Welcome to the inaugural episode!

I’m spilling the beans about my new direction, my intentions for this show, and why you’ve probably had a really hard time changing your habits. We’ll explore self sabotage, the mind-body connection, the power of positive self-talk, and how to feel better (but not in a cheesy, rah-rah, unicorns-and-rainbows kind of way).

What’s covered in Episode 1

• Why I’m moving away from straight-up nutrition coaching
• The patterns I noticed around self-sabotage, both with myself and my clients
• The one thing that determines whether you’ll be successful with something
• How your thoughts shape your reality, including your physical health
• How your subconscious mind influences your habits, health, and happiness
• Ways to gently shift your self-talk into a more positive place
• The new tool I will be integrating into my practice (it’s not functional medicine or lab testing!)

Relevant Links and Credits

Looking for the download, “7 Signs Your Subconscious Mind is Sabotaging Your Health and Happiness”? It’s at the top of this page!

• Follow me on Instagram @hollyfisherhiggins
• Check out The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo
• Check out Sean Croxton, podcast host and money mindset expert
• Download The Holistic Psychologist’s Future Self Journal
• Recommended reading: The Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton
• Show music: “On the Verge” by Joseph McDade

Podcast Transcript: Episode 1

Hello! Thank you so much for tuning in. I made it happen. The podcast is here! I have this ridiculous setup in my closet, because the cats really wanted to be on this episode. I have a feeling they’re always going to want to be on the episodes, so this closet is probably going to be my studio. This is not a podcats. Okay. No more puns this episode, maybe.

Anyway, let’s dive right in. Episode one. Confessions of a health coach. I’ve got some beans to spill. I’ve got some, I’ve got some things to get off my chest, some confessions as it were. So what I want to talk about this episode is the new direction I’m going in. And this not a completely new direction, but it’s definitely a bit of a pivot from things I’ve talked about in the past. And if you’ve been following me on Instagram, this might not come as a massive surprise. I don’t know.

Maybe it will be a massive surprise. You tell me. So I’m going to talk about that. I’m going to tell you why moving forward, I’m gonna be talking less about food and more about something else. It’s not that food isn’t important, it’s very, very important. But unless you have this other thing in place, food can only take you so far. So I’m going to continue talking about both. I’m not not going to ditch the food entirely, but I have really come to believe that this other piece of the puzzle is massive. So I’m going to be diving into that more. And finally, I want to give you my perspective on why you’ve probably had a really hard time changing your habits.

So brief back story, especially for those of you who might be new here, and not know my story. I’ve written about it extensively on my website and shared about it on podcasts elsewhere. So I’m not going to spend the whole episode telling you a back story, but brief backstory. I used to be diagnosed with 10 different mood disorders, ranging from depression, anxiety, agoraphobia. I’m not going to list them all, and I inadvertently healed myself through food. I discovered the incredibly powerful link between nutrition and mental health, and I became so passionate about that link… about the power of food to heal our body, to heal our mind, and how you can really create a radical remission in quote unquote mood disorders using the power of nutrition. So I went back to school several years ago to study that. I enrolled with the Nutritional Therapy Association, amazing program, and I said to myself, this is going to be my mission. I’m going to spread the word about the food-mood connection. Because if I had been told about this, I could have saved myself a lot of suffering.

So I made that my mission. I made that my fire, and I did it, and it’s been amazing and I have gotten to help so many wonderful clients! Shout out to my clients, hello clients, I love you. And in my practice, you know, I mostly help women who struggle with depression, anxiety, autoimmunity, hormonal imbalances, digestive issues, fat loss, fatigue, those sorts of things. And it’s been absolutely incredible.

But after a while, after a few years of practice, I noticed some really distinct patterns, patterns around self sabotage. We all know self sabotage. You can have the right plan, the right support, you can have it all mapped out. And still there’s that pull back to the familiar. There’s that tendency to create all of these roadblocks for ourselves. And I became really, really interested and why we struggle with self sabotage, because it’s not just my clients that struggle with self sabotage.

I struggle with self sabotage too, in many areas of my life, and I thought about it so much ,because it’s definitely not for a lack of wanting change. Some people out there will say things like, “Oh, you must just not want it bad enough. And you know, in my tough love moments, I’ve said similar things, but I actually don’t believe that anymore. I think, you know, if we decide we want change, we probably really want to change. So the self sabotage piece, again, you know, we can have the perfect protocol, have the best, highest quality supplements, we can have accountability, we can have it all mapped out, we can be excited, and yet we slip back into our old patterns we get in our own ways. Why do we do that? I wondered, and I wanted deeper tools to help help people with this piece, because coaching is excellent and can really help you figure out where your blind spots are, find some new strategies. Coaching can absolutely help. But I wanted, I wanted to dive deeper into this because it was just so fascinating and interesting to me.

So I fell down a really deep rabbit hole, a very, very deep rabbit hole. I started researching habits, the mind, the subconscious, human behavior, and I discovered why some people have an easier time with change than others, and why you might find it really easy to change one area of your life, but not another area of your life. It’s like beating your head against the wall. Can you relate to that? And when I was down in this rabbit hole, which I am still very much in, I had so many light bulb moments and ahas, related to my own journey. Like looking back in the rear view mirror, knowing what I know now, there are things along my path that makes so much more sense now that I was completely blind to up until this time.

I thought it was all about the food and the supplements and I had the right protocol. And if only I could share this protocol with other people, they would be able to replicate what I did. And yes, the protocol is absolutely important. You know, diet, lifestyle, supplements, all of that is important. But I had this other thing going for me that I had no idea I had going for me. And to illustrate that, I want to paint a little picture for you. Maybe you’ve heard this analogy before. If you ask a fish to tell you about his life, bear with me. He’s going to be like, Oh yeah, I have my octopus friend and sometimes I swim past the treasure chest and uh, you know, sometimes there’s sharks and I have to swim away from the sharks. That fish can talk all day long and he’s never going to tell you about the water he’s swimming in because water is all he knows.

He’s blind to it. It’s just like if somebody asked you to talk about your life, you could talk all day long. I’ve got this super annoying coworker and my sister’s driving me crazy. You get to the end of the day, you probably wouldn’t tell somebody, Oh, and every few seconds I breathe in and breathe out just because it’s so natural to you. So I was swimming in quote unquote water and I was blind to the fact that I had something on my side that I didn’t realize was influencing me and helping me so much.

Okay. So what is this thing? Can I answer it? A drum roll sound effect here. It’s belief, plain and simple. Belief. I had belief on my side and I knew I believed in myself and I knew I had a fire in my belly, but I didn’t realize what a crucial ingredient this belief was to propelling me forward.

So when I decided to change, I drew my line in the sand. I just had this deep knowing, this deep conviction that no matter what I was going to change and this was going to happen. And this is the missing ingredient. I see this with my clients too — the people who have the most profound recoveries are the people who just have this deep belief and this positivity, that change is going to happen. You know? And when we spend a lot of time fighting or resisting and doubting, change is a lot harder. And I know this sounds really simplistic and cutesy and maybe, maybe you’re like, I don’t believe that, but just bear with me. So have you ever seen those memes on Instagram? She believed she could. So she did. Or whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right. You know, and we like these and we repost them and maybe we get t-shirts made out of them or we hang plaques in our bedroom.

But I call this my pot smoking in the basement voice. But like, have you ever really, really thought about this because this is, this is it. Do you believe that change is possible for you? This, this is what determines whether you’re going to be successful with something or not. And these aren’t just cutesy rah-rah cheerleader quotes that people post on Instagram. This is like ancient, profound, deep wisdom. I’m telling you, let me just break this down for you because do you notice how often you try to do something for self-improvement? Whether that’s, you know, changing up your eating, getting into a daily journaling routine, exercising, meditating, and you’re doing these things. But in the background, you’re still telling yourself these stories like this probably won’t work for me. Oh, it worked for them, but I’m somehow different. I’m the exception and it’s not gonna work for me because nothing ever works for me or I’ve failed a million times before and I’ll probably fail again.

I call this the screw up hall of fame. Like we all have our, our case of screw up trophies. Look at all the evidence for how I’m a failure or I’ve always struggled with this. It’s genetic, it’s my destiny. It’s too much work. It’s too hard. So when you have these thoughts playing in your head, even though you so desperately want to make change, this is like having one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake and when you’re driving the car of your life with one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake, you are going to burn out that engine really, really fast. That is what is behind self-sabotage. You’ve got one foot on the gas with your actions and one foot on the brake with your thoughts and your beliefs.

Your thoughts do create your reality. And there’s a thought model that I like to use from Brooke Castillo over at The Life Coach School. Check out The Life Coach School Podcast. It’s my favorite. I like how Brooke Castillo breaks it down the best, but a lot of other people have written about this and they put it in slightly different formats, but really it’s, it’s all the same thing. And truly it’s universal law. But the way Brooke breaks it down, she has a little acronym, CTFAR, that stands for circumstances, thoughts, feelings, actions, and results. So let’s say you have the thought, I’ve failed a million times and I’ll probably fail again. So how does that thought make you feel? It probably makes you feel defeated. Despondent, tired, unmotivated. So when you feel that way, what kind of action are you going to take? Probably not much action or only a little bit of action. And then what results are going to come from that? Probably more of the same.

So do you see if you, if you jump from the thought all the way down to the result, you can see how the thoughts are creating that results. But if you plug in a thought that feels just a little bit better. I’m not a big fan of like when you’re working consciously anyway. I’m not a big fan of rainbows and unicorns over the moon affirmations because a lot of times we don’t believe those things and they don’t feel good to us. So you have a thought that feels just a little bit better, just for today, I know I can do this. If you think just for today, I know I can do this. How is that gonna make you feel? Probably more along the lines of capable, inspired, motivated. What action are you going to take from that? You’re probably going to take some action. You’re probably going to do what you want to do and then the result is that you start noticing a shift, noticing a change, moving in the direction that you want to move in. So I use that thought model a lot in my coaching.

And there’s another outline that I want to share with you. And I think that I originally heard this from Sean Croxton, but I know Bruce Lipton and Caroline Myss have said similar similar things, but what I heard Sean say was our beliefs become our biography. So whatever you believe about yourself, that becomes the biography of your life, the story that you tell yourself and you tell other people about who you are, your beliefs become your biography and your biography becomes your biology. So the stories that you tell about yourself, about your life, about your health, about what you’re capable of, those literally influence your biology. Whatever story you’re telling yourself about your health and why your health is the way that it is, that’s creating a feeling which is creating an action which is creating a result.

So the story that you are telling yourself about your health is perpetuating itself into more of whatever you’re dealing with with your health. And don’t feel bad about this. People have a tendency once they, I know I felt this way about certain things. Once they realize that the stories that they’re telling themselves are influencing their outcome, they start getting really down on themselves. I’m such a bad storyteller to myself. It’s all my fault. I’m a horrible person. Please, please just pause. Don’t go down that rabbit hole right now because the truth is you have been programmed your entire life to think that change isn’t possible for you or to think that you are stuck with X, Y, Z condition or stuck in X, Y, Z situation. You have been programmed to believe the things that you believe from a very young age, by your family, by doctors, by everybody you grew up around. You know, you just absorbed and internalized all of these things.

So I want to give you a few examples. Let’s say you’re young and you’re at a checkup and you hear a doctor tell your mom, Oh, she’s really slow to develop. You know, she’s not moving along the timeline. Or you’re told from a very young age or maybe not even from a young age, but you’re told by a doctor this is genetic or you know this condition has an 85% chance of progressing. So those are examples within the medical scenario, but there’s also the stories that you hear from your family, Oh, you’re just like your father. He’s such a nervous Nelly. You hear that over and over again. You’re going to start to believe it. Or Oh, we’re the Smiths and we have bad knees. All the Smiths have bad knees, or every man in this family goes bald by the age of 30. We grow up internalizing all of these biographies of everybody else around us.

So I’m going to get real chicken and egg on you here right now. Is it really the genetics that are responsible for these things, or is it the belief that these things are inevitable? More on that in a minute, and again, I want to reiterate, don’t judge yourself or criticize yourself for beliefs that you may have about yourself or stories that you tell yourself about your health. Because the first step is always awareness. It’s always just noticing with loving compassion. What stories are you telling yourself, whether they come from you or they came from outside of you, what are you saying to yourself? And once you notice what you’re saying to yourself, you can start to tell yourself different things. You can start to intentionally think thoughts that feel just a little bit better. And the other thing that I see with this, this doesn’t mean that you have to get all of your beliefs in order before you start taking actions.

So a lot of people, when they find out about these concepts, they’re like, okay, I need to stop all of my actions and my healthy habits. I’m going to, you know, I’m not gonna worry about the eating or the running or the whatever right now because I gotta get my beliefs in order. And then once I get my beliefs in order, then I can go do my habits and things. You can work on both at the same time. It’s a process that that can happen in tandem. If you say, Oh, I’m going to go over here in the corner and work on my beliefs and ignore the rest of my life. It’s just another form of stalling and self sabotage, so you can change your habits and shift your beliefs at the same time. But I’ve gotten to the point where I really don’t think we can truly sustainably, longterm change our habits and how we’re showing up in the world without making our beliefs conscious and purposefully working to rewire them.

Because otherwise it’s like that. That one foot on the gas, one foot on the brake thing I told you earlier. Otherwise we’re always going to slide back into our old way of being. So again, the first step is getting conscious, getting all that junk out on the table. And we do that through loving awareness of ourselves, noticing what’s coming up for us, observing our thoughts. And the second step is to work on shifting those beliefs and a lot of what you’re working with when it comes to those really deep, really resistant thoughts and patterns that you just feel like you can’t get over.

A lot of what you’re working with is programming in the subconscious mind, which is largely cemented by about the age of seven. And there’s a famous quote and there’s a lot of argument as to who said this. Some people say it was Aristotle, some people say it was Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Doesn’t really matter. The quote is give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man, give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man. And what that quote means is whatever’s going on the first seven years of our life, that is going to be a mirror and a blueprint to what happens for the rest of your life. That doesn’t mean that we’re doomed. If you know, age zero through seven was a hot mess. It was for most of us. Generally speaking, and it doesn’t mean you’re doomed to that. It just means that until you become conscious of what’s imprinted there and work to actively rewrite it, you’re going to keep repeating the same patterns that you’ve always repeated.

So how do we dig this stuff up and write new stories for ourselves? Well, there’s a lot of different techniques to do this and some of this work happens on the conscious level. Some of this work goes pretty deep into the subconscious, but regardless, repetition is very, very key. And my favorite tool when it comes to repetition is the Holistic Psychologist’s Future Self Journal. If you, aren’t following her on Instagram, get on that, but her Future Self Journal allows you to consciously bring light to your patterns, your habits, your stories, and then actively through repetition work to rewire those. And eventually you do that enough, it filters over to the subconscious level and it just becomes ingrained in you. Meditation is another wonderful practice to assist in this work, but a tool that I have become really, really passionate about is hypnosis.

Hypnosis is one of the quickest, most effective ways to access the subconscious mind and work with what’s going on there. And I feel like in the United States, I don’t know if this is true in other parts of the world, but I feel like in the United States we have a lot of misconceptions around hypnosis. You know, most of us have probably been to some kind of event where there was a stage hypnotist making everybody dance around like chickens or whatever. I know, I experienced that in college. Or maybe you’ve seen some of these hokey hokey old movies or I feel like there’s probably a Twilight Zone episode where somebody gets stuck in hypnosis, and there’s just sort of this lore and this mysticism about it that it’s this crazy thing, but it really isn’t. And in other parts of the world, I get the, I get the impression that it’s a lot more mainstream and everyday. But it’s a simple, effective, powerful way, again, to access and rewire deep seated beliefs. And self-perceptions, and I have been using it a lot myself, both working with a practitioner and I’ve also been doing self hypnosis lately, and I have been able to shift some really long standing stubborn patterns and beliefs myself.

And I’ve also been able to shift a health issue, a personal physical health issue. I will do a whole other episode on this in the future. It’s way too much to get into, but this is a health issue that I just thought I was going to be stuck with for the rest of my life. Because of some things that happened to me. And it’s changed, it’s turned around and I am, I am in shock and awe and gratitude. So I’m just blown away by the power of this tool and kinda kicking myself for not discovering and utilizing this sooner. And this is what I am back in school for. I have been studying this intensely for a while now and in the coming months I am going to be integrating this into my practice and using this as a tool with clients.

And the type of hypnosis that I’m studying, it can actually be done virtually. And that’s how I’ve worked with my practitioner is virtually and I am just so, so excited. You know, the excitement doesn’t just come from the shifts that I’ve noticed myself, but also what I’ve been learning in my training. Stories that I have heard from colleagues, I’m so geeked out about it and it is a specific form of hypnotherapy called RTT or Rapid Transformational Therapy. So if you’ve experienced hypnosis before, and it wasn’t RTT, this is probably a little bit different than what you’ve experienced. It uses really specific techniques and processes. So stay tuned for more on that. I’m going to be going really in depth in future episodes with you and teaching you how to deliberately use your mind to guide you toward health and happiness because self-sabotage sucks, right? And beating your head against the wall and wondering why you’re not making progress is no fun.

And going back to the hypnosis bit for a minute, I have to share something really fascinating with you. Remember earlier in the episode I was talking about genetics and saying, well, is it, is it really the genes that caused the issue or is it the really strong belief that we have about genetics being so powerful that causes the issue? So something I learned in the training that I’m taking right now is often when people are regressed in hypnosis… because regression is a tool that you use in hypnosis to allow the mind to jump back to earlier ages. So often when somebody is regressed around a specific issue, let’s say they are, regressed around a symptom or a specific health complaint they’re having, and you ask the mind to show you the cause, the reasons behind the issue, where it’s origins are, where it started.

Often somebody will regress back to a memory of being very young and being told that something is genetic or something runs in the family. How crazy is that? So that right there, that the mind immediately goes back to five or six years old being told by a family member, Oh, we all go bald by the age of 30. Or, Oh honey, this is genetic. To me, that points to belief, and it’s just so fascinating. And I’m not saying that genes don’t influence anything at all, but this whole belief thing, man, it’s my jam lately.

So the answer to your challenges, it’s not always gonna be a shiny new protocol or a magic bullet supplement. Maybe you don’t need a secret hack. Maybe you need to do the things that you know you need to do consistently, but your beliefs and your self perception are what’s standing in the way of that.

So I’m going to be talking a whole lot more about this. I hope you’re as geeked out as I am, and food supplementation, wellness strategies, all of this stuff is still very, very important and has its place. I don’t want anybody emailing me or “at-ing” me saying, you just told me to believe and nothing else matters. I’m not saying that at all, but I think belief is such a huge piece of the puzzle. I’m not going to stop talking about the other pieces, but I’m not going to talk about the other pieces anymore without this piece.

All right. Your coaching takeaways for today, I’m going to try to end every episode with some actionable takeaways for you. Just start noticing the negative beliefs, stories, narratives that come up for you. Maybe write them down. Keep a little note on your phone, keep a little journal, and once you notice those thoughts, pick a thought, preferably a thought that’s really stubborn for you, something that you find is on repeat all of the time, and pick a thought that feels just a little bit better.

You don’t have to jump all the way up to, I’m amazing and I have an awesome life and I’m the coolest and I’m the best and everything’s hunky dory, ’cause that you’re not going to feel good about that if that’s not true for you. So pick a thought that feels just a little bit better and intentionally and deliberately work to repeat that to yourself. Write it all over sticky notes, lock screen on your phone. Focus on embodying that new thought.

All right, so if you want more head on over to mindspeakpodcast.com. I have a free download for you there. Seven signs your subconscious is sabotaging your health and happiness. This is a good one. So head on over to mindspeakpodcast.com and grab that free download. Also, if you like what you hear, take a moment, subscribe on your preferred channel, leave a review and a rating. I really appreciate it. This helps me out so much being a brand new podcast. You can also screenshot this episode, tag me on Instagram @hollyfisherhiggins, and I’d love to see you spreading the love. So I will see you next time. But in the meantime, go believe in you. I do.