Most of us would choose pizza or a bacon cheeseburger over a pile of kale, but what if our lives depended upon that kale?
Hey, Emerge Sales Training community. Tasha here. Today, I’m going to share with you my story about how I lost thirty-ish pounds in the past year – fluctuating with weekend pizza and tacos – and really give you insight into my story of health over the past year and a half.
What spurred this on is this past week or so before, I was at the annual convention of many of my clients and a lot of the “Facebook Friend-iversary”, or Facebook Memories were popping up. I looked at pictures from last year when I was really, really sick at the same event, and this year people were consistently saying, “Wow, you look great. What the heck happened?” And, in my mind, I was like, “Well, this is just Tasha; it was the Tasha that you met last year that wasn’t real.” So I thought that it might be helpful to share with you some of my journey.
I think it’s helpful for how we take care of ourselves as humans in the world, also as business owners. But, these same principles really apply to those of you who are looking to transform your business. I want to remind you that the definition of emerge, which was intentionally chosen as our company name, is to rise up, as if from an inferior or unfortunate position. If you’re reading this, you might find yourself in an inferior or unfortunate position, and I think this, I’m hopeful, that this story and these steps that I’m going to share with you on how I transformed my inferior and unfortunate health into what you see here today will really be great stepping stones for you.
I’m gonna start off by just painting a little bit of context. As women, I feel like I lived my whole life thinking that I needed to be a hundred and twenty pounds and that that was a good idea. So, I’m actually gonna start off by giving some actual weight numbers. So, I’m 5’6”. My listed basketball height, with high tops on is 5’8”. When I was a college athlete and was at my peak physical condition, I was 140 pounds. My smoking hot, when-I-met-Charlie-weight, was 155. I gained 5 pounds when I went on birth control, and then another 5 when I had Zoey, and so on.
So, when I started Emerge I was probably between 165 to 167 and that’s OK. OK enough weight. When I started Emerge, I started as a private coaching practice. I was gonna work 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., take on some clients, and spend more time with my kids. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I have found that I am pretty good at what I do and the word of mouth started to get crazy. We grew very, very, very quickly. So quickly to the point that it set me into massive panic and overwhelm, and triggered an autoimmune disease that I had had several years ago, which was, ironically, the things that triggered the creation of Emerge. So it’s funny how that all worked out.
In December 2016 I found myself with night sweats, chills, fevers, and was like, “Oh my gosh, what’s gonna happen?” Well, in January the rash showed up. Now, I allude to the rash, but you don’t understand. The other day I sent out a couple of pictures, like I was ready to actually share and put it on Facebook. Basically, it was all dark and purple around my neck, around the top part of my chest, and coming up my face. I think that the core issue there was overwhelm plus a dormant autoimmune illness. Those things together just created great havoc on my health.
Now, I am fortunate to be in a medical community since my dad is a doctor. Now, as I share this, I know many of you are into natural medicine. I’m gonna ask that you not throw in your 2 cents here because that will bother me and that is not the purpose of the story.
So, I was super sick and the rash was growing and it was literally unbearable. So, with a mix of natural and medical options we went through this process of trying to figure out how I could live and function with this rash. Enter Prednisone.
Prednisone is a steroid. We were using natural options to try to quell this, but it was not working, and we had to step in with some more severe measures. At this point, I was on forty milligrams of Prednisone. Over the next several months I gained, I think my heaviest was 196 pounds. So I gained thirty-ish pounds, over the next year. I had the big puffy, chipmunk-Prednisone cheeks. If you see pictures from last year, you’ll notice those. Any of our clients that are nurses or doctors probably picked up the Prednisone cheeks well, and I appreciate you not calling me out on that. But that’s what I was dealing with last year. The Prednisone made me paranoid, which only added to the overwhelm. I was sleeping, maybe, 4 hours a night, if I was lucky, in 90 minute increments, and this was maybe after 4 doTERRA Serenity soft gels and a dose of NyQuil, just to keep me from itching.
It was pretty crazy and at the end of the year, I found myself in a space where I had accomplished all of my dreams. I had brought on one of my dearest friends, to work with me. I had this team. We were successful. We had coached like crazy, created tons of success for our clients and our students. I was in a position where I was able to give more to charity than I made in my corporate job and that was just crazy. And I was really sick and I was miserable, and it was horrible.
But there’s these turning points where I think God speaks to you. I was at church and they started playing “Drummer Boy” over Christmas. This thought of the drummer boy not having anything except “this is my finest gift” and I felt God saying, “Okay, you don’t have a drum. You have no rhythm at all, but you do have a microphone. That is your gift as well as your mind, which is the greatest gift, that I gave you.” But if my mind wasn’t operating at full speed, and my body wasn’t operating at full speed, then I wasn’t honoring the gift that God had given me to give back to Him and the world and to the community.
A few harsh words from a friend, as well, led me to move on this, and I became committed to doing some meditation and stuff. So, I don’t know exactly what it was that really triggered it. I think it was a bunch of small things that happened.
Now I weigh in at 163, which is what I weighed before I had Haley, and just a couple pounds away from when I got pregnant with Zoey, which is pretty cool. So that’s the context for the story.
I don’t know if any of you guys can identify with this, just massive feeling of overwhelm, feeling like you have this huge, huge, huge responsibility to do a good job and it just felt like so much, and so heavy, and how that affected my health. I knew I had to make some changes.
I was able to work with some really, really great specialists here in Orange County. There’s a research hospital UC Irvine, and we couldn’t really figure it out what was going on. But, I was able to get on a different medicine, get off the Prednisone. I did go through adrenal gland failure last Summer. It was just nuts, and here are the different things that I think have helped me get my health back in good order.
Number 1: a realization that I’m no good to anyone like this. My greatest fear was that I would let people down, and I had to take a step back and look back on when were the times where I felt like I really let people down, and what was so interesting is it had to do, often, with my health.
I struggled with asthma and in previous times in businesses, the times where I felt like I let people down, was when I was sick and overwhelmed. The other piece of it was I was doing everything by myself. Typically, I was working myself into a frenzy and so those things need to change. So I had to first have the realization that I’m no good to anyone like this. I don’t operate in a space of, “I need self care to take care of me.” What I had to come to the realization of was that, I couldn’t serve God, serve my audience, serve my team in the state that I was in.
Because, also, everybody was worried about me and that’s not healthy either. So, number 1 was this realization I’m no good to anyone like this.
Number 2: it was a commitment to be better than nothing. So after I had the kids, I started Weight Watchers. You do these transformations, and I think that works for people, but it doesn’t work for me. Typically, I’m a go big or go home kind of person, and that’ll work, except that I was already in a state of massive overwhelm.
People would say things like, “Well, just cut out all of this in your diet,” and I was like, that’s overwhelming to me. Or, “Do this huge thing; go see this doctor and this doctor,” and I was like, you don’t understand, I have this obligation to serve my audience and to serve what God has asked me to do. I can’t, just like, take off time. That just didn’t feel right and led to a feeling of overwhelm.
So I committed to better than nothing. And what do I mean by that? I mean that perfect is the enemy of good enough. Instead of beating myself up – I’ll go into this next – that I didn’t have 45 minutes to elliptical, I would just do as much as I could. If it was 5 minutes, fine. At least it got me in the habit and the routine, which was what was the most important.
There’s a lot of research around habit formation, and, BJ Fogg, I believe is the name of the TED Talk (if you look up Tiny Habits) it talks about, if you just start with tiny habits that are doable, your mind will do them, and then you’ll be able to put them into your routine pretty consistently. So, I actually just went for better than nothing, as opposed to all in, because I was already so overwhelmed with my business, and my family, and all of that.
Number 3: start the day off right, and this has probably been over the past 4 months, so, I do, like, half of “The Miracle Morning,” by Hal Elrod. There’s six things can do. I’ll usually do 3 or 4 of them, and I’ll alternate. Sometimes I’ll do the exercise and sometimes I’ll do the writing and sometimes I’ll do the meditation and it’s never perfect. But, see the previous tip of better than nothing.
I think the whole “better than nothing” is I just gave myself a lot more grace than I ever had in the past in order to give myself time to nurse my body back to health. So, number 3, starting the day off right.
Number 4: simple swap. I decided to choose joy over sacrifice. So when you’re in this process and you’re like, “OK, I need to lose a lot of weight, I need to get healthy.” Again, it feels overwhelming and I always, in the past, have felt like, “OK, don’t don’t do this!” Like, what are the things that people give me crap about? “Don’t eat chili fries.” That’s not happening! Right?! “Don’t eat pizza.” That’s not happening.
I remember reading or hearing this thing, that the quality of your relationships is a better indicator on your health than anything else. I realized that if I deprived myself and sacrificed that, (this isn’t a recommendation for anyone else, this is just me and my deal) I would be angry, I would be frustrated, and I would take it out on the people I care about. So instead, I chose simple swaps.
What I didn’t realize is that a lot of the wheat and stuff were making my rash worse. So I swapped out oatmeal, which I hated anyway (see previous podcast), for eggs in the morning, and that swap was easy. The biggest swap that I made, and this is going to sound ridiculous, but I really, really mean it, is I pretty much have chips and guacamole almost everyday between three and four in the afternoon.
Here’s why: I love french fries, and I love pizza, and I love cheeseburgers, and so when I go my whole day and I’m really hungry at the end of the day, that’s what I crave. Instead of saying, “No, don’t eat that,” when you’re at the end of the day and you’re craving In-N-Out, and then your husband shows up with brown rice, grilled chicken and broccoli, that doesn’t cut it. That does not create joy, and I wanted to not just be healthy, but I wanted to be joyful. And so what I did, instead, is I chose… chips and guacamole. Avocado, garlic salt, lime, blue corn chips. Corn, water, salt, and that’s it. And if I have that between three and four o’clock, then I’m not hungry for the other things, and that grilled chicken, or grilled salmon, or whatever healthy option that was available for dinner wasn’t so bad. But at the same time I didn’t feel deprived and frustrated. So, I swapped out chips and guacamole for french fries, and I think that helped a lot.
Number 5: influence of those around you. To this, I will give some kudos to my friend, and, in essence, business partner, Karen, for when she embarked on her twelve week transformation, it shifted me as well. I think it’s so important that whatever you’re trying to do, be surrounded by people that value those same things.
While the people that I know that pursue health (Charlie is not one of them), are not in my immediate space, we spend so much time together over Zoom that it impacts me and influences me. I just feel like it’s so important to have that community.
I was joking yesterday about how I got a phone call, and I was laying in bed dreaming of donuts and I got a phone call from Karen, “Let’s go for a walk!” It saved me from eating donuts, yesterday, and I think that those influences that we have we can’t do these things on our own. If we want to transform who we are and what we do and what our habits are, we need to surround ourselves with people who also have those habits. Iron sharpens iron.
So that is my story. I think that these principles apply to our health. I think they apply to our relationships. I think they apply to our business. So, let’s say you are in a state where your business is in an inferior or unfortunate position and you need to emerge. Well, how would you use these tips?
First is, I’m no good to anyone like this. So, let’s say, you’re in a space, let me think of a pretty common example, where you’re not focused, you’re overwhelmed, and you’re not reaching your goals. You’ve told your family you have had this dream, you’re not sticking to your schedule, you’re not sticking to your calls, you’re not doing the things. I think at first comes to this realization that you’re no good to anyone like this.
You might think that, “Well, I’m putting my family first, but more is caught than taught to our family, And, you know, I think that the world need more role models for people who follow through on their commitments, and have integrity, and achieve their dreams. So, the first step is, just realizing, I’m no good to anyone like this.
Number two, commitment to better than nothing. So, you might say, “OK well I’m gonna do a 90 day push, and I’m gonna get to this and this,” and then you set these huge goals. But I’m just going to ask you to compete against yourself. “Can you do better today than you did yesterday? Just a little bit. Or better than before?” And if you don’t, give yourself grace, and just say, “Hey, this progress that I’m making is better than not making progress at all,” and give yourself some grace there.
Number 3, can you start your day off right? Can you wake up early and pour into yourself? Can you keep your mind and your body sharp, and can you start your day with revenue generating activities before you get distracted? I think that’s really, really important.
Number 4: Can you do simple swaps? Can you choose joy instead of sacrifice? So, instead of forcing yourself to do outreach, could you do your outreach with a friend, a team member, someone in the Emerge community, and choose joy instead of torture in your business?
Number 5, can you surround yourself with people who share your dreams, share your values, and care enough about you, to say, “This is what we need to do, this is where we need to go today”?
So, that’s my challenge for you. I hope this story has been helpful for you, in some way shape or form. Leave me a comment, or shoot me an email if the was helpful for you, and I hope you guys have a great rest of the day.
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