Ep #236: Showing Up

Katrina Ubell:      You are listening to the Weight Loss for Busy Physicians podcast with Katrina Ubell, MD, episode number 236.

Welcome to the Weight Loss for Busy Physicians podcast. I'm your host, master certified life and weight loss coach, Katrina Ubell, MD. This is the podcast where busy doctors like you come to learn how to lose weight for the last time by harnessing the power of your mind. If you're looking to overcome your stress eating and exhaustion and move into freedom around food, you're in the right place.

Well, hey there, my friend. How are you? I am so happy that you're joining me today. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Summer's like halfway over. What the heck? It's not actually, as I'm recording this, but when this comes live, for sure, it's going to start feeling that way. I hope you've had some really fun experiences. I know that I have some fun things planned coming up that I'm really excited about and some cool stuff that I'm going to get to share with you pretty soon, too, that I can't wait to tell you. Not quite ready to tell you yet, but very close.

The first thing though, that I want to let you know, you may, I mean, if you have a very astute ear or if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you might be like, wait a minute, she sounds a little different. What's going on? And you'd be right. So here's the deal, I got Invisalign, which if you don't know what Invisalign is, it's basically a way of straightening your teeth that doesn't involve traditional braces. And I've had them for a week now. And I think for the most part, I sound pretty normal, but then other times I talk and I'm like, wow, this is hard. And then I thought, well, maybe I should take them out to record this podcast. And I was like, I don't know. I mean, I'm supposed to have these things in at least 22 weeks. I mean, I probably should just get used to it. And it's probably not as bad as I think it is. It just probably feels more difficult in my mouth than it does otherwise.

And so the reason I got these, someone actually said recently, “I thought your teeth were great,” but I actually had a pretty decent open bite that has been bothering me for well over a decade, probably at least 15, 20 years. I had braces back when I was a teenager, just like most people, at least in the U.S., like most people. And also like most people, especially back in that day, I didn't keep wearing my retainers once I went to college. And so overall things were okay, but things kind of eventually gradually shifted. And I had this open bite, which just is kind of more annoying for me than it is a cosmetic problem.

And so I think it was, I was for sure pregnant with a child. So it was like, I think probably like 12 years ago, I had decided to see an orthodontist to just find out what can be done about this? And at the time, the guy I saw, he was like, “Well, we could do Invisalign, but it's totally just going to come back.” And I was like, well, that doesn't sound worth it. So anyway, I kind of dropped the whole idea. And then Zoe Perez, one of our amazing coaches on my coach team, she several months ago said, “Oh, I just got Invisalign.” And I was like, “Oh, you did? Tell me everything I need to know.” And so she said she had been open to having regular braces, but her kids told her no, you can't do that. And then the orthodontist actually said, no, it's actually better for adults to have Invisalign.

So I thought, you know what, I wonder if things have changed in the last many, many years, went to a different place, and they're like, “Oh, absolutely we can fix this. This is no problem.” Apparently Invisalign has improved dramatically over the years. And so they're like, “Yeah, go for it. You can do it.” So I signed up, and the first day, the first 24 hours, I was like, really, literally, why? Why did you decide to do this? But it's gotten better. I've gotten the hang of it more now. And it's going to be fine. I have to feel like from a pain perspective, I have to say, it's more, it's almost like braces, wimpy braces. I remember there being a lot more pain with monthly adjustments than this seems to be. I just changed the tray for the first time last night, and I'm like, barely even feels like anything happened.

So anyway, that's what's going on for me. So I'm trying to navigate the world with this again. I'm like, oh my gosh, okay, I don't want to be the person digging in their mouth to get their trays out at a restaurant, now that we can start going back to restaurants. But I'll sort myself out, figure out what I'm going to do. But anyway, that's why a few of my sounds are a little bit off, but I don't think it's too bad.

Okay. What else do I have to tell you? I wanted to invite you to an encore training. So last week I had the How to Lose Weight For the Last Time training, and you might have missed it. And if you did, or you wanted to come live and you weren't able to, I have great news for you, because I'm doing another one on August 4th. These are super fun. I teach you really, really great, important information that you have got to understand if you want to lose weight and keep it off forever. Literally, I don't care what method you use. You have to understand this. So regardless, you need to know this information.

And so I'm hosting it on Wednesday, August 4th. It's at 8:30 PM Eastern, 5:30 PM Pacific. I'll just suggest that you use a time zone calculator, if you have a hard time extrapolating from there. But I'd love if you could come and join me live because it's obviously way more engaging to be there live, but also, then you can ask your questions and I stay on at the end and just keep answering questions, usually for quite a while. So bring your questions, be happy to tell you more about losing weight and keeping it off permanently.

And then also, I'll tell you at the end a little bit more about my upcoming opening of the Weight Loss for Doctors Only program that will be in September. It's an amazing, amazing program. We've actually been putting the final touches on the new update for the whole thing. It's new and better than ever. And that's going to be released for September. So super excited for everybody who's decided to come and join us. We already have some people who've placed their deposits on it. And I'll tell you more about the program at that call, as well, if you're interested. If you're not, you can totally just ignore that part or just drop off at that point. But if you want to hear more, I'll tell you more about that, too.

So the way to register for that call is to go to katrinaubellmd.com/loseweight, L-O-S-E W-E-I-G-H-T. Again, katrinaubellmd.com/loseweight. If you end up not being able to attend live, or you know for sure you can't attend live, but you want the replay, we will send the replay to everybody who registers. So go ahead and do that.

All righty. I wanted to talk to you today about a term that is used a lot in the coaching world, that to me feels just like any other word that I use all the time, but from time to time, our clients, the doctors that we work with in the Weight Loss for Doctors Only program will come in, and there'll be like, “Can you explain to me, what exactly does this mean?” And what they're talking about is showing up. They'll be like, “What does it mean to show up?” I think definitely people who don't live in North America sometimes especially are like, come again? What does that mean? What exactly are you saying or talking about?

And I thought that was a good topic for us to discuss because we talk about showing up in terms of showing up for ourselves and we talk about showing up for others, and I thought it'd be a good idea to delve into that a little bit more so that we can just make sure we're first of all, all on the same page, so that when I'm using that term, and when I'm saying that, or people around you are saying that, you know what they're actually talking about, but then you can also think a little bit more deeply about how you actually show up, and that word will be more meaningful for you and to you.

So showing up is literally just what it sounds like. If you show up at a party or you show up at work, you're there, you've arrived and you're present. That's essentially what we're talking about with showing up. So when you talk about showing up for yourself, what we're talking about there is really what your experience is of yourself in the moment. So I always think of showing up for myself as, here's an example, say I'm just in a mood, just having a hard day for whatever reason. It's just, it's one of those days. It's just kind of hard. Showing up for myself involves asking myself, love, what's going on? What would be the best way that I can support myself? Asking myself what I can do, and then even thinking about things that would be supportive. Maybe I'll realize, you know what, you didn't get a lot of sleep last night, and showing up for myself in that moment, the best thing I can do is to get to bed early.

Or one of the ways you can show up for yourself is by following your eating plan, or recognizing that when you have those over desire thoughts, and you have urges to overeat, and you just want that thing, showing up for yourself is going, “Hey, primitive brain. Think again, I'm not going to actually do that. I'm showing up for myself,” meaning my experience of myself is going to be the one that I want to have, and the one that I want to have ongoing, right? The one that I'm going to be proud of tomorrow and next week, not the one that I want to have for the next five minutes, because I'm not willing to feel something. It's very, very different there.

So I think of it in that way. Showing up for myself is how do I want to be? Now, not showing up for myself is beating myself up, having an internal or maybe even external dialogue, talking about how stupid I am, how I'm worthless, how I can't do anything right, being super self-deprecating, just being negative about myself, pointing out my flaws to myself, just basically treating myself poorly. That's not showing up for yourself. Also, deciding in the moment, you know what, screw my plan, I'm just going to dive head first into the ice cream tub. We could argue that that's not showing up for yourself, right? Because in the moment, you're not keeping your best interests at heart and in mind, and you're kind of throwing yourself under the bus, so to speak, in the sense that you're like, yeah, whatever, it'll be fine. There'll be consequences later, but it's okay. Just for the moment, this will be better.

So showing up for yourself often involves being willing to feel your emotions, being willing to do actions and activities that are supportive to you and for you, such as potentially doing thought work, journaling, meditating, moving your body in a way that feels good, getting sleep, eating foods that are nourishing to you, active de-stressing methods, things like that. Those are ways that we show up for ourselves. Also, not treating ourselves poorly, like our inner dialogue. We show up for ourselves when we treat ourselves in a supportive and loving manner. When you have that strong, loving relationship with yourself and you treat yourself well, that is one way that you show up for yourself. So that's really what that means when it comes to yourself.

Now, when we talk about showing up for others, and of course we can't control what others' experiences are of us. Their experience of us is just a combination of their thoughts and feelings about what we do and what we say and how we show up and our facial expressions and things like that. So we aren't really in control of that, but I think of showing up for others as the version of you that you present to others. So there's a way that we show up when we go to work, there's a way that we show up for our aging parents or for our children or for our partner or a friend, a sibling.

Even when we're people pleasing, it's still a way that we show up. We're showing up in a way that isn't in alignment with us. When we're people pleasing, we're showing up in a way that is focused on attempting to manipulate the other person to think and feel a certain way about us so that we can feel good about ourselves. It's all manipulation, people pleasing.

So when we're thinking about how we show up for others, it's much more about being in alignment with who we want to be. So showing up for others doesn't necessarily mean that they're happy with us, that they're pleased with what we've said or done. You might show up at a meeting at work and tell people some really hard truths and they're really upset about it, but that doesn't mean you didn't show up for them. It just means that they're having an experience based on what you said.

So when we talk about showing up for others, we're just thinking much more about who do I want to be, what's a way of being myself that's in alignment with the kind of person I'd like to be in this situation? So for instance, an example I can think of is with aging parents, it's so common and easy for us to revert back, like to basically almost infantilize ourselves and revert back to this kind of childlike behavior. I often will coach people who are like, “It's like I turn back into a bratty teenager again, when I'm around my parents and I'm like 47 years old.” And they're like, what is going on? How can I stop doing that? I want to be who I am right now, but when I'm with them.

And that's where it takes some more work. The path of least resistance is to not show up for others and not show up for yourself. It's just the easy route is just to kind of follow the flow of the river and just what comes is what comes. It's more effort to think about, this is who I want to be, and even if in the moment I find myself going back to presenting myself or behaving in a way that I'm not proud of, or that I don't want to be doing, having enough awareness to recognize that that's what's going on, doing what you need to do, and maybe take a break and get yourself back on track. And even if you can't do that, if you can at least have awareness of it, then after the fact you can work on it again. What was so hard about that? Why was I acting that way? What was I feeling that made me act that way? And what was I thinking that made me feel that way? How was I interpreting what was going on?

You know, very common in the aging parents example, what we're thinking is we're interpreting what is being said as like a criticism, or as though we're trying to be controlled, which maybe we are being criticized and maybe we are trying to be controlled by the other person, but of course, that's up to us to determine what we want to think about it and make it mean. And so if we're thinking that we're allowing this to bring up the feelings and actions that we took when we were much younger, we'll just find ourselves behaving almost against our own will, acting in a way that we really aren't proud of and don't want to be partaking in or participating in.

So the same thing can go with parenting. So often I coach lots and lots of people on them getting so upset that their child is disrespecting them. But then in the process of being upset, they're disrespecting their child. And we often end up doing the thing that we are telling them not to do. I think the classic example is the kids are all yelling and then we yell at them for yelling. We're like, “You guys need to be quieter,” which is just so funny. So are we showing up for ourselves and showing up for others when we're responding in that way? Most likely not.

And so that's when we want to be looking at, okay, who do I want to be as a parent? How do I want to show up for my kids? Now, this does not mean perfection. This doesn't mean that you're like Mary Poppins and you never get upset. I think sometimes we can really get to that perfectionistic kind of a place, where we're like, well, I mean, if I was really showing up for my kids, then I would never get angry and I would never be short with them, and I'd always be extremely patient when they get up in the middle of the night, and things like that. And that's just not, that's very unlikely to be your experience of it.

And I think the more that we can accept that that's what it's like to be a human, that sometimes we're going to get woken up in the middle of the night and we're going to be frustrated about that, and we're going to really wish that kid would just go back to sleep, and that's okay. That's okay. But how do we respond, really, to ourselves feeling frustrated or being annoyed or something like that? Are we reactive and then lashing out at the kids or lashing out at our partner or whoever else is around, or are we taking a minute, getting a little bit more centered, and reconnecting to the version of ourselves that we want to be and that we want to present to others?

I like to think about it like, you know, what would love do? So unconditional love is probably not going to be making a snarky comment right now. So if one comes to mind, I can just keep that one inside, and it doesn't need to fall out of my mouth. So that can be a great way of keeping yourself sort of in check, or giving yourself a beat, like breathing for a second before responding, rather than just going through the world as though you're completely out of control or not even able to make a decision about what it is that you're going to do.

So that's really what showing up for yourself and for others means. I think sometimes we can get kind of confused or think, like, well, I have to show up for myself. That means I have to do everything perfectly. And it doesn't mean that at all. What it really means is recognizing that you're not perfect and then responding to yourself accordingly, in a loving and supportive fashion, with compassion, with grace for yourself. We often think if we're not mean to ourselves, if we don't beat ourselves up, then how will we ever improve? And that is one of the most common things I coach on again and again.

I completely understand the fallacy and where it comes from, and thinking that if I just crack the whip harder on myself, then I'll finally be able to do that thing that I really want to do. But there's literally no, there's just no experience that will feel good enough that it will counteract feeling really bad, and then you'll get there and it won't be good enough. And then you'll just continue with the cycle. And that's what we find so often, it's like we've gotten in this habit of treating ourselves poorly and not showing up for ourselves, and then it's so uncomfortable to be with ourselves that we're like, hey food, or an alcoholic beverage, that sounds like a good idea. That sounds like a great distraction, a great way for me to no longer feel this way.

And then we don't know how to get out of that cycle. Like, I don't know why I am eating all the time at night. Well, it might be because being with you is so uncomfortable that you eat to try to distract yourself. And being with you, what I mean by that is what's your self talk, what's your inner world like? What's it like for you to be with you? Are you showing up for yourself in the sense that you're your best friend, you're your biggest cheerleader, your biggest champion? Are you that person who's showing up for yourself day in and day out, knowing that if everything falls apart, you've got you? You're there for you, no matter what. When you can get to that place, with that relationship with yourself, it's like there's nothing that you can't do, right? The worst thing that's going to happen is an emotion, and that's okay, because you know how to support yourself through that. And if you have other support systems in place, even better. So, so great.

So when you're thinking about showing up for your patients or showing up for the office staff at work, just think about, who is this version of me? Am I behaving in a way that I can be proud of? Am I present in this moment in a way that I'm excited about and that I'm happy about, that I like? If you are not doing that, then that's something that you want to be looking at. And of course, the way you show up, that's just your actions. That's what you say. It's your facial expressions. It's the energy you bring to the room. And so if you aren't happy with what you're doing in terms of showing up, what you want to be looking at is how are you feeling? And then what thoughts are creating those feelings?

And that's where we have our work to do. We shift that so that you can take different actions. Very often what we think is that what we really need to be able to act differently is different surroundings and different people. And while that may make it easier, you can also recreate the same experience, even with different people around. You can change the facts and still have thoughts and feelings that don't drive actions that you want. Okay?

Well, my friend, I hope that I clarified what showing up means. I would love for you to join me on August 4th. It's a Wednesday, 8:30 PM Eastern, 5:30 PM Pacific, for How to Lose Weight For the Last Time. It's very important that you know this information, if you're wanting to lose weight and keep it off forever. And it's free. You can register by going to katrinaubellmd.com/loseweight. And so much of what I even talked about here applies to that losing weight and keeping it off forever. If you don't keep showing up for yourself, you will gain the weight back. It just is a fact. It will just happen. So we have to learn how to adjust that so we can be proud of how we're showing up.

All right, my friend. I love you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being here, and I hope you have a great rest of your week, and I'll see you hopefully on Wednesday, August 4th. Take care. Bye-bye.

Ready to start making progress on your weight loss goals? For lots of free help, go to katrinaubellmd.com and click on free resources.