Wanna know how you can become your VERY BEST SELF🥇? It’s not just what you’re doing, but who you’re spending time with and how you’re celebrating your SUCCESS that makes all the difference!
In today’s episode of the Fitness Matters podcast, we’re chatting about the process of NORMALIZING SUCCESS – why it matters, how to do it, and who it affects (because it’s not just about you!) – on your way to living the life of your dreams.
Wanna know more? Tune in now, and let’s GO!
Invite💌 your friends to their own SUCCESS by SHARING this podcast! 💛
Normalizing SUCCESS (Full Transcript)
You’re listening to The Fitness Matters Podcast with Pahla B. And this is episode number 233: “Normalizing Success.”
Welcome to The Fitness Matters Podcast where every week we talk about the fitness matters that matter to you. I’m Pahla B, YouTuber, certified life and weight loss coach, soon to be author and your best middle-aged fitness friend. Are you ready to talk about the fitness mindset that matters to you? Me too. Let’s go.
Hello, hello, hello my friends [singing]. Yes, of course. I’m singing. Obviously. What else do we do around here except sing? Oh my gosh. We talk about the fitness matters that matter to you. We talk about your mindset because it matters. We talk about normalizing success. I am so excited about this topic, as I always am. I realize that I say that kind of all the time. I say it about every topic. I say it at the beginning of every workout. This is me. I’m excited. I’m an excited person. And you hanging out with me and my excitement normalizes excitement for you. Let me talk about, well, normalizing things. I know that you know this concept. When I decided to make a podcast about this, I knew that this isn’t something new or groundbreaking. This isn’t something that you’ve maybe never heard of before. But I want to approach this in a way that helps you not just understand the concept, but really think about who you are, and where you are, and what you are doing to normalize success for other people.
That was a spoiler alert, by the way. But anyway, normalizing. I know you’ve heard the expression that you are the sum of the five people that you hang out with. It’s kind of a funny thing to think about. And I know that sometimes the thrust of that is that therefore you should be really careful who you hang out with, that you should really look around and see whether or not the people that you are friends with are taking you where you want to go. And I actually want to come at this from a little bit of a different angle. But also I wanted to talk to you about, well, of course, I wanted to talk to you about why – why we do this. And I was thinking about how actually wonderful it is that our brains do this. Our brains developed millions of years ago when we were cave people, way, way, way back in the day to normalize things so that we could survive.
This is a survival mechanism, as pretty much everything is. Everything that your brain does automatically, it almost always comes back to your biological imperatives of staying alive at all costs, staying the same as much as possible and making adaptations when necessary. And this was absolutely a survival mechanism. You are born with the ability truly to become anything. And just to be super clear, I don’t automatically subscribe to the blank slate theory of your brain. Nor do I actually subscribe to the theory that there are certain attributes that we are 100% born with that you have to portray in your life. I have kind of an open mind about this, partly because it hasn’t been proven one way or the other, and partly because both of them make sense in their own way. And therefore, I like to take bits and pieces of the things that make sense to me and pretend like that’s 100% true because that’s just the easiest way to have a thinking model about the world.
So here is my truth: that we have the ability when we are born to take in and perceive everything that is going on around us and then make meaning of that to become who we are. And what I mean by this is that the environment you are born in makes you in many ways who you are. You have the ability. I mean, let’s come back to our biological imperatives. You have the ability to make changes and to be different, but what your brain normalizes – meaning that it sees it as normal – is what it perceives on the daily. Obviously you can see how this would be both good and bad.
If you grow up in a fantastic environment where everything is lovely, loving, your needs are taken care of, you have what you need to be able to be smart and well-rounded and think critically and all of those things and not worry about your survival, it makes it very easy to normalize that. For somebody who grows up in an environment that does not provide all those opportunities, your brain has normalized whatever that situation was. As you grow and have the ability through agency and your own life to meet other people and be in other environments, you have the ability to change what is normal for you. And that is honestly, as far as I’m concerned, the main reason why I wanted to talk about this. You can, at any point in your life, normalize something different for yourself than what you were brought up to believe and to think of as normal.
When I was gone, I told you about it in the last podcast. And it’s funny because you heard the last podcast after I actually already got home from Austin, Texas. But now in real time for me, I just got home from Austin where I went to Mastermind with the Life Coach School, which is an event that’s put on for certified coaches from the Life Coach School. And it was amazing. I mean, like almost 2,000 mostly women – like 99.5% women. I think there were maybe 10 to 20 men there, all who own their own businesses, who are coaches. And actually I said that they all own their own businesses. That’s not necessarily true. Lots of the coaches work for other coaches or work in corporate America as doing some sort of coaching. There are people doing all different kinds of jobs, but we were all certified life coaches who believe in life coaching as a profession and as a way of feeling better in your life.
And one of the things that Brooke Castillo does (she’s the owner of the Life Coach School) is that she really normalizes making a lot of money. That is her main goal. She is aiming to be an example of what is possible as far as earning a lot of money, really specifically as a woman. And it was so fascinating – and in my opinion, empowering – to be in a room where there are all these women standing up and cheering and screaming at the top of our lungs and celebrating other women who make a lot of money. I mean, I want you to think about that. Like how not normal that is in the real world. Like we as a society, we love it when people make money right up until they make what we consider to be too much money and then it’s greedy, or then it’s selfish, or we have these social norms. We have normalized that we think that some people should be rich and some people should be poor.
And it was really, honestly, it was so freeing to be in a room where it was just completely normal to be successful. And to be successful at a level that makes sense for you. I mean, yeah, there is the drive of, “Oh, you have to make as much money as you can. And that’s how you get to be on stage.” But I honestly didn’t hear that message nearly as much as I heard the message of, “You can do anything; you have all the power and you can be as successful as you want to be.” Not that you have to be the most successful, that you have to be a certain kind of successful, make a certain amount of money but that you can do anything you want. And I love that.
Obviously, this is the message that I have for you also. I want to normalize for you the success that you want in any endeavor. I mean, most of the time, of course, we talk about weight loss. I want you to be as successful as you want to be with your weight loss, with your business, with your relationships, with anything in your life that really lights you up inside. And this is the thing about being in a room full of other women, really specifically women. I mean, you guys, if you are a man listening to my podcast, thank you. You are welcome here also. But you’ve probably already noticed that I mostly talk to women. I mean, we talk about menopause, we talk about midlife, we talk about weight loss. I tend to think of my message as being very female-centric. So I’m going to continue with that. But I want you to know that I want to normalize success for everybody, for every situation.
For you, what this means is that yes, as the cliche goes, you do want to be careful who you hang out with, and you don’t have to be – here’s my message – you don’t have to be exclusive about it. You can choose to normalize whatever kind of success you want in whatever way feels good. My goal in life, my business goal is to normalize weight loss success. It is to normalize being a woman in midlife who is successful at a couple of different things – maintaining my weight, loving my body, being in business for myself. I want to normalize for you what it’s like to love yourself unconditionally. I want to normalize what it’s like for you to feel your feelings in a society where some of them, we pretend to ignore. And some of them, we glorify. I’m looking at you being busy or stressed out.
But I want to normalize for you, whatever success you want for yourself. Take the parts of my message that really resonate with you and run with them. Make them normal for you. When you do surround yourself with other people – be that women or mixed company or whoever it is that is doing the thing that you either aspire to or are in the middle of or maybe have already had some success with – that is where you can be your best self. This is exactly what we do actually in the Get Your Goal Group. And it’s why that title is kind of intentionally vague.
Yes, most people come to me to lose weight, but I will tell you that in the Get Your Goal Group, I have so many members who have finished losing weight, who are now normalizing for the others in the group, that it’s completely okay to maintain your weight. It’s completely okay to not worry about your weight at all anymore, and to focus on other goals. It’s completely okay to have other fitness goals for yourself. It’s completely okay to struggle with a new goal after you’ve had so much success with weight loss or whatever your first goal was.
In the Get Your Goal group it is all women who are normalizing both the work and the struggle of success and the success of success. How to be proud of yourself and celebrate your wins and still have toilets to clean and still want more for yourself and be striving for something different and struggling with that while celebrating. In the Get Your Goal group, we celebrate and we struggle in equal measure, and we just completely normalize that of course you have a goal, of course you’re struggling with it, and of course, you’re going to achieve it.
Here is the thing though about only wanting to be with other people who normalize a particular kind of success for you. It puts you in a position where you’re not thinking about how you can normalize success for other people. And that’s where I would love for you to think about how you are a leader and an example of what’s possible and somebody that could help somebody else in your circle. Rather than thinking that, “Oh, I have to only surround myself with people who are succeeding in the way that I either am succeeding or want to succeed,” I want you to think also about how you can be the success story for somebody else so that more people in the world can experience success. When you think about not just how your goal benefits you, because it does. And that is a good thing. And honestly, most of my messages, most of the time, you’re like, “Pahla, this is slightly different. Your podcast is usually telling me to focus on me and not worry about other people.”
And you’re absolutely right. I don’t want you to worry about other people. And I do want you to understand that you simply being who you are is not automatically going to change somebody else. This is the other thing. You can’t make your success “normalized success” for other people. I am just throwing that out there. There are people that I know who don’t want what I got, and that is completely okay too.
Being your own normalizer. Knowing that you can be with any people at any time and still feel your own success, and going out there and being successful with at least some eye towards being an example of what’s possible for the people that you know – honestly, it feels amazing. Like this is what I want you to take away from this. This is for you. It’s so you can feel good and it’s so the world can feel good. The reason I put myself out there in the world on YouTube, on podcasts, during lives, in the Get Your Goal group all the time, is so that you – you personally – can see what this is like.
I struggle and I celebrate and I am successful. This is available to you, and it’s available to everybody you know, at least in part, because of you. It’s amazing to think of you personally being successful and struggling, the combination of those two things, not just being successful, but normalizing that success has struggles and it’s not all or nothing, that it’s both. Normalizing that for somebody else will help more people in the world be successful. You guys go out there and be successful. Thank you so much for listening. I will talk to you again soon.
If you are getting a lot out of the Fitness Matters Podcast and you’re ready to take it to the next level, you are going to love the Get Your Goal coaching and accountability group. We take all the theory and knowledge here on the podcast and actually apply it in real life on your real weight loss and fitness goals. It’s hands-on, it’s fun, and it works. Find out more @pahlabfitness.com/get-your-goal, and let’s get your goal.
