Hey GOALfriends, welcome to episode number 275: Why I'm not making workout videos anymore. You guys, I have a very different kind of episode today where I don't know that I have any actual lessons to share with you. I'm sure I'll come up with something cuz I almost always do. I consider myself to be a teacher and the kind of person who likes to share where I am and what's going on with me in a lens that can help you solve problems in your own life. But it's not like a, oh, here's this specific issue and here's what you can do kind of episode. It really is a little bit more of a life update and kind of sharing with you, uh, behind the scenes of the process of change and really specifically the messy middle of being a person who is changing their lives.
So let me start with the answer to the question why I'm not making workout videos anymore. And well, first of all, let me just tell you just in case you don't know, I, for the last 12 years, no, not quite 12 years, 11 years, yeah, 11 years, I have created full length workout videos over on YouTube. If you only know me from the podcast or from the Get your GOAL group or from, I don't know, Facebook or something like that, I have a treasure trove of workout videos over on YouTube that are completely free that I've been doing for years. And this year in 2023, I have made the decision to not create any more full length workout videos in favor of a couple of other things. Really specifically on YouTube. I'm making daily short form videos. They're called shorts and I don't always know if people know that they're called shorts, which is why I keep using the phrase short form videos.
Shorts have been around on YouTube for, I'm gonna say two years, maybe not two years, at least a year, at least a year ever. Since TikTok got really famous, I don't know if you know this, let me just kind of take a little wandering story to the side. YouTube does this thing where anytime anybody on any other platform comes out with something, YouTube adopts their own version of it so that they can stay relevant and so that they can do everything. It's basically one stop shopping for everything you could possibly need so that people will stay on the platform. I mean, that, that's just how business works. When in doubt, we're gonna give you everything so that you don't have to go anyplace else. So when, uh, when Instagram first started becoming like a lot more popular, uh, YouTube came up with the community tab where you can post like a static photo and a caption that still shows up in people's subscription feeds.
Sometimes that would, would behave more like either Facebook or Instagram. When Instagram stories became a thing where you could post something that would disappear in 24 hours, YouTube came up with that, that didn't turn out quite as well on YouTube. Um, and Facebook has those two. I I don't find them to be especially usable over on Facebook personally. They show up in my feed a lot more than stories do on YouTube, but I, I don't know, I don't, I don't love stories. I never have. I do watch them sometimes on Instagram, but they have definitely been more of an Instagram thing. And then when TikTok really came out a couple of years ago, they, uh, you know, with their one minute videos that, you know, just could tell a story very quickly, YouTube jumped on that one pretty quickly and it is definitely a focus of YouTube.
In fact, they just announced, YouTube just announced that they will start monetization of short form shorts. Uh, oh gosh. In fact, I think it's already started cuz this is February. So you can start making money off of shorts. Whereas for the past year or however long they've had shorts on YouTube, you couldn't make money from them. So, and I just feel really compelled to tell you that that is, that the money has nothing to do with why I've made this decision, even though I totally just made that connection in my mind that actually has nothing to do with it. I wanted to let you know that I'm not making workout videos anymore for the number one reason of, I have felt really uncomfortable making workout videos where it feels like I'm telling you one thing and doing another as a weight loss coach, I know that exercise has nothing to do with weight loss.
That the thing that determines whether or not you lose weight, number one is that you believe in it. Number one is absolutely mindset, just a hundred percent. You have to believe that you can lose weight because that is how your brain works. Your brain creates for you the thing that you believe. And obviously there's a process of learning how to believe that that goes into it. That then helps you create the evidence that then, you know, creates the thing for you. And like I'm as a life coach, I understand all of that background. And then the other thing that really drives the weight loss that you also have to believe works is eating the right number of calories. You have to be in that very slight caloric deficit. Like that's the actual biological science of it is the caloric deficit. And then the psychological science of it is that you have to be able to do that thing.
And the way that you are able to do that thing is because you think something that creates a feeling for you that drives that action. So of the ways to lose weight, there are two things that I have talked about in my workout videos, but I haven't really, well I have modeled it for you. I mean, it's the entire basis of this podcast is talking about the mindset that goes into it, the psychology of it, the thoughts that you think that can help you feel, the ways that will drive the actions. So I've been talking about it and in fact in the whole last year of 2022, I, I offered this, this ability to like think about your thoughts and have helpful thoughts versus unhelpful thoughts. And I've been modeling it for you while also exercising. And I really, really, really want to be clear with my message that exercise is not how you lose weight.
And I wanna be clear with that message in a way that I am not. Then while I am giving you that message seeming to contradict really even more specifically than that, I have gotten, I've gotten comments every day since the beginning of my time on YouTube about other people's perceptions of how easy or difficult the workouts are and my advice in the five oh method, which I offer to you freely and generously every single time we talk. Come on over to GetYourGOAL.com and grab the five oh method. It's my weight loss advice. It's, it's everything that you could possibly need to know about weight loss. And the thing that I tell you is that you should be exercising moderately, every single day about the same level of difficulty, about the same level of intensity, about the same way, approximately the same amount of time.
But time has far less to do with it. It's much more about like intensity that exercising approximately the same way that is to say moderately every single day will help you get in that caloric deficit. Not because it burns calories, but because you're exerting approximately the same amount of energy every day and therefore you can eat the same number of calories every day. And then it's just the same across the board as opposed to some days working harder and some days working less and trying to figure out where your caloric deficit is when when you work harder on some days and less on other days and taking rest days and all that kind of stuff. So I have known for a while, like not even a while, I have known my entire career that the way that I perceive exercise is always going to be different than the way you perceive exercise.
The way you perceive exercise has nothing to do with the exercise itself and everything to do with your lifestyle and, and all of the factors that have led up to you being exactly where you are right this minute, which is to say your current fitness level, the amount of sleep you get every night, the amount of water that you drink every day, the foods that you eat, the amount of a caloric deficit you might be in the quality of those foods when you are eating those foods as opposed to when you are exercising. Like there are so many factors that affect you and your perception of the workout that when I say exercise moderately, and then I offer you this example of what feels moderate to me, that really truly for about 99.999% of you, it doesn't feel moderate for one reason or another because of your own life. Like everything about your life that goes into your perception of what is a moderate workout.
And that that constant daily, I'm gonna call it a struggle and I, that feels like a really big word for how it truly felt in my life, but it felt like a conflict that I was saying one thing and trying to offer you very clear instructions on how to create that thing in your life. And then modeling this thing that could work for you as a moderate amount of exercise and also might not. It felt like there was a constant struggle between the two, a constant conflict between the two things that I was doing one thing and for a lot of people appearing to say something else. And I had two choices here. I've always had two choices and I don't think you're going to be surprised, , that what I chose , this is so funny. These words are coming out of my mouth and I had not explained this to myself in this way before and now it's hilarious to me.
But of course I'm choosing to say, I'm choosing to talk instead of choosing to do . I would always rather talk, talking is my superpower. I would rather explain something to you and help you through that explanation. Figure out what to do for yourself than simply give you the doing and have it occasionally be wrong. And by occasionally, I mean for really a large part of my audience, for a large part of my audience, the exercises that I was modeling weren't moderate. And that has always been a sticking point for me where I try to explain, and yet I feel like the explanation got lost in the doing because for so many of us, when we try to do something new, when we want to create new result for ourselves in our lives, we're not really prepared for how much thinking there is involved with it.
That we really just want somebody to tell us what to do and therefore we'll just do it and we'll make ourselves do it through willpower or, well, generally speaking it's gonna be through willpower. And then, and then when we don't get the results that we're looking for, we really struggle. And by making my message a speaking message only, I feel like it will help you no matter where you are on your weight loss journey, I feel like it will help you more to start with the thinking, to hear my thoughts, do your own thinking about it. And then from that thinking, because this is the way it always goes from that thinking, you will create a feeling for yourself which will drive of actions, which you can then do some analysis of.
I understand how different that feels for you. And in this podcast I kind of wanna share for you how different it feels for me too. This is, this is a career change for me. I have been a fitness trainer since January 1st, 2012. I spent the fall of 2011 studying for my personal trainer certification. And I, it's so funny, I don't remember the exact day that I got my personal trainer certification. You would think that that would be really important. And it was, I was working in the fitness industry already. I was working at a well known chain that I always refused to name because I've talked numerous times about how much I didn't like my job there and I don't need to like throw them under the bus. It really wasn't about the well-known chain, it was much more so about my experience of working in a particular place, working in any particular place.
Honestly, I, I see that particular part of my career journey as being the really, really, really thing that I needed at that time. I was so unhappy there. Not because of the chain and not, definitely not because of the people I loved working with the people or not working with the people. I loved the clientele there. Like I have such fond memories of all of the women who came in to work out. I loved them. I didn't have a lot of love at the time from my boss or my peers. And I can see very clearly now that that was exactly what I needed was to be so unhappy there that I could make the change for myself because I was never gonna be happy working for somebody else. I am an entrepreneur. I was born to work for myself. I was born to create my business for myself and I needed, I needed to be unhappy there.
And boy was I , so that's why I never named the place. But anyways, I, I got my personal certification while I worked at that particular chain of fitness centers for women at some point in time in the fall. And I don't remember what the date was, but I vividly remember putting in, putting in my two weeks notice and then being called in and given my final check on, must have been like December 30th or something like that. But I put in the paperwork to create a business for myself. I got my business license through my city on January 1st, 2012. And I think about that day all the time as the day that I created myself that I became a fitness instructor. And interestingly, on January 1st, 2023, I declared for myself a new career path. I have been a life coach you guys since 2021. Like I started my life coaching certification in 2020.
I got my certificate in April of 2021 and I've been life coaching. I have included it a little bit here and there, you know, Paula b, weight loss life coach for women over 50. Like I've, I've thrown it out there. I have a life coaching business. The Get Your GOAL group is life coaching. And yet I'd still been kind of squirrel around this. Well, I'm a fitness trainer who is a life coach who understands about weight loss. I'm a weight loss coach who's a life coach. And on January 1st I decided and declared for myself, I am a life coach. I am a life coach, making a career for myself as a life coach who coaches women on how to lose weight. I happen to have a plethora of experience and expertise in the world of fitness. I also, even though I don't really mention this very often, but I am literally also a menopause expert.
I did so much research while writing my book Mind Over Menopause, which is coming out in June of this year, 2023. And I'm, I'm still kind of working on declaring that part of it, but I want to really talk to you today about what it feels like. Well, I guess I'm gonna just put this through the lens of what it feels like to change careers. See, even though everything that I have done over the last 11 years has been like a constant change in who I am. When I started off as a, a fitness trainer, I tell you what, when I first started off as a fitness trainer, all I wanted to do was work with endurance athletes and triathletes and help them get better. Like I, at the time I was a triathlete and a due athlete and an endurance runner, and I really just wanted to work with people like me.
And I got absolutely no traction on that . Like none. I, I put out flyers, which is hilarious to me now. Like I, I tried to network in the real world in my city and went to races and like put flyers on people's cars and got absolutely no business that way. And then started working with my mom, uh, doing in-home personal training and started working with a couple of friends, doing in-home personal training and then started working with strangers, which was very exciting and it was very interesting. Um, it's interesting to me now that a lot of the women that I worked with were older than me at the time. I mean in, gosh, in 2012, I, I was only 42. Oh, I was so young. That's so funny. Which obviously 11 years ago, like, I get the math on this, but still thinking about being 42, thinking about who I was when I was 42, that just feels like a million years ago.
But a lot of the women that I worked with were in their fifties and sixties and do they work with anybody in their seventies? I must have like very late sixties, early seventies. So I worked with the women that, I mean the women that I had been working with at the well-known chain of women's fitness, uh, centers. I, I've always worked with this clientele even when I was younger and I still love working with women in their fifties, sixties, seventies, and even eighties that it, it is so fulfilling to me to fill this niche. But that was interestingly who was a attracted to me and my advertising, even though I felt like I was very clear that I really wanted to help endurance athletes. The people who were attracted to me were the women who didn't wanna work with a 20 year old who didn't wanna work with a 30 year old, that me in my forties, even though, even though I was still pretty young, that they could relate to me a little bit better than somebody who was like very young.
So I, you know, I started off with in-home personal training and I, I really wanted to work with like fitness only and a lot of the women would talk to me about weight loss. And I had some theories about how to lose weight. And I'll be honest, I I, I did not know what I was talking about. I didn't learn anything about that in my fitness training. Fitness training is for fitness training. There are plenty of fitness trainers who have opinions about how to lose weight and will put you on a diet and tell you how to exercise. But what they are doing is guessing. And I will tell you that there was a lot of guessing going on when I very first started and then working with women in real life. I learned what was actually going on and I started doing more studying and more paying attention and understanding both anecdotally and the science behind it.
Like I did a lot of, I'm gonna call it research even though I hate it when people use that word, you guys, it is not research when you go on the internet and read things that is going on the internet and reading things. Research is when you go into a lab and you conduct the experiments yourself. However, the word research has been popularized to mean reading other people's research and calling it research. And so that's what I did. And when on the internet and I read things and I will tell you that a lot of what I do read on the internet is not just popular articles. I actually do go to the source material. I read through the science of it and I then look up all the words that I don't understand because I don't understand them. And I have learned a lot over the years by going to the actual research and trying to understand it versus just reading articles in, you know, women's fitness magazines.
So over the years I have worked with people in a fitness only way and then moved into starting to offer weight loss advice. I was so reluctant to offer weight loss advice for so many years. And then I finally embraced that I could talk to women my age and older. So I started moving into like fitness and kind of weight loss for women over 50. I started doing that when I was 49, by the way, and I, I remember, I remember the first couple of videos that I put out where I was like for women over 50 and I felt like such an imposter cuz I was still 49. And I'm like, I am feeling these things. They do relate to me. I'm definitely getting to be menopausal, but also I'm still only in my forties. So that felt very squirrely when I inched my way into that.
And then after all of those years of like the anecdotal evidence and the, you know, internet research, I realized that I really did have something to say about menopause and about weight loss. And so I, I started declaring myself a weight loss coach. I started talking about weight loss really, really specifically. And that felt very uncomfortable for a long time too. I had a lot of resistance that, and yet I knew that it was the thing that everybody wanted to ask me anyways. And by not offering you the information, I wasn't serving you. And here, here is the lesson that I'm gonna take away from this. I knew that I was gonna come up with something. My reluctance, my reluctance to serve you has never been about you. It's been by reluctance to declare myself as an expert, to declare myself as somebody who has something to say in this arena.
And my reluctance has, has hindered both of us in a way that I was really only serving my comfort zone by continuing to do the things that I had been doing before. When I first became a a fitness coach, I had people who wanted to know about weight loss Right away I was reluctant to talk about weight loss because I wanted to stay in my comfort zone of, no, I just exercise. When I started talking about weight loss and being a woman over 50, I still wanted to stay in my comfort zone of exercising and, and answering questions in a way that felt comfortable for me.
By me stepping out of my comfort zone, declaring myself a life coach who can help you lose weight. It feels really uncomfortable, but I'm willing to do it because I wanna serve you. I wanna serve you in a way that makes the most sense. I don't want to stay comfortable and keep doing the things that I've been doing that may or may not serve you. Giving you the information and the framework and the, the explanation of how the science works, how your body works, how exercise works, how a caloric deficit works, how your mindset is the, the thing that runs all of the other processes, giving you that information is the most helpful I can be. It's also, frankly, right now the most uncomfortable I can be. It's me standing on a platform without my blankie of exercise in my hand. I have relied on exercise for years in so many ways and me not relying on that anymore, but relying on the information that I can provide you, the support that I can provide you, the life coaching that I can provide you feels so uncomfortable. It is messy here in the middle, I am on the daily desperate to feel comfortable again, desperate to go and work out my way through this. And I know that you guys feel that too because what I'm, the, the comments that I hear, the emails that I'm getting, the feedback that I hear from you really through comments and emails, I'm not really sure why I called it feedback in any other way,
But what I hear from you, the message that I, that I hear overwhelmingly is you are supposed to work out. You are supposed to be working out. When you are not working out with us, you're disappointing us. You are going to fail, you are turning your back on us, you've become greedy. And those are the ones that I can come up with off the top of my head. Those are the comments that I'm hearing. And the thing that I've noticed here, here in my messy middle is that
The thing that I know as a life coach is that your brain will always reflect back to you and look for evidence of and create evidence of the thing that you already believe. So the comments that I am hearing that feel very like overwhelming, like there's so many of them, like it's everybody's opinion, are the things that I am already thinking about myself that I am already struggling with in my own brain. And I wanna, this is a lesson that I'm gonna offer you. I wanna offer you that when you are in the middle of changing, when you decide I'm going to lose weight, the thing that you will hear from other people will be things that you already think about yourself. People will say to you, right, to your face, well I don't know why you're gonna do that cuz you're just gonna gain it all back.
Or, well, that's gonna be way too hard. You're gonna have to change everything or I don't know why you're gonna bother with that, or whatever it is that you already think about yourself. It will sound so loud from other people. For every 20 compliments you get about, oh my gosh, I'm so proud of you, you're doing such a good job and you look so great, you must feel so amazing. You're doing so good with this. You're gonna get one person who says some crappy thing and you are going to think everybody hates that. I'm trying to lose weight. Everybody thinks I'm gonna fail everybody, whatever. Fill in the blank. Whatever your your thing is, that's your brain doing what brains do. I am coaching myself every single day right now here in the messy middle that the one, I'm gonna call it an insult. I, I really, there's, there's no way that the people who are are commenting or or emailing me, there's no way that they intend their comments to be insulting.
I know they don't. They're, they are people who have been with me for a long time who consider themselves a fan of my work, who don't want me to change. And I totally get that. And they're expressing their uncomfortableness with my change. And it is amplified by my uncomfortableness with my own change. So I hear it as an insult. And this is, this is probably what's gonna happen to you. You're going to hear an insult from somebody else and you're gonna take that on as though it means something about you. This is what I have been doing, this is what I've been coaching myself on every single day. And I, I, the reason that I'm sharing this story is I just, I really wanna normalize for you how, I guess I'm gonna call it painful. This is how uncomfortable it is to change and that it, it is normal and it is okay and you can change even when other people seem really unhappy.
Even when you seem unhappy with yourself. , even when it all feels really hard and like maybe you're not gonna make it through. Of course you are. Of course I am. I feel so compelled to serve you in the highest way I can. I know for a fact and I've always known that talking is my superpower. Telling you something that you need to hear is my favorite compliment. When, when I hear, when people post on Facebook or they send me emails or they, uh, talk to me in the Get Your GOAL group or, or anytime when somebody says to me, what you said, Paula totally changed something in my brain. Like I I heard it in a different way and it just clicked from me. And now I'm getting this result from myself that I've always wanted. That is, that is me fulfilling my destiny in the world.
That is me serving at my highest level. That is me doing my greatest good in the world. And it feels so amazing and I feel so compelled to do that. It means that when I feel uncomfortable that I've got something that I'm aiming for. And this is what I wanna offer you. There's a reason why you want to be your healthy weight. And right now it might seem like you wanna be your healthy weight because you wanna look good or you wanna feel good or you wanna be healthy. That's, they're all good reasons, but there's also something else waiting for you there that is you serving at your highest level. That is you being your best self. And what I think that is what I think it is for me is this struggle to get there. The struggle to get there is gonna show you the way it's showing me that I can be a mess, that I can make mistakes, that I can, I'm gonna say make people unhappy, that I can live with people's opinions. I can live with, again, air quotes, criticism. I can do things I didn't know I was capable of doing. I can learn new skills, I can think new things. I can think about myself in a different way. I can declare myself to be a different person. I am a life coach. I used to be a fitness trainer and now I am a life coach. You can do that too. You used to be a person who was overweight and now you are a person who can get their goal.
This, this uncomfortableness of making a change, of declaring I am no longer making workout videos and other people have opinions about that and I have opinions about that. And there's a chance I could fail and there's a chance that I could be a disappointment. There's a chance, actually, you know what? There's literally no chance that I'm doing this from greed. Here's, here's the thing. Actually, there was a couple of things when I first started talking, I was gonna tell you a couple of things. The number one thing that I was gonna tell you was that the, the things that I thought about myself, like I am a disappointment. I am greedy. I am, I don't remember what the other one was, that your brain and my brain will offer that declarative I am statement and yet it's definitely not who I am as a human being.
I might feel disappointment. Oh, failure, that was the other one. I might feel the feeling of disappointment, but the feeling of disappointment is very different from me being a disappointment. I might feel the feeling of failure, but I am not failing and I am not a failure. I might try things. In fact, I almost definitely going to try things that don't work out the way I intended, that don't work out the way I expected, that don't work out the way I wanted them to. I can feel the feeling of failure without being a failure. And I'm going to, I'm gonna say I can feel the feeling of greedy, but I don't, I really, I I'm capable of it. Like I, if it came to me, I certainly could. But I, uh, I've heard a couple of comments, a couple of comments about Paula's only doing this because she's greedy, because she wants to sell her book because she wants to make money in the Get Your GOAL group.
That, that it's, she's all about the money. And I can totally understand how it could look like that. And I wanna offer to you really specifically you, if you have any intention of ever going into business for yourself, you slash I cannot operate a business from a feeling of greed. Your thoughts create feelings and your feelings drive actions. And I will tell you that the feeling of greed does not drive any of the actions that actually propel a business forward. The feeling that I tap into constantly every single day is generosity. I want to give you the ability to get your goal. I want to give you the information you need. I want to give you my knowledge, my expertise, my opinions. Certainly I want to give you, gosh, I wanna give you the belief that I have in you. So often I hear you talking about, I just don't know.
I feel stuck. I'm having a hard time and I just wanna pull the belief that I have in you out of my brain and like, you know, surgically implanted in your own brain somehow. And the only way I can do that is to keep talking and keep telling you I believe in you. You can believe in yourself. The belief is available for you. That is my superpower. And the only way I can give it to you is from a feeling of generosity, the feeling of greed. I'm sure there are, I I'm sure there are people who can operate from that feeling, but I'm, I I feel very certain that it has to be for short amounts of time that there also has to be some other feeling. I really truly believe that, especially for entrepreneurs. I, I'm, I'm thinking about whether or not I think this about like big businesses and corporations and you know, we all have such an opinion about like corporate greed and how, how big businesses are only operating for money and like, I get that, but they still have to provide something that we as consumers are willing to pay for.
And that that decision to provide something for someone, I really think that has to come from some level of generosity, some level of caring and some level of giving. Now for me as a personal entrepreneur, like literally a doing, you know, I talk to you in my group, I talk to you personally on the podcast. I talk to you personally in the shorts I am. I think of myself as a one to one business. Like it's me and it's you. Everything I do comes from generosity. Everything I do comes from curiosity. Everything I do comes from a space of wanting to give. So I really don't take on that feeling of greed. I I, I'm sure I could feel it cuz it's a feeling just like every other feeling. It's body sensations created by hormones. Like there's, there's the ability to feel it. And also I really don't, when you are making a change for yourself, it's gonna be uncomfortable. That's my lesson for you today, .
I had a lot of things to say to get to that at the end, you are going to feel uncomfortable when you make changes and you're totally capable of doing it anyways. I'm capable of having a, a midlife career change. You are capable of making whatever change it is you want to make, there's gonna be a messy middle. There's gonna be people expressing their opinions and those opinions are actually gonna be your own in your own brain reflected back at you. There's work to be done on your mindset. There's work to be done like physical, you know, work to be done to get to your goal, but you totally can and I can too and we can get there together. You guys, thank you so much for listening. I always appreciate it. I'll talk to you again soon.
