Episode 279 The Consistency Code: How to stop self-sabotaging your health with Courtney Townley
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When I was in my 30s and 40s, I thought health was something you earned with discipline. I ate clean, drank tons of water, ran marathons, and swallowed whatever supplements were trending. And even though I appeared to be doing everything right, my stress was through the roof and my body constantly ached. I was always looking for the next thing to fix. But here’s what I didn’t realize. I wasn’t broken.
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or even unhealthy. I just wasn’t listening to my body. I cared more about how things looked than how they felt. I thought that I had to prove I was healthy by doing hard shit and taking on more than I could actually handle. I didn’t understand that relaxation isn’t something you earn after you check all the boxes. It’s an essential ingredient to success. In today’s episode, I’m talking with Courtney Townley, host of the podcast,
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Grace and Grit, and author of the new book, The Consistency Code. Courtney helps women navigate the health maze of midlife when your resilience to stress is naturally lower and the load you’re carrying has never been heavier. And the old strategies that you’ve used to just keep going are no longer working. In this episode, you will learn why doing more often makes you less healthy.
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and how your definition of self-care needs to change. Also, how to identify integrity pain, the tension between who you are and how you’re really living. And then what to do when your motivation disappears and you literally don’t have the energy to keep up with your damn self. Being healthy isn’t about external metrics. It’s when you finally learn how to experience unconditional love for your body.
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My name is Colleen and I’m a mindful drinking coach helping high achieving professional women permanently reduce their alcohol consumption by 80%. Join me each week for evidence based holistic strategies to regulate your nervous system, balance your dopamine and activate the growth mindset that makes you so powerful in other areas of your life so you can stop worrying about losing control and trust yourself again. Get happy, not sober, it’s not about the alcohol.
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Courtney, I am so excited to have you. Welcome to the show. Thank you for being here. Would you do the honors and introduce yourself to the audience? Tell us who you are, what you do, and why you do it. Sure. Well, first of all, Colleen, thanks for having me. I appreciate being on the show. ah My name is Courtney Townley, and I basically at this stage of my career, I call myself a health and self-leadership coach because I really help mostly midlife women to lead themselves through the health arena with more ease and grace.
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because it’s a crazy arena, as we all know. Quite the obstacle course from perimenopause to the other side. I mean, there’s so much mixed messages and information and it’s very hard to know where to start. Very easy to just kind of give up before you start. A thousand percent. And I think it starts so early, right? Like the messages were sent when we’re teenagers and young adults. ah There’s a lot of belief, I think, that develops.
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in a woman’s head that can make it really hard to maneuver through the space, especially as we approach midlife. uh But I came into the industry 30 years ago. I was a personal trainer and I love teaching movement. I thought it was super fun that I could make a living teaching people how to be better movers, but I learned very quickly that people weren’t necessarily aspiring to be better movers. They were aspiring to feel better. And movement is only one small piece of that equation.
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So I was very ill-equipped to have those bigger conversations. So I went on to get more education on nutrition and lifestyle management, uh behavior change science, and ultimately got to a place where I was kind of teaching like the five basic foundational principles of wellness, which I know everyone teaches these things a little bit differently, but I’ll just tell you what they are for me. Movement, nutrition, uh sleep, managing your mind.
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and um which went out, and hydration, right? Those things. Like we all know that those are kind of basic tenants of self-care. And that was well and good. Like I got heavily involved in the weight loss industry. I helped a lot of women lose a lot of weight and also had an epiphany that why are so many women losing weight but then struggling to stay there? Yes. Right? Like that was a big kind of curious moment for me.
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And I was also, this was right around the time that I gave birth to my son, this is about 15 years ago. And I myself had been like this avid athlete my whole life. I looked the part of a fit trainer, but I was not healthy. I was broken in so many ways. And it just became really apparent once I had this tiny little baby to take care of how unwell I was. ah
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And so I think that crossroads of dealing with a lot of midlife women who were struggling to maintain weight loss and then myself going through this transition into motherhood and really rumbling with my own health, it really got me questioning this model that we’re sold about what health is and how to go about improving it.
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ah I ultimately went on to a life coach school because I really wanted to understand better how to help women manage stress from a holistic perspective, not just around their health. And then I just arrived in this place in my career that finally feels like home, where I really help women to unpack unnecessary stress while simultaneously helping them to lean into stress that amplifies their life. It’s both things. It’s not either or.
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So, I still call myself a health coach, but I just approach it from a very different place than I did 30 years ago. Yeah. Talk to me about how you knew you weren’t healthy. I know from my own experience, I was always chasing health. I certainly looked the part. I had the trophy for the running and I was doing it right. And I had my house clean and everything was good. I didn’t know that…
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The majority of my stress was actually coming from the inside. I didn’t know that my mental health, like, it was funny when you said the five foundations, know, sleep, nutrition, movement, hydration, manage your mind. I was like, Whoa, I didn’t see that one coming because to me, mental health was something that you had or don’t have. Like I had no idea that mental health is like physical health. You kind of got to do stuff every single day. And I was running so fast.
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that I didn’t process my emotions. I was just going on autopilot, getting the trophies I thought, and then wondering why I felt like I was crumbling and broken and like all of those things. How did you know that there was an issue when you did look the part and get your trophies? Well, I’ll tell you, it was a specific moment. So I had a really beautiful pregnancy, but I had a very difficult childbirth.
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I hemorrhaged after childbirth and I had to have a blood transfusion and all these things. And then on top of it, they send you home with this little seven pound gelatinous blob that you’re somehow supposed to know how to take care of, right? So I always say that some women waltz into motherhood, but I entered more like a tsunami. It was not a graceful transition for me. And what was so glaringly painful in that transition is I had all my family and friends come over to see the baby. And the one comment,
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that I heard over and over again was, wow, Courtney, you lost your baby weight so fast. So here I was imploding on every level, mentally, emotionally, physically. And all people wanted to focus on was how my body looked. And to me, that was like, OK, clearly we have this really wrong because I am not well. Again, I was struggling to manage the baby. My marriage was really struggling. I had
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a lot of issues in my body. Like I had immense joint pain and I was young. I mean, I was 32 years old. I should not have been having this kind of pain. I was having to take really long naps in the afternoon. And this was even prior to having my son. So it wasn’t just because of being a new mother. So there was lots of evidence that I was not internally healthy, but I looked healthy.
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I really just started to understand this concept, which I originally learned from Precision Nutrition and I love it so much. It’s called deep health. And deep health is the premise that there’s so many dimensions of health. Like you said, there’s mental health, there’s emotional health, there’s the health of our relationships, our spiritual health, environmental health, and of course, physical health. And all of those different dimensions have the ability to contribute to your stress bucket.
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And if your stress bucket is overflowing because your relationships are broken, because you don’t have skill sets to manage your mind and emotions, because your physical body is breaking down, you will not be well. You are going to have ultimately a whole lot of dis-ease in your life, which leads to disease, right? So where were the models of health, the protocols, the programs that were teaching people how to
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improve those areas of health. I didn’t know of any because all I knew was fitness and that a question or like, don’t it’s kind of rhetorical. Like at the time it was really asking that question, where are the places that address the whole human? And I couldn’t find them, right? So it was a frustration for me as a professional, as a woman rumbling with my own health. And ultimately I just had to forge my own path. I think the conversation is becoming much bigger now.
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which is great, right? Things tend to evolve and change. But at the time it was, em it really didn’t exist. And so that just kind of led me down a pathway of kind of figuring out for myself, what does health really mean? What does health mean? What does health feel like? How do you know someone’s really healthy? And I’ll tell you that at this point in my career, I really look at health as more of a direction. It’s not something you have or don’t have.
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Yeah. Because there’s parts of my life right now that probably aren’t optimized, right? They’re not in the most stellar health they could be, but I have other parts of my life that are really healthy. But the thing that I constantly come back to with the areas I rumble in is, I traveling in the direction of health? Am I making decisions to move me in that direction? And if the answer is no, I don’t have to beat myself up about it. I just need to acknowledge that no, I need to make a new decision to move me in that direction.
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So to me, is definitely a direction. Health is also relationship because you’re in relationship with everything in your world, food, exercise, people, yourself. And if those relationships are broken, you’re not going to have great health. ah And I ultimately think health uh as power, like as the life in your life, right? How much life do you have in your life?
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A lot of people I ask that question to, and it’s on a scale from one to 10, it’s definitely below five. What decisions can we make to help you put more life in your life? Well, and that is such a good question that I know in times in my life, if someone would have posed that to me, it would blow my emotional circuit breakers because where do you start?
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Where, what am I doing wrong? I’ve always just, just tell me what I’m doing wrong. Just tell me what to do next. And the idea of how to be more healthy, which I guess means feel better. I’ve just always spent decades assuming that the difference between me and feeling better is about a hundred things on my to-do list and oh goals that I have to achieve. And then as soon as all that happens, then I’ll feel good. I will feel better when...
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if and after all of these external events occur? Yes. How do you get off the hamster wheel? Yeah. So two things. Two ways I really simplify it for my clients is number one, I’d let me to, I want to speak to the midlife woman because that is kind of my target audience. And what’s happening at midlife is your bucket, right? I talked about that bucket of stress.
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Your bucket, which is your physiology, is starting to kind of lose its resilience because when we lose estrogen and progesterone, we aren’t so good at managing cortisol. We’re not so good at managing stress. So our bucket is not as strong as it used to be. And then we’re carrying more in our bucket than we’ve ever carried before. So health is really an exercise in unpacking unnecessary stress because there’s a lot of ways we’re bringing in unnecessary stress.
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And it doesn’t matter where you start. What matters is that you start unpacking the bucket. Okay. And the second part of the equation is how do I fortify the bucket? How do I make the bucket stronger? How do I lean into stress that actually fortifies my resilience and my ability to push through hard things? It’s those two things. And it isn’t one specific thing. Yeah. It’s making a decision on where you want to start.
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Yeah. And I love that you have those two points because I think my fear always was if I start doing less, then I’m going to be less. And I know what I found is that the slower I go, the faster I get. I don’t work harder, I work smarter. So I love this idea of taking unnecessary stress off, but also improving your resilience so you can carry more of what matters.
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Can you talk a little bit about unnecessary stress? Because it’s really hard to pick through where you’re doing it to yourself and giving up the things that you think are going to make you better. So unnecessary stress, I would qualify as anything that feels stressful that isn’t really giving you any benefit on the other side. Okay. So unnecessary stress would be things like...
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not setting a boundary. It could be with food, could be with work, could be with anything. uh It could be self-narrative, just spending hours and days beating yourself up mentally. What does that give you in terms of benefit on the other side? Nothing. Right. Nothing. Right? It could be spending a lot of your time, energy, and other life resources on things that don’t really matter to you, so then you never have time for the things that do. And that creates a tremendous amount of unnecessary stress.
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So unnecessary stress, I would say, comes in 10,000 different forms. And it’s really asking yourself the question, like when people say, I’m feeling stressed, is the stress that you’re feeling giving you some benefit on the other side? Right? And if it’s not, I think it’s really good to question and consider how might I let this go? How can I let it go? How can I put it down? How could I remove this from my life? ah
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And that in itself, it sounds simple, right? But simple isn’t always easy because we just have patterns of clinging to it. Like it’s somehow going to change us. Yeah. We’re doing it for a reason. I mean, all of our stress serves some sort of purpose on some level. Absolutely. Well, you said earlier, like when you were asking me the question of like, how did I know I was unhealthy? And one of the things that I think really stands out for me, especially in this conversation, is that
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I think I was working really hard in my life to prove my worth versus owning my worth. And that is unnecessary stress, right? Because when you’re trying to prove your worth, that work is never done. Yeah. Like you can hustle so hard. All right. So let’s translate this into actual life. What did it look like, sound like, how did the scene change for the character that was you?
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to go from having to prove your worth to owning it? What did you do different? What did it look like? Yeah. I would say, so there’s four primary things that I did, right? And the first thing is so unsexy. And it’s the thing that we never want to spend time on, but it was really that practice of awareness, really hyper-developing my sense of self-awareness. What were the thoughts that I was thinking about my life?
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How was I showing up in my life in all the places and spaces, right? It was like really paying close attention and asking like, why am I doing these things? It’s not just what am I doing, but why am I doing it? Why am I exercising seven days a week? Why am I only eating salad for lunch? Yeah. Why am I not setting boundaries with clients? Yeah. I feel like uh if somebody could pull a transcript,
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of your internal narrative. We pull transcripts on our podcast. Could somebody pull a transcript on the last week because that’s been horrible and shitty. I’d like to see what’s going on in there. If you could read a transcript of your own thoughts, that awareness alone would be so powerful. It’s like reading hate mail. My narrative at that time when I was not healthy was like reading hate mail. It was like,
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somebody that I kind of cared about in my life writing me really awful things. And that person happened to be me. Like how awful is that? And so you’re right. Like that would be such a beautiful thing because we could really quickly recognize the quality of our thinking. And if that thinking is not inspiring you to take action or inspiring you to kind of show up in your life in a powerful way, it needs to be, it needs to, there’s some work that needs to be done there.
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So the practice of awareness is huge. was noticing a lot of things in my life that honestly I just didn’t want to notice because it called me into work. It was so much easier to avoid it. So you said there’s four things. I listen to your broadcast. Is this your four parts of your consistency code? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Tell us what that is so that then you can frame it because I know you have a book coming out and I want to talk about that. So awareness is step one, but tell us what the…
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Tell us about the consistency code before we keep doing the other three. So ultimately the consistency code is helping women through the problem that I think I truly helped them solve, which is helping them to lessen integrity pain. So what is integrity pain? Integrity pain is the very real discomfort that we feel physically, emotionally, mentally from living our life out of alignment with what we truly want. Okay. Okay. We all have it and we all have 10,000 forms of it.
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And if we can lessen the integrity pain in our life, we will be happier and healthier.
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And so the book is about solving that problem. How do we live with less integrity pain so we can have more health and happiness? And the four parts of the code specifically, I will tell you the whole first part of the book is about behavior change science. So it really kind of helps people to understand why behavior change doesn’t just happen in 21 days. I know we’d love to believe that, but that’s not how rolls.
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But it also sets the stage for understanding the specific chemistry of the midlife woman and how our brain is changing, our physiology is changing. Obviously our hormonal landscape is a big part of that. And how does that play into behavior change? So the first part of the book is all about kind of the science behind it. And then the consistency code itself is four practices and they’re very simple and they’re very unsexy, but they are powerful. So the practice of awareness is number one.
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uh And I will tell you with the practice of awareness, um it’s becoming more aware of your surroundings, like where you are at any given time of day, because that’s really helpful to your nervous system, staying calm. um It is naming, like noticing your thoughts, naming and noticing thoughts, naming and noticing emotions, and starting to pay close, close attention to your behavior, how you’re treating yourself, how you’re talking to yourself, how you’re feeding yourself, all the things.
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Once we collect some data on how we’re actually showing up, then we have to get clear on how we want to be showing up. What is the version of myself that I want most expressed in the world? That’s really important clarity because it tells me the direction I do want to travel in. Well, and you can’t get what you want if you don’t know what you want. It’s so true.
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The brain, that’s the good news though. The brain will help you get whatever you think you want. You just have to decide what you want. And I know, and you know, my story is long, but I can remember 46 waking up and somebody kept asking me, my ex-husband now, what do you want? And I couldn’t even answer the question because I had spent 30 years not knowing what I wanted, trading my opinions for drink tickets and
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going along to get along. I lost myself. I had no idea what I wanted. So that question is, I think the most important question you can ask yourself is, what do I want? Because there’s no way to get what you want if you don’t know what it is. Well, and you said it so well there. It’s that self abandonment. We’ve all done it to some degree. We’ve all done it in different ways. But at Midlife, so I call Midlife the renovation years.
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because it’s the time of life where we look around and we’re like, damn, I did some awesome things. Like I built some things. There’s parts of ourselves that we enjoy or we like. And then we also look around and we think, I don’t really like the art on the wall anymore or this carpet has got to go. Right? We start having less tolerance for our own BS. That’s really what happens at midlife. And so there’s the invitation. Do you want to continue to force yourself to tolerate your own BS?
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Or do you want to actually start to soften that and heal that? I definitely recommend the latter. Oh, I got the breakthrough comes after the breakdown. Yeah. You’ve got to let it go. And that’s scary. But the sooner you let go, the better it gets. Absolutely. Absolutely. So there’s that reckoning. That’s what I think the practice of awareness is. It’s like a reckoning with yourself of, okay, I have to meet myself where I’m at.
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no matter how messy and ugly and inconvenient that is. That’s just, we can’t fix what we don’t face. So I got to face it to fix it. So that’s the awareness practice. Then once we have awareness on how we’re showing up and how we want to be showing up, then we start to organize ourselves a little differently. So the second practice is the practice of organization. I call it just kind of keeping promises to yourself. It’s like, how are you going to plan?
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to move your life to this higher level, to this higher ground. And because I see women doing one of two things. They have no plan at all. So it’s all willy-nilly. And you your brain likes the path of least resistance. So if you don’t have a plan, it’s always going to revert back to what it’s always done. That’s law of behavior change. It’s like you will take the path of least resistance. So if you don’t know what you’d want and you don’t have a plan to get it, could not go anywhere. Absolutely. And the other thing I see women doing,
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is the other extreme, which is they make all the plans, right? They get the color-coded markers and the planner, and they spend all weekend making a plan for what they’re going to do this next week to take care of themselves. And then there’s no follow through because the plan is so ambitious. It freaks your brain out. And a freaked out brain is going to say, hell no, I can’t do this. Maybe next Monday. Yeah. And that’s what it becomes, right? Repetition next Monday, next Monday, next Monday. After Christmas, after summer. After tax season. After the holidays. Absolutely.
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Yes. So we have the practice of organization, which is really, always recommend. So Susan David, who is a psychologist that wrote the book, Emotional Agility, I highly recommend everyone read it. But she talks about your state of whelm, which I think is really important when we are organizing ourselves. Your state of whelm is where you’re not feeling overwhelmed and you’re also not feeling underwhelmed. You’re feeling a little bit challenged, but it’s not freaking you out.
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And when I ask a woman, is she in her state of well, one of my clients are really used to that language. If I ask them that, they’ll often say, no, I’m totally not in my state of well. And it’s like, great. So how do we simplify this to make sure you’re in your state of well? Because the other thing to understand is that your nervous system, I’m sure you know this and your listeners may be aware of this too, but your nervous system is meant to oscillate all day long. It’s meant to go through periods of an effort and periods of recovery.
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But that’s not how most of us live. We live in constant escalation of stress. And then at the end of the day, what happens, we face plant, right? Or we start reaching for the alcohol and the food and the Netflix and all the things. Yeah. So how can I organize my day in a way that honors my nervous system? Because if my nervous system is taken care of, I’m not going to look for all of these self-soothing activities because I don’t need to. Yeah.
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You’re talking about environmental design, like creating a life you don’t need to escape. That’s not send yourself into the same situation and hope it goes well. Like you’ve got to, you got to set yourself up to complete the stress response throughout the day, oscillating, coming all the way back down into peace and then going back out. And most of us, like you said, live in pants on fire survival mode and then wonder why we’re pouring vodka on it to quench the fire. Totally.
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100%. So there’s a lot of work to be done there because it’s not that women aren’t organized. It’s that their organization is not honoring their brain or their nervous system. And so we have some work to do there. And then from there, and this is where I probably do the bulk of my coaching, is the practice of follow through. We can have the best plan in the world, but if you don’t follow through, it’s all for nothing.
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There’s really, I think, two core skill sets in the practice of follow through that are missing from most wellness programs, which is befriending emotions. We’ve got to learn how to feel all of them without escaping. ah We have to recognize that we’re emotion generators. So I can actually generate emotion. And how do I do that? And then, of course, parenting my brain. I’ve got to take responsibility for the thoughts that are in my brain.
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um in order to show up to do the work I’ve called myself into. And so those are the skillsets I teach in the practice of follow through and they’re game changing because I think that that is true, like self-management. It’s what allows us to have powerful self-leadership skills is being able to feel emotion and being able to manage my mindset. And then the last skill is really just the practice of realignment.
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Because life is going to throw us a lot of curve balls and we are going to have so much opportunity to get misaligned and off course and do things that we didn’t intend to do. And that doesn’t have to be the end of our efforts. It’s, just applying skillsets that allow us to realign with the direction we intended to go.
28:53
Okay, so I love the follow through skill. I think that is exactly where we fall through. We make big plans and then we don’t execute. Can you give me though a very specific example of a client you’ve had or maybe in your own life where using those skills actually resulted in more follow through? Like talk me through an actual lack of follow through and
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what the intervention is, when and how to do those skills. Yeah. So it’s every coaching call I get on because what happens in a coaching call is I always ask a woman to celebrate her rise. Where are you winning? What’s going awesomely well? And then the second question is where are you rumbling? And rumbling is where we’re stuck, where we’re not following through, where we’re confused. So that’s where a lot of the gold gets revealed. So a woman will say something to me like, well, first of all, let me say this.
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In our previous call, she’s always made commitments. She’s always told me what she’s committing to in terms of her own self-care between that call and the next time we talk. So we get on the call and inevitably there’s something that she didn’t follow through with. And let’s just say, for example, it’s exercise, right? That comes up a lot. Like I said, I was going to walk every day for 20 minutes and I didn’t. Yeah. And so I will ask her what of these four areas
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were the reason that you didn’t follow through. So were you, did you have a plan for walking every day for 20 minutes? And a lot of times that right there is the error. They just had no plan. Okay, great, let’s solve that. Let’s pick a time, specific time of the day, but let’s say that they did have a plan and they still haven’t followed through. My next question is, what were you feeling in the moment that you saw it on your calendar and you didn’t wanna go? Like you just decided not to go. And they’ll say something like, well, I was feeling overwhelmed because I had so much to do at work.
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I’m just feeling so overwhelmed at work and I was feeling pressed for time. And so what happens is she starts revealing her quality of thinking. She was focusing on not having time, on being overwhelmed, that this was inconvenient. And so I will start changing her self-narrative. I’m coaching her to think about it in a different way. Let’s look back at your history. And when you take that daily walk, when you come back and sit down at your desk, how does your work day go?
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And she’ll often say, oh, I feel so inspired and I’m creative and I’m calmer and I’m less reactive. Okay. So what if in that moment next time you remind yourself of that, right? You like, and this is what self coaching is. Self coaching is talking yourself into it rather than out of it. We’re so good at talking ourselves out of it. So she’ll do a little bit of that work with me. Like I always say to my clients, I will be your coach only until you’re willing to assume the role yourself.
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eh That’s the objective. I’m talking myself out of a job. I’m coaching myself out of a job. And so, you know, I am that voice for her for weeks and weeks and weeks until finally she starts coming to calls. And when she tells me she has a rumble, she also coaches herself through it. Just naturally. starts telling me why she didn’t follow through and what she’s going to do next time. And I’m like, okay. Like now, and we also can see the pattern of her showing up to do the work more often.
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doesn’t mean perfectly, doesn’t mean a hundred percent success rate. It just means she’s being a lot more consistent at honoring the promises she makes to herself. I think this speaks to a foundational misunderstanding about what really needs to change. You know, I say with my women, this is a thinking problem, not a drinking problem. And you’re focusing on reducing your drinking or you’re focusing on walking more.
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when truthfully there’s a hundred thinking habits that are ultimately manifesting as drinking or not walking or whatever it is that you want to do and learning that it’s the thoughts that perceive the behavior, good and bad, and that you actually have control over your thoughts. Like you can ask yourself a better question. And I use the analogy with my clients that your brain’s just like a search engine. When you type in
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what the fuck is wrong with me and whose fault is it, it’s gonna generate all of this information to answer the question. When you say, how could I be 10 % more consistent this week? And what do I need to make this happen? Boom, it starts popping popcorn and answering that question. And I think that...
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Back to number one for you, like awareness of your thoughts and the fact that you can ask your brain a different question. You’re not a hostage to this stream of consciousness. You actually can take control of the conversation. And with my women who are often professionals just like yours, I’ll say, well, have you ever been to a meeting where somebody keeps bringing up dumb, stupid points? Do you just let them hijack the meeting? They’re like, well, no. I’m like, yeah, take control of the conversation in your brain.
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you’ll be amazed at how much more effective you are when you assume responsibility for your own internal narrative. It’s so true. And I love that the way you said that, like, just ask better questions. that’s it is. better questions. Ask better questions. And the other thing you bring this up, and I think it’s so important to like highlight it, is that I think that we live in a culture that loves this idea that action precedes motivation. And I think that we love
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like definitions, like, OK, it’s that way or it’s the other way. And I think it’s both. think sometimes you can feel unmotivated and take action because you just aren’t buying into the emotion. You’re going to act anyway. That is a possibility. But it’s also true that you have the capacity in every moment to motivate yourself. Are you using that to your advantage? And if you did, I bet you’d follow through a lot more often.
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You are the source of your own motivation. This idea of I have to wait until I feel like it, I have to wait to be ready. It’s like no motivation comes from feeling good about what you’re doing. You got to act first. And like you said, it does come from both ways. But I think people don’t understand that they are the source of their own motivation. Motivation is tied to your self narrative. It doesn’t come in an overnight package from Amazon. this is the example I give is nobody who thinks they hate running
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gets a runner’s high. Doesn’t happen. You know, it’s the story you’re telling yourself that triggers the motivation and that causes the dopamine. Dopamine comes from anticipation. And if you’re anticipating something positive, then there’s your motivation. If you’re anticipating that it’s going to suck and that it’s going to hurt and it’s going to be hard and that you can’t, then you don’t have any motivation. Yeah. I always say that motivation is something you work for, not something you wait for. Oh, yes. So how are you working for it? Like, are you…
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And this is the value of listening to podcasts like this or reading motivational material or hanging out with people who are inspiring. It’s like you curate an environment and a life of motivation, but you have to go out and seek it. That is your work is to work for motivation, not to wait for it to find you. Yeah. Why do I want this? Yeah.
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answer that question. Why do I want to take a walk every day? What’s on the other side of overcoming the activation energy to get my butt off the couch or out of my desk? all right. Now, is there another, is there a fourth? The last piece is the practice of realignment because life is going to throw a lot of curve balls. Life loves throwing curve balls. Like you might get five curve balls today, right? A curve ball is anything that just throws you out of alignment with what you intended to do. And people who are really successful in life,
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however you define success, it’s not that they don’t get misaligned. It’s that they have strategies for getting themselves realigned very quickly. And I find that so many of my clients just don’t have those strategies. And it’s really funny because the consistency code, it’s like, well, where do we go when we’re misaligned? Will we go back to the practice of awareness? Why are you misaligned? Where are you misaligned? What do you need to do to stay in your state of whelm and just pivot yourself back in the direction you intended to go? It’s like the, I always say the consistency code is a wheel.
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because it always turns as long as you have breath in your lungs. This work is never over. Right. It’s not a straight line. It’s not a destination. It’s not someplace you arrive at and get to have cocktails on the beach. That’s not how it works. Health is something we commit to hopefully every day for the rest of our lives. Some days you’re going to do it really well and some days you are going to do it horribly. You’re just not going to be great at it. If we make that mean…
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that we suck and we’re never going be good at this and I’m not destined to be healthy and all the things like you were just saying, the quality of thinking, of course we’re not going to get realigned because we’re our own obstacle. But if I change my self-narrative and I just say, okay, Courtney, you had a bad day or this day just got carried away in ways that you just did not expect and there was more on your plate than you were able to manage, so what are we going to do to make sure tomorrow doesn’t roll the same way?
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So maybe I have to put a little more forethought into my food or whatever it is, the thing that I feel like I messed up with. ah But realignment is a practice. And I don’t feel like as humans, we’re really great at practicing realignment. What does it look like? Yeah. What does it look like to get to that step and then move into realignment? How does that look? How does it look?
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like moving back into realignment? Well, I think it’s circling right back to what we were talking about earlier, which is like your vision for how you want to be showing up. So I have all my clients create a power statement, which is basically just finishing the sentence. When I am living with power, purpose, and impact, I am a woman who what? When you’re living in that place, what do you do? How do you take care of yourself? How do you think? How do you problem solve? And when my clients are misaligned, I have them read back their power statement to me.
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Because then I don’t even have to tell them anything. They just read their own answers. Uh-huh. Right? So they read the power statement. They’re like, oh, I see what I need to do. I need to meet myself where I’m at. I need to not buy into this emotion. I need to pivot my thinking. That’s where self-coaching starts. It’s like they have to have that clarity of who they want to be in the world so they can realign with it. And you’re just one decision away from doing that. One decision. One decision.
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Literally, this is how you generate your own emotions. And when you tell your brain what you want, I want to feel powerful, then your brain can solve, well, what’s the power move right now? Totally. And you are one decision away. And I think I know for years, I chased the cheese. I will be powerful when I’ve lost my baby weight, when all my kids are perfectly behaved, well dressed, and get all A’s on their report card. I mean, good luck, lady. I had four kids.
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But I always thought my power was on the other side of these accomplishments. So like you, I had to prove my self-worth and then I could feel powerful. And then that day never came because I was living out of alignment. I didn’t understand what I really wanted was a feeling and that I could have that where I was. Yeah. Yeah. And man, when we become power generators or just emotion generators,
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that allows us to step into our power and the journey of whatever we’re trying to accomplish becomes so much more enjoyable. Because like, what a shame to have to like go on a journey of losing weight or getting whatever your goal is, making more money, whatever the thing is, and you hate every step of the way. You somehow think you can hate your way there, but then be really happy once you get there. That’s not how it works. I know.
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I know. And you said something earlier about the direction you’re facing. And in my niche, we talk about alcohol, right? We talk about the slippery slope. Sure. And the only difference between being on the slippery slope and a freaking mountain climb is the direction you’re facing. Like, all you have to do is turn around. Wherever you’re at, turn around. Where do you want to go? And I love your realignment statement. I am the type of woman who is, what is it, powerful?
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Yeah. When I’m living with power, purpose, and impact. Power, impact. get that tattooed or put it on a post-it note because those words instantly bring you back. Yeah. They instantly bring you back. It’s like a compass. Yeah. And that is your true north. When I am living with power, purpose, and impact, I am facing the right direction. When I am doing that, if that’s
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what you want, your brain will solve, every decision becomes a litmus test. Is it more or closer or deeper into purpose, power, powerful and impact or is it out? And that I love the realignment piece because I also teach that realignment is a feeling. Like what you want is always a feeling. And when, when you know that what you, what you want,
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then it feels you’re no longer being drained of all your mental resources and emotional exhaustion with the background noise of everything that’s wrong and why you can’t and why that’s going to be hard and why you’re going to start next Monday. All of that energy gets restored when you are in alignment. It’s like the three cherries on the slot machine click into place and you’re a powerhouse when you’re in alignment. It’s so true. And I think to that point,
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You know, we often are trying to identify uh misalignment, like where I’m misaligned. And it’s like in order to answer that question, you better start identifying what it feels like to be aligned. Yes. Because we just kind of, when we’re aligned, we don’t really pay attention to it. We aren’t like honoring it or celebrating it or being aware of it. And then of course, it’s just, it’s kind of harder to identify misalignment sometimes.
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So knowing what alignment feels like for you, for most women that I hear, they’ll say it feels like calm. It feels like home. It feels like ease. It feels like ease. Ease, openness. Yes. It’s a feeling. I often say the solution to alcohol use disorder is a feeling. If you felt powerful and purposeful and impactful, you would drink like somebody who feels that way. Problem solved.
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I mean, course it’s not that simple. There’s a lot of work as we know and as your clients know, but truthfully, you got to start with the end in mind and that realignment, that alignment piece is a feeling and we’re just so used to trying to figure out what’s wrong so we can fix it. And the truth is you got to figure out what’s right and expand it. Yeah, it’s so true. And I’m such a believer that health is an exercise in expansion.
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And expanding the way you think and expanding what you believe and expanding how you feel. Like it’s expansion. And that’s so not what we’ve been taught. We’ve been taught it’s all about shrinking and getting smaller and all the things. It’s like, no, it’s really about expansion. Yeah. All right. Well, tell us about your podcast because I love your Grace and Grit. And I also think sometime we should meet in real life and have an alliteration off because I notice you like alliterations as well, Grace and Grit, all the things.
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um And so I do too. And so we can have a little contest and enjoy that game. tell us about the podcast and then talk to us about the consistency code. I know that’s coming out soon, right? Yeah. November 5th. Okay. November 5th is the launch date for the consistency code. And honestly, it is the breath and the heart of everything that I teach. it’s like all my clients and all of my community members go through the consistency code course.
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before anything else in my ecosystem. Okay. And I wanted to turn it into a book five years ago and we all know how that goes, right? Yeah. I just thought writing a book would be the simple thing. Apparently it’s not. So here we are. We finally got here. My podcast is really, I mean, we’re approaching our 400th episode. We’ve been around for 10 years. It’s called Grace and Grit. And it really is
45:23
All conversations, women’s health. So we talk about everything from like all those dimensions of health that I mentioned earlier. We cover all of that ground. ah So if people want to find out more about that, they can go to my website, graceandgrit.com to find the website, sorry, to find the podcast and all the programs and things. But the book has its own website, which is the consistency code.com. And ah there are some things that people can go there and grab right now. They can definitely drop their email to be on the wait list.
45:53
Then we’ll have all kinds of goodness that is kind of a bonus to the book that will be available once the book launches. That’s awesome. Well, is there anything that I haven’t asked you that you would like to say or share or just word of wisdom? uh I would just say that I think the thing that women do not hear enough is that you really don’t need more information. You need more application.
46:21
And that’s really where we struggle because we’re so overwhelmed by all the information that’s coming at us. And in all the years that I’ve coached, I’ve never met a woman ever who did not know at least one thing that she could do to improve her health and happiness. The question is, why aren’t you doing it? Yes. Right. And what’s behind that is a lot of thoughts and a lot of unwillingness to feel certain things. And if we can solve that, if we can get you out of that integrity pain,
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life is going to get a whole lot better. Yeah. And mean, gosh, I wish we learned these skill sets as kids because I think it would have changed. I know it would have changed my life in a lot of significant ways. I think it would have saved me from a lot of unnecessary suffering and probably unnecessary suffering of the people around me. Just saying. Just saying. Yeah. It’s not that it’s hard.
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But it does require effort and it requires um paying attention. And the last thing I would say is the consistency that I truly advocate for is just consistent self-honoring. And that does not always look the same. Some days self-honoring looks like putting yourself to bed at seven o’clock at night and just saying, I’m done for the day. And some days self-honoring looks like getting your butt out of bed and doing the hard things. Yeah. Yeah.
47:49
So it’s that consistent self-honoring, whatever that means for you, so that you can be a fully expressed human because at the end of the day, that’s what this is all about. When you are not fully expressed, the world loses out on that because it’ll never exist again. Your expression will never exist in this package, in this way. That is a tragedy for that to not exist. I think a large part of self-honoring also is honoring your past decisions because there is zero benefit from
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any beating up of that I did get myself out of bed or I didn’t get myself out of bed. Either way, it already happened. So honoring the past version of you’s decision and not going back and saying you should have made a different choice. That’s where it begins. Honoring every decision you’ve ever made. It’s not your fault. Nothing went wrong. You are here. It’s your responsibility. What’s next? Yeah. Focus on moving forward, looking ahead. Absolutely.
48:47
All right, my friends, I hope you loved this conversation with Courtney as much as I did. Her consistency code framework, awareness, organization, follow through and realignment is such a powerful roadmap for getting out of your own way. And here’s what really landed for me. You don’t need more information. You need more application. We all know at least one thing that we could do to improve our health and happiness right now. The question is, why aren’t we doing it?
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So if you got value from this episode, please share it with somebody who needs to hear it. Send it to that friend who’s stuck in a cycle of making plans she doesn’t follow through on. Screenshot it, post it on your stories, post it to your social. Just help us spread this message to women who are tired of self-sabotaging. And if you’re a successful, high-achieving woman who’s done with the cycle of breaking promises to yourself, especially when it comes to drinking,
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I want to talk to you. Click the link in the show notes to apply for a free discovery call. We will map out exactly where you’re stuck and why following through at this point feels impossible. And then exactly what you need in terms of guidance and support and accountability to create long lasting change that you don’t need willpower to sustain. You know, asking for help is not a sign of weakness. It’s a sign of strength. Powerful people
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Don’t try to do everything by themselves. They hire experts. They hire people smarter than them. They hire people who have the experience to guide them. One of my favorite quotes is, you can only rise to the level of problem that you’re capable of solving. So there is no greater power move than hiring somebody to help you solve this problem. So get in the show notes, get on my calendar. And for everybody else, thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being a part of my community. I love you. I appreciate you.
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and I’ll see you on the next episode.