I think about trust a lot. A decade or so ago, I realized I was spending my life following “rules” and “guidelines” that weren’t mine. While working hard to follow these external rules, I rarely cultivated trust within myself.
For example, from my pre-teens to my early 30’s, I painstakingly straightened my hair because my curls were too unruly. I needed to be polished and put together. My curls couldn’t be trusted. If you’ve ever spent way too much time or money defying your true nature, I know you can appreciate the freedom that I’ve claimed by embracing my curls.
It’s not just about tossing your hair straightener. How we do one thing is how we do most things.
If you’re prioritizing external rules over honoring your internal wisdom, there is a good chance that you may not be trusting yourself as often as you could be.
When we don’t trust ourselves, we
- second guess ourselves,
- feel stuck in indecision,
- are consumed with fear over making a bad or wrong decision,
- worry there’s a better approach out there (and we keep searching for it), and
- look for external validation or assurance instead of tuning into our own awareness.
With all of the personal study I’ve done around trust, trust isn’t something you either have or don’t have. It comes with practice.
You may have more clarity around some decisions than others. And that’s appropriate. Like whether or not to take on a new client. Some decisions have higher stakes and require more information. Like your next pivotal hire.
Consider how you could benefit from practicing trusting yourself:
- What do you notice when you’re struggling to make a decision?
- What do you notice when you make a decision with clarity?
- Is there an area of your work where you could trust yourself more?
- How could your organization benefit when you have more trust in yourself?
- How is your organization impacted when you doubt yourself?
If you have any questions or would like to explore this topic with me, email me at tara@tara-whitney.com or schedule a coffee chat. https://lnkd.in/evQSpm9G
Do You Trust Your Body?
10 questions to ask yourself.
It makes sense that we don’t. We’ve been told and conditioned to prioritize external knowledge over internal wisdom. Trusting our body is rarely celebrated or modeled for us.
But, with practice, it’s absolutely possible (and life changing!).
When confronted with a challenge or problem, do you say “let me think about it” or do you say “let me be with this” ?
Do you prioritize stillness and space?
Do you know how to experience pleasure, joy and peace in your life?
Are you often creating and exploring new solutions and ways of doing things, or do you prefer to follow a formula?
When things don’t go your way, do you immediately assume you’ve done something wrong?
How much time are you on Google reading and seeking information and solutions?
Do you often sign up for courses and training with the hopes that knowing more will give you more confidence?
Do you honor your hunger and eat when you need nourishment?
When you are tired, do you rest?
How would you describe your relationship with your body? A trust advisor? Beloved? An enemy? A stranger?
I’d love to hear from you. Do you do things that create more trust in yourself and your body?
How to Tell if You’re Really Hungry
It’s a beautiful discovery of reconnecting with your body
For many people, recognizing hunger feels complicated.
It’s really common to question your hunger and wonder if you’re just thirsty, bored, anxious, tired, or nauseous.
There is plenty of information out there on recognizing hunger. Yet, there are few important things that you need to keep in mind.
We were born knowing our hunger
Just like breathing, peeing, and knowing when we’re too warm or too cold, hunger is a biological instinct that everybody has. This is why you can’t console a hungry baby with something other than food. And why you can’t feed a baby that isn’t hungry.
A baby doesn’t need to think about hunger. They know when they’re hungry. Period.
Remember when you were a kid and you left food on your plate so you could go outside to play? Your hunger was satisfied so you moved on. There were other things you wanted to do besides eat. Play. Schoolwork. TV. Video games. Time with friends.
But then something changed.
We stopped prioritizing our hunger
A parent may have demanded that you finish all of the food on your plate. Or, they promised dessert if you ate your vegetables, even though you don’t like broccoli. Or, you were told that if you didn’t eat during mealtime, you wouldn’t be able to eat later. It was either 6 pm dinner or no dinner.
You couldn’t override your parent’s rules, so you had to override your body’s cues. Hunger (and the absence of it) became something to negotiate with.
There are dozens and dozens of reasons why our parents and our culture dictate eating times and create food rules for us.
They may be great at dictating for us when to eat and what to eat. But they’re not great at reminding us that our body knows when it’s hungry. And that hunger is something to honor.
If your parents didn’t demand that you cleaned your plate or made certain foods forbidden, consider yourself lucky. You got the message that listening to your hunger was a safe practice. If there was ice cream in the freezer, you could have a bowl whenever you wanted it. And you only ate it when you were hungry for it.
Hunger is the enemy
When you went on your first diet or weight loss plan, you were given food rules to follow. Certain foods became off-limits. You needed to restrict how many calories you could eat each day.
As you’ve pursued weight loss, your hunger becomes highly inconvenient. Like a big boulder on your path to weight loss success, you learned to not attend to or listen to your hunger. Hunger was an obstacle.
You may be very resourceful at ignoring your hunger. Chewing gum, drinking coffee or diet soda, or drinking large amounts of water are some ways you may have tried to avoid the inevitable hunger signals so you can stick to your diet plan.
Hunger will always win
Many of my clients don’t notice hunger until they’re well beyond hungry. They’re starving. They’ve either not recognized the numerous signals their body shared asking for nourishment, or they’ve intentionally neglected them, hoping they’d go away.
Asking your body to not be hungry is asking your body to do the ONE thing it knows to do: stay in balance. It’s quite brilliant at keeping you alive and in a state of homeostasis. This is why you may notice that when you’re well beyond hungry, your mental and emotional state goes out of balance.
You’ll start to think about food a lot. You’ll get cranky and easily agitated. You’ll get anxious and feel overwhelmed.
At some point, your body’s demands will take over and you’ll eat urgently. Many people describe this as a feeling of being out of control because they eat fast and they eat whatever food is available.
Overeating or bingeing, something that diet culture demonizes as a problem, is just your body keeping you safe. If you’ve gone long periods without enough nourishment (because you’ve been dieting), when you do allow yourself to eat, your body will demand food because it’s unsure when food will be available again.
The opportunity
It’s a big step, I know. For all of the reasons I’ve shared, you’ve been taught to not trust your hunger. Your hunger has led to out-of-control eating.
It’s important to remember that your body is still sharing hunger signals with you, you’re just out of practice noticing these signals.
Getting to know your hunger is also a practice of acknowledging your needs. You are human, with a physical body that will make simple demands to operate at its best.
Are you also avoiding your other basic human needs?
You deserve to feel satiated, no matter what sized body you have. You also deserve to be well-rested. You deserve to have a body filled with energy. You deserve to feel loved, safe and secure.
As you permit yourself to honor your need for more nourishment, you’re also opening the door to allowing yourself to receive rest, love, and contentment.
Get to know your hunger
As you reconnect to your physical hunger cues, it’s important to stop looking at the clock. You may be surprised when you’re hungry a few hours after eating breakfast, or that you’re not hungry until 10 am. Your biological hunger doesn’t follow a clock.
Your hunger patterns aren’t static. They change with things like activity level, sleep, weather, travel, and your menstrual cycle.
Just like everybody is unique, each body shares hunger signals uniquely. How I notice my hunger will be different than yours.
The best way to discover your hunger is to be curious about it. Consider yourself a scientist, observe your body in a whole new way and collect a variety of data points before you reach any conclusions.
Your body is masterful at communicating hunger to you. Hunger isn’t just a growling belly, but instead a full-body process. Let’s take a look at some of the signals your body sends to you by noticing what’s happening:
In your head
One of the clearest signals you may first notice is your ability to focus. When you’re hungry, it may be hard to concentrate on the task at hand. Consider the last time you ate. If it’s been more than a few hours, there is a good chance you’re hungry.
When you’re hungry, you may start to think about your next meal or snack.
I was on a snowshoe hike this past winter when I started thinking about a bowl of chili with cheese sprinkled on top. I could see the chili in my mind. I even imagined the smell, the taste, and how the first spoonful felt in my body.
With your mood
You may be very familiar with the term “hangry” when you get impatient, angry, and frustrated at those around you because you’re hungry. Your mood is one way your body is communicating hunger to you. You may notice that you get cranky and agitated.
You may feel tired and low on energy.
Your body
You may get a headache when you’re hungry.
Of course, your hunger can arrive with an emptiness. You can notice this when you don’t feel any weight or presence in your belly, instead, it may feel like a void.
You may also notice your belly rumbling and growling when it’s hungry.
These are just a few common signals of hunger. There are certainly others.
It’s not about doing it right
As you start to discover your hunger signals, give yourself permission to not get it perfect. There is no “right” time to eat. However, there can be a sweet spot of your hunger, when you’re hungry enough that food will taste really good to you and when you’re not so hungry that you need to eat quickly and urgently.
The best way to know if you were hungry is to eat something. Do you feel better than you did before you ate?
Exploring your hunger is a really powerful process in healing your relationship with food. You’re reconnected to your body. The signals are there, it’s a matter of relearning how to honor them.
As you do, you’ll be practicing self-trust and creating a non-negotiable connection with your body.
Your Business Needs a Morning Routine That Works for You
It’s never about doing what you’re supposed to do
Your morning routine is more than just starting your day right — it’s about aligning yourself with your business.
We all know that successful people have a morning routine. Oprah. Brene Brown. Michelle Obama. They meditate. They walk in nature.
This may inspire you to follow suit. I know that thinking. “If I do what they do, maybe I’ll get more of what they have.”
Hal Elrod’s Morning Miracle introduced me to start my day with an intentional daily practice. Before then, I was doing some of the right things. You know those things — meditate, yoga, workout.
I was fairly consistent, sitting on my meditation cushion for the minimal amount of time I thought was acceptable. I got to a yoga class a few times a week. I’d squeeze in a workout. I’d keep a journal on my bedside table, and would connect the pen to paper before I’d fall asleep at night if I wasn’t too exhausted.
These felt like a chore. It took a lot of effort for me to do these things. I felt bad when I conveniently forgot to meditate. Or skipped a workout.
I Started Letting Go…
And then something happened. I gave myself permission to stop doing what I thought I was supposed to do.
I stopped practicing yoga. Which is funny to admit since I’m a yoga teacher. I couldn’t force myself to unroll my mat and do one more Downward-Facing Dog pose.
I stopped working out to just get a sweat in. I’ve run marathons, loved intense, dripping sweat workouts. But my body was achy and tired. Forcing it to move fast and hard wasn’t fun. So I slowed down.
I did keep meditating. But only for 5 minutes. Long gone were the days when I sat for 20, 30, or even 40 minutes (this was a brief period, by the way). 5 minutes was all I could take. So I did do that.
And I did it as guilt-free as I possibly could.
And Realigned With My Business and Me
I was letting myself discover who I was as a human being if I wasn’t an accountant or a yoga teacher.
It’s not surprising that these behind-the-scenes shifts were happening in parallel with the transition of my businesses. I was letting go of my accounting business so I could spend 100% of my time and energy in my intuitive eating and transformational coaching business.
I wasn’t just letting my yoga practice and my accounting business go, I was letting myself discover who I was as a human being if I wasn’t an accountant or a yoga teacher.
When I stopped ‘shoulding’ myself, I was embarking on a process of discovering something new. All of this felt uncomfortable and uncertain. And necessary.
Like a new friend, I was getting to know myself. Something new was emerging inside of me.
I started to align with my business and discovered a morning practice that worked for me.
Here Are Some Ways To Try This Out for Yourself
This process took some time. As a business owner, I invite you to consider a few things I did.
I got clear around how I wanted to feel every day. I want to feel energized and connected to my creativity. I want to feel light and present.
I understood why feeling this way was so important to me. When I feel grounded, I’m available to my clients in the best way I can be. When I’m energized, I write my best content and create programs that I’m excited about offering.
I noticed how each practice made my body feel before, during, and after I did it. I feel so calm after my new yoga routine. I love walking and so does my body.
I dedicated myself to my morning routine. I schedule the time in my calendar so that it doesn’t get tossed aside in the busyness of my day.
I’m open to changing my routine when it no longer works for me. I know that my needs change over time and I expect my morning routine to change too.
The more personal our business is to us, the more our business needs our presence and energy.
It doesn’t take discipline to follow through with a routine that feels warm and welcoming.
Closing Notes
Create a daily morning practice that includes stillness, reflection, movement, and fresh air, and notice how the more you’re connected with yourself, the more you will thrive in your business.
I encourage you to dive in and enjoy this magical process of letting go and self-discovery!