind your back. I'm not heating on you while I'm busy smiling at you. So your client needs more than just you.
You need oftentimes more than just you to help your client.
So again, sometimes our clients need to let go of certain friends, certain relationships that no longer are enhancing their journey.
I'm always going to encourage my client to find and create some kind of support group, classes, meetings, whatever it is that inspires my client. Lights them up. It doesn't have to be something indirect relationship to their challenge, like a support group for people wanting to lose weight. No, but it might be, you know, a group for women who get together to empower each other around business, a network, and just be around people who are just wanting to uplift each other and see each other be successful. If that's something that's relevant for your client, it might be something that's more creative. It might be something that's more spiritual, religious, church groups, anything. I don't care. Talk to your client. What, what's, what's available to you, Mr. And Mr. A client? You, you need to find out about their social world.
Who are they hanging out with? Do they have conscious community? It's, it's, this has been, you know, I I, I personally feel pretty lucky because I've had this all my life. I've always created a community, a group of people around me, even if it's just a few friends who are people who can uplift me and I can uplift them. Mutual support, mutual benefit.
It's a powerful tool to help you be more effective with your client.
A lot of people are not tapping into their resources. Bottom line. Okay, next, this is a tricky one. Assume young people don't have a problem. So this is for those of you who are now seeing younger people. Now this training is not about working with people 15 and under. I just wanna let you know that everything that I'm telling you is applicable for late teens and older 17 and up is what I'm going to guesstimate. However, some of you are the kind of professionals that are already seeing younger people, or you're the kind of people who have young people in your life, or you might find yourself mentoring younger people at some point. So I want you to assume that young people don't quite have a problem in the way we usually think they do.
So I'm speaking right now for clients about 15 and under. It's not that they have a problem, it's that their parents have something to deal with and society has something to deal with. Why? Because if you're 15 and under, I'm sorry, you're a product of your world for the most part. Do you come in with certain karma, certain attributes? Probably. I believe we do. And we grow up in an environment. We grow up in the world, we grow up in a family environment. So when I'm dealing with a person 15 and under, I'm not, and they're, and and they're 50 pounds overweight. There's kids 15 and 15 and under who are hundreds of pounds overweight. We won't talk about that group right now. But if they're overeating, if they're binge eating, if they have terrible body image, I don't sit there thinking, oh my, you poor young person. You have this problem that you have. No, the world has this problem and it landed in this person. It's a problem with the world. Am I blaming right now? No. I don't have an ounce of blame in me. I'm just telling it like it is. A young person wouldn't have the problems they do if they didn't grow up in a world that had problems. So I'm never focused too hard on fixing young people. Oh my God, I have to take this problem away. You're not gonna take away their problem. Doesn't tend to happen like that when it comes to an eating issue. Health issue is different when it comes to an eating issue. O reading, binge eating, emotional eating. For those of you working in the eating disorder realm in the weight realm, I don't focus that hard on making sure my young person never has this issue again. That's actually not the main part of my focus.
I'm always gonna let my young person know that they're dealing with, you know, the reason why you have this challenge is because you live in a difficult to navigate world and it makes perfect sense that you have this challenge that you have. It makes perfect sense to me. You're over reading. It makes perfect sense to me. You, Benji, it makes perfect sense to me that you carry around extra weight because we live in a pretty crazy world. Adults don't always know what they're doing. We haven't created a safe environment. We war on each other. There are people living in poverty. There's a lot of craziness that goes on.
So you're not the only person who has this problem. And the problem actually doesn't belong to you. It's, it's living in you. But this problem existed long before you showed up. And it'll be around long after you're gone.
I'll say that to a 13-year-old. They get it.
I believe that we cannot legitimate legitimately help a young person if we think they have an issue, period.
They're the product of upbringing and environment. Trying to fix them is kind of a further affront to their soul. It's it's an insult. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. They hold the issues that they hold, it's living in them and ultimately they're gonna have to be responsible for it. But right now, because they are young, they cannot truly be responsible in the same way that an adult can be responsible. So you are the adult talking to them.
All I'm saying is you gotta be careful. You're not exclusively focusing on them. So with young clients, you have to be their advocate. You have to be their ally 100% and let them know that their problem actually started in the world, not in them. Um, you know, I'm gonna talk a little bit more about working with young people towards the end of this training, but I just wanted to introduce this concept now because I believe it is extremely important. 'cause I am, you know, I I just see far too many parents proclaiming that their kid has an issue and sending their kid to this therapy, that therapy, this weight loss cam, that program, because my kid has a problem and no, always work, work with the parents first. That's where I'm gonna find all the solutions. That's where I'm gonna find a lot of great places to work for sure. Okay, for women 40 and over, here's your strategy. You gotta queen them for women 40 and over. Make sure you queen them if that's what they need. If they aren't on the queen program, meaning if they're stuck in the non age appropriate archetype, the princess, then you could forget about truly and sustainably helping them with their concerns around food or body. I mean that you cannot have a woman 40 and up who is still in princess archetype and you can't work on her food and body issues and expect to see good success unless you help that woman step into her age appropriate archetype. Unless she steps into her queen, unless she gets on the queen program. We have to have to have to, no exceptions be in alignment with the life stage that we're actually in. Otherwise. Symptom and unwanted health complaints and unwanted behaviors around food
are predictable, particularly for women. Humans can commonly get locked into an early archetypal stage. You know, this princess or prince.
And the good news is, we can turn this around very quickly. You, your client can turn this around very, very quickly. That's the good news. People can turn it around. They, they can literally begin to turn it around in a significant way in one conversation.
So you have to understand that if you are dealing with an adult woman, 40 and over, 40 to 50 is queen in training, 50 and over is queen, it is time to be on the queen program. If you're between 40 and 50, it is time to absolutely queen yourself if you're 50 and over. If you want to get where you want to go with your body image, with your unhappiness around food, around weight, around emotional eating, any of it related to unwanted food behaviors, this is it. This is a foundational piece. Gotta go there at some point. Not saying you have to do this in the first session. Remember, you gotta build up to this one a little bit. You have to have the trust of your client. You have to have some kind of foundation to truly begin this conversation. For most people, that can happen as early as the third or fourth session easily.
Likewise, for men, 40 or over, you got a kingdom. Far too many men have a challenge in this day and age, making the full transition from prince to king. Why? Because the world, our culture simply doesn't support or encourage this natural progression and development. Same for Princess to Queen. The world ain't supporting it. Quite the opposite. I do wanna say that I believe that men have a different and often less obvious set of challenges, um, when it comes to making this transition. So as always, by stepping into our age appropriate archetype, only good things can happen. If I notice my man 40 to 50 is still living in prince mode
and not taking the high road and not having a higher sense of purpose, not taking good care of his kingdom, not coming from a place of character, still trying to have the most toys or to conquer or to take advantage,
I'm going to raise my hand.
I'm going to explain the concept of Prince and king because I cannot help my male client with their eating challenges, their health challenges, their weight challenge if they're of king in training or king age, and they're firmly steeped in a prince archetype.
So in part, we are here to help call our client into their age appropriate archetype.
Next, my friends, here's another important one. I want you to always, I've never quite said this to you, I want you to always defocus on food amount and appetite.
Always defocus on food amount and appetite. What do I mean? The majority of people when it comes to weight, the majority of people, when it comes to my eating, when it comes to my overeating, my binge eating, my emotional eating, when it comes to wanting to have the body that they want to have, when it comes to body image stuff, what are people doing? They're conditioned to, to think they're eating concerns center around appetite as the enemy and food as the enemy. But more specifically, the amount of food is the enemy. Most people are freaking out internally around food amount. How much did I eat? And their appetite. Oh my god, hunger bad. So this actually never takes us where we want to go. Straight up. It's a profound mistake. It's a toxic belief. It's an absolute waste of life energy for somebody who's dealing with binge eating, emotional eating, overeating, weight and body image to focus on food amount and appetite is just, is just looking for the solution to the problem where it doesn't exist. It's 20,000 miles away from where you're looking. This approach has gotten us nowhere. Zero.
Your client's fears around these are completely unwarranted. Your job is to never buy into their anxiety
because food amount is not the problem. My out of control appetite is not the problem.
As you have learned food amount, the amount of food a person eats, the appetite regulation a person has is all about eating speed. It's all about stress. State eating, it's all about relaxation. State eating, it has to do with bio circadian, nutrition, meal timing. It's deeply connected to macronutrient balance. It's connected to pleasure. It's connected to how we nourish ourself. It's connected to our awareness of the meal, the cephalic phase, digestive response, taste, pleasure, aroma satisfaction, your visuals of a meal. If you don't get that, you're going to be physiologically driven to eat more. Then you're gonna go, oh my God, I'm eating more. I have to cut down. No, it's the cutting down has nothing to do with it. You have to be more present.
Food quality will impact how much we eat and will impact our appetite. You could have the biggest amount of willpower in the world and if you're continuously eating a typical standard junk food diet, you're gonna want to eat more and your appetite's gonna be bigger. Why? Because junk food is designed to do that to you. Our toxic nutritional beliefs are driving how much we eat and drive our appetite. What do I mean? Or any toxic nutritional belief is gonna put you into a stress response. Stress response will deregulate appetite.
Our toxic nutritional beliefs will lead us to have certain kinds of behaviors. Oh my god, food is the enemy better not eat better. Skip meals. Okay, great. You skipped a meal you didn't eat, and then three o'clock you're binging and then you hate yourself. It's not about food amount, it's not about your appetite, it's about your toxic belief. So what I'm saying is I don't, I I I, I hear my client, of course I'm gonna ask, and I'm doing a dietary intake. I ask about food amounts and yes, I wanna learn, is my clients starving throughout the day? Are they coming to meals ravenous? Because that's gonna tell me that they're underfeeding themselves or their macronutrient balance is off or their food quality is off, or they're eating far too fast, or a combination of some or all of those.
But you, the practitioner, you're never gonna go, oh my God, yeah, you do have a problem. You are eating too much. We have to make sure you don't eat too much.
Are you seeing my friends? Do you really get how this has nothing to do with a person eating too much? Eating too much is a symptom
of all these other aspects. Eating too much might mean I'm trying to regulate my emotional metabolism because I got all kinds of stressors going on because this is going on at home with the wife, with the husband, with the kids, with the house, with the mortgage. Yeah, I get it. That happens. So then we learn to work with that stress better. We learn to regulate that better, as opposed to, oh my God, let me control my food amount. No, because you're attacking the problem where, where it absolutely doesn't exist. So for me, the practitioner, I I just hear the food amounts. I hear the conversation about appetite. I never go there.
And if my, and if my clo well, don't we need to work on this? Well, yeah, we're gonna work on this, but we're gonna work on this in a way that actually works. If it's a first session, I'm gonna tell my client we're gonna work and see. We're gonna look and see what is affecting you eating more food than you want to. What is making your appetite feel like it's out of control to you? 'cause it's not what you think. So yeah, we're gonna look at things like eating speed. 'cause that'll affect how much you eat in your appetite. Wanna look at things. Are you in a sympathetic state, sympathetic nervous system, dominance when you eat or parasympathetic dominance, when you eat stress versus relaxed eating. We're gonna look at your macronutrient balance. We're gonna look and see about how the metabolic power of pleasure might or might not be impacting you. We're gonna look and see what your awareness is around a meal, because if we're not fulfilling the cephalic phase digestive response, then you will naturally be driven to eat more. The quality of our diet can drive us to eat more. The beliefs that we're walking around with in our minds can drive us to eat more. So that's what we're gonna look at.
So my friends, this is not something you're gonna be talking about with, okay, Mr. Mr. Klein. We're gonna spend the next three session figuring out how you can eat less food by tying your hands behind your back and having a fork that shocks you with electric shocks. I don't know, nonsense. Um, okay, next, my friends. Here's a question I'm often asking myself. Um, it happens, it happens to me lots of times. I feel uncertain in a session and I'm unsure where to go next. A lot of times I'm just not sure what, what, what, what, what I wanna do next. I'm not quite getting it. So I ask the question, what wants to happen here? What wants to happen in this moment right now? What wants to happen next?
This is a question that I'm calling a powerful question. I ask it of the universe to myself on behalf of my client. What wants to happen next? I'm asking this question silently to myself. I'm holding that question while I relax, while I keep doing my best, while I'm still working and talking and listening with my client. And I await some answer and I await some insight.
Sometimes there are certain clients who, who tend to be a little more challenging for me. And I might even ask before they walk into a session, huh? Just what wants to happen in this session.
It's a wondering when you introduce a wondering into the invisible atmosphere, it is heard in my belief system. So this is all about you, the practitioner, once again, partnering with an invisible intelligence and learning to relax in the face of uncertainty and having a, something, a tool, a trick to help you while you're in uncertainty, which is to ask a question. Okay, what wants to happen here? My client's been talking a lot. Wow. He has a lot of challenges. She has a lot of problems, a lot of symptoms. God, what wants to happen next here?
Things reveal themselves. It's you learning how to regulate your emotional metabolism. It's you learning how to conduct a session. You know, there's plenty of sessions where I just feel, man, God, I know what I'm doing. Uh, I'm feeling really confident. And there's times when I just don't know. I don't know what's happening next. So I ask, okay, what wants to happen here? I very simple next. My friends working with complaints. Here's an assumption. Humans often complain. We do. We complain. And that seems normal and fine. And it's 'cause there's, trust me, there's all kinds of things to complain about. Actually, you don't have to trust me on that. You know, there's things to complain about. Now with clients. With clients, their strong, consistent, outstanding complaints often show us the places where they are restricted, blocked in reaction and not evolving.
Constant, I'm talking about constant complaint, often results in the flow of personal growth and our metabolic potential being obstructed.
So my saying complaint is bad, no. Am I saying all complaints impact us in this way? No. What I am saying is that you, the practitioner, when you're with a client and you start to notice, there are certain clients who have certain strong, consistent, outstanding complaints that are often just, they show up, they show up. My client's constantly bringing it up, and they're, they're whining, b******g, moaning, complaining. And I notice it keeps rearing itself. These often, not always, but often show us places where they're restricted, they're blocked, they're in reaction, they're not involving. It shows us that there's energy there, whereas the energy, it's in a client's complaint. Constant complaint often results in obstructing us when it comes to our own personal development. And it's a stressor. And it'll impact us from a, from a metabolic perspective in the way that stress does. So, think of any strong complaints you've heard from your clients around family, money, my boss, my body, my husband, my kids, my wife, my neighbor. That is an indicator that work is wanting to be done in that area. So I'm gonna look to massage the complaint. I'm gonna explore with my client, Hey, Mr. Mr. Client, I notice you keep having the same complaint about your boss. Can, can we just talk about that more? Like where is that going? What, what do you see happening? What do you think we need to do about that? What do you think you need to do about that?
As you explore and massage a complaint, you begin to liberate a little bit of energy. Because oftentimes behind every complaint there's an unfulfilled desire. So yeah, I'm constantly complaining about my boss, complaining about my boss. What's the unfulfilled desire? I want to have better relationships at work. I want to feel empowered at work. Great. I want you to feel empowered at work too. Mr. And Mrs. Client, we have to start to see, okay, what are the practical steps that you could feel more empowered in relationship with your boss? You know why? 'cause you gotta deal with your boss five and a half days a week. That stress and that relationship because you don't feel empowered and you have all these complaints about your boss is really disempowering you. And here you are complaining about emotional eating, which I totally understand. And we humans, we're pretty smart when we emotionally eat. We're doing that for a very brilliant reason because it's helping us regulate uncomfortable emotions oftentimes.
So instead of trying to make yourself stop eating emotionally, which is impossible, you go to the root, which is, wait a second, what is the emotion? I need to learn how to metabolize better? What is the lesson I need to learn? I need to learn how to empower myself at work. I need to learn how to have an honest conversation with my boss. I need to learn how to, how to manage that relationship better.
So there's the work, that's where the action is because oftentimes that's what's connected and driving or helping instigate our unwanted eating challenge in the first place.
So you're gonna help your client discover the desire that's masked by the complaint.
Does that make sense? If my client is complaining, yeah, my partner, he's just shut down. He doesn't talk, he's, he's not communicative. We can't have conversations like this one. Okay, well what would be the desire there? What's like, if you could just write the story the way you wanna write it, what would that relationship look like? So then you hear what the desire is. I wanna partner who's emotionally more intelligent, more mature, more sensitive. Got it. And then I'm gonna look for ways, you know, are there openings there? When have you had that kind of good conversation with your partner? What were the circumstances? What was the topic? Has there ever been any breakthrough? What do you notice in the past? Helps your partner move to that place more? Now, if we can't come up with anything that my client can do to uh, massage the situation, tweak it a bit, see if they can do something that can change the energy or help the other person shift, then I need to help my client learn how to better be with what is. And can you accept that this is who you're married to? Because it sounds Like, like if he's not gonna change, then you could either still keep complaining or figure out a way to accept this is who I'm dealing with or explore other options here. So it's just being real and sometimes being real with your client. It doesn't mean you're gonna figure out brilliant solutions, but you're being real and your client is being real. And you're talking about real things. And you're talking about real things in a way that matters and you're grappling with it and your client's grappling with it. And perhaps we make the connections and we notice and we see where your client's eating issues or their concerns are connected to this very complaint.
You know, I do want to give a heads up because sometimes the opposite is true. A client is withholding a complaint. How you doing Mr And Ms Client? Ah, I can't complain. Usually when somebody says that they've got some complaints, um, sometimes a client is withholding a complaint. Some people do that, they just can't get it out. They can't say it, they don't. They're good boys, they're good girls. They don't wanna complain about something or they're afraid to complain about something. That by itself will obstruct energy. Sometimes the complaint needs to come out, it's fine. Sometimes our complaints need to be heard by our partners, our kids, our coworkers, our bosses, our significant other, whoever it is. A complaint in by itself is, there's nothing wrong with it. Complaint is a complaint is a complaint. It's fine.
What do we need to do with it? Does it need to come out? Does it need to be massaged? Does it need to be worked with? That's there's your job, okay? Don't forget to do this simple counseling coaching, simple counseling coaching tool that makes the work stronger, makes the work better, and it helps ensure that our client knows we are actually listening and truly on board with them. So this is a counseling and coaching technique 1 0 1. When I say 1 0 1, that's not an insult. It means we always wanna be able to do the 1 0 1 kinds of stuff. They're fundamental, they're foundational. And in this case, I'm talking about regularly or as needed, identify and confirm the obvious, identify and confirm the obvious. At various times in any session, I will likely sprinkle in comments, sprinkle once, twice, I will likely sprinkle in comments such as, wow, I get it. You're really upset about that. After my client is just talking about something that they're really upset about. What do you say when they just finish their story about what they're really upset? I'll say, wow, I get it. You're really upset about that. I'm letting them know I hear you. I get it and I'm feeling you. You are really upset about that. I am acknowledging what they just told me. Or they tell me a story. I might go, wow, I would feel the same way if that happened to me. They're feeling fill in the blank. They tell me a story. My client's feeling guilty or they're feeling embarrassed or they're feeling enraged because of the story they just told me. Wow, you know something, I feel the same way. If that just happened to me, you're just confirming the obvious. You are letting them know, I get you. I see you, I hear you. They just explain a conundrum. I might say, wow, you really are in a pretty difficult situation. Just because my client explains a conundrum to me doesn't mean it's my job to get them out of the conundrum. Rookie mistake. Wow, Mr. And Mr. Client, you're really in a pretty difficult situation there. I've been in a few myself. That one's right up there.
Another way to be in alignment with your client to I to confirm the obvious. Wow. You know, something that makes total sense to me. Whatever my client just said, whatever observation they made, if it really makes sense to me, I'll say, you know, that makes total sense to me.
Or I think just about anyone would be upset if that happened to them.
'cause sometimes people are a little bit apologizing for how they feel about something.
And if they're the kind of apologist that doesn't need to apologize for how they feel about something, you know, Mr. And Ms. Klein, I think just about anyone would be upset about that, angry about that, sad about that, depressed about that.
You're creating connection. You're letting your client know, I see you. I hear you, I get you. It's that simple. Okay, let's close out with a couple of pieces around men and women, given the feminine archetype, women and praise. I just want to say in general. In general, not for every single woman on the planet, but in general, praise works big time for women clients. So please give it gen generously to your women clients, especially give it to your princess clients. But honestly, uh, in general, you have to be generous in giving praise to the feminine archetype, especially to the women. You look so much happier, you have such a glow, you know something, you don't realize how fast you're actually progressing. This happens a lot for people. They, they really feel like they're not getting where they want to go and they're actually moving as fast as they can miss client. You really don't realize how fast you're actually progressing. It's pretty impressive. Wow, you're really courageous. Wow, I really respect how you're doing this work. I am really impressed with all of your efforts. You have really stepped up. I really admire that. You know something, miss client, given what you've been through, I really think you've done pretty amazing.
That's what I'll say in a first session. And my client, they're sharing about their history and they tell me some often story, some, some terrible, awful story I might say, you know, given what you've been through, given that you're sitting here right now, I just have to assume that you've done pretty amazing. It's amazing. You're still here for a lot of people. That's actually true, my friends. So give praise generously. And for the men, men in challenge, challenge for the masculine archetype, not all men in general, general statement challenge works well for men. Give that generously. So for my male client, I'm talking about Prince age, I'm talking about King Age. I know you can do better than that.
This is your chance to step up and rise to the occasion. Come on. Really, you can't give up that easily. You are so much better than that, don't you think? So these are all ways, loving ways to challenge the masculine. You know something, Mr. Klein, I really would like to see you handle this in a whole new way. You know something Mr. Klein. It's time to step into your power here. And quite frankly, only you can make that happen.
So those are just little examples of how you can use language to introduce challenge to the male archetype. And sometimes your challenges are gonna be very, very specific. So these are all just sort of the lead ins in general. But what I'm asking you to do is to catch this, to catch that for a client who is in a male body who expresses the male archetype challenge is potent. It's great medicine, it works. Praise for women. It's potent, it's great medicine. It works. And always my friends, please remember, remember, remember to believe in a higher wisdom. Trust that your client is with you for a good reason.
Trust in the wisdom of life. Trust in the wisdom of the universe. Trust in the wisdom of your journey, of their journey, of the journey that you're on together. There's an unseen guiding hand, uh, that I believe operates in this. It is your job to gather evidence and to prove that or disprove it for yourself. But I'm saying I think it really works. I think it happens. And when we're aware of this, when we embrace it, it infuses the work we do. Even more. So My my friends, I hope this conversation was helpful for you. We have lots of new material coming around the corner on the other side. I can't wait. Thank you. Thank you so much, and I'm gonna see you on the other side. This is the end of Counselor Tools and Guiding Stars.

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