Summary 

Welcome to the first episode of our brand-new Coffee Chat Series: a special collection of candid, strategic conversations designed to help high-achieving women break free from the hidden mental blocks standing between them and their dream body goals.

In this kickoff chat, I’m unpacking one of the most sneaky yet expensive thought habits that keeps so many smart professional women stuck: the belief that “it’s not working.” And no, this isn’t about willpower or discipline. This is about thought currency.

Join our next Coffee Chat: http://www.burnstressloseweight.com/coffeechat

Learn more about the group: https://www.burnstressloseweight.com/group 

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

• Why “low currency thoughts” like it’s not working feel practical—but quietly bankrupt your belief, time, and progress
• How your primitive brain is conserving energy in a way that sabotages your long-term success
• The simple math that shows just how costly negative thinking really is (spoiler: almost 500 hours/year)
• How to trade in your $1 thoughts for $100 thoughts—and what that means for your weight loss and wellness goals
• One powerful question to start identifying your real strategic gaps today

Listen to the Full Episode:

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Featured on the Show:

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Download the full transcript here.

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  Hey friends, welcome back to the Burn Stress, Lose Weight podcast. As you may or may not have heard, we are doing a brand new series called the Coffee Chat series, where I am coming to you live via Zoom, and we are chitchatting, but more like powerhouse, talking about the specific gaps, the strategic gaps, the mindset gaps that very smart overachieving women are having when it comes to hitting your dream body goals. So this is a series I'm going to keep doing this series because I really wanted to have. An opportunity and a way for us to talk like we are talking around a coffee table, but again, not just casual chitchat, really strategic conversation where we're talking about real problems. The real, real gaps that you might have in hitting your goal. And it's an opportunity for you to share what is actually coming up for you, where you get to ask real questions, how it pertains to your life, and I will actually ask and answer. Those questions inside the coffee chat. The other thing that we're doing as I do the series that I'm really just having so much fun with is we will be posting the replays of the coffee chat inside our private Facebook group. So this is where I will be posting the replay and I'm going to be giving you, unlike real coffee chats, like I'm giving you actual homework where you can actually bring. Some of the topics that we talk about in the coffee chat and exactly how that conversation is going to impact you this week, the actionable steps that you're going to take from what you learned in the coffee chat. So these chats are really meant to be deeply transformative for you, for you to start changing the way that you think about weight loss, the way that you think about your goal, the way you think about any obstacle that you might have had in the last year, the last month, the last multiple days. And we're going to turn it around together. So if you miss the first coffee chat, it is not at all a problem you're not behind. You can go and grab the replay and get into the private Facebook group where you can get all of this juicy information and get streamlined and set up for our next coffee chat, which we're going to be doing. I gonna sprinkle them, you know, as we kind of keep moving forward. And you'll get the dates and the times for when our next coffee chat is when you are signed up. So you can grab your seat at the table at www.burnstressloseweight.com/coffeechat. Our first coffee chat I'm thinking of as almost like a springboard into all of our future coffee chats because it is a foundational skill that I think is going to be a concept that we lean on in moving forward when we talk about urges and cravings, which is our next coffee chat. When we talk about specific strategic gaps that you might be having and how to solve them as a busy professional, we're going to be coming back to this one concept, what I like to call high currency thoughts. I feel like it's one of those conversations once you see it, it's really hard to unsee and it's a concept that I really think is going to move the needle for you in losing the weight you want and feeling better as a busy professional. So I'm bringing our very first coffee chat to the podcast today. I really hope you enjoy it. And if you want to come live, which is truly the best way to enjoy these coffee chats, is to engage with me in real time and. To ask questions and have a real conversation that I strongly encourage that you  come live to our next one. You can get all those details over at burnstressloseweight.com/coffeechat. Without further ado, let's get into our very first coffee chat where we talk about how to create high currency thoughts. So you stop bankrupting your bank account of your time, your energy, and your results. Hey unstoppable friend you're listening to the Burn Stress Lose Weight podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Priyanka Venugopal, a physician, turned a stress and weight loss coach for professional working moms. And the founder of the Burn Stress, Lose Weight, Feel Unstoppable Small Group Coaching Program. This podcast is going to inspire change at the root for you on and off the scale. I've lost a little over 60 pounds while being a busy physician mom with two young kids and an unpredictable schedule. And along my journey, which was full of many, many imperfect moments, I have learned how to skip past the fads and the gimmicks. I am on this mission now to share with you how you can have a real strategy and mindset skills to really have more of the life you want that you have worked so hard for. Let's get into it.

   

  Hello, welcome to our very first coffee chat. This is a series I have been thinking about a lot. If you're brand new to me, I'm gonna introduce myself in just a minute. I'm gonna take like no more than 60 seconds to tell you about me, but I've really been thinking about how we can start to open up more conversations, more opportunities for us to connect, where you really have an opportunity to get your questions answered. I think that sometimes we try to stick ourselves, you know, it's like a round peg into no square peg, into a round hole. Like I have a thing with these kinds of phrases and sayings and it can feel really frustrating when you try to take a plan that maybe you see on the internet that you read about and you try to fit it into your life, but you feel like it's just not working. So I was thinking about how can we, you and I have more of an opportunity to have conversations where you actually get questions answered, where you feel not only more inspired to be able to hit your dream body goals, your weight loss goals, your wellness goals, but you leave with actual, tangible, actionable steps, which is my entire goal in creating even the series. So welcome to our very first coffee chat. This is the coffee table. We are going to be, I have my little coffee cup. Can I show this to you guys? If you've seen this on video, my daughter made this for me for Mother's Day. This is supposed to be. A little bit of a self portrait. I don't know, but it is just the sweetest thing. She knows I love a good mug and I wanted to bring my coffee. I'm a huge coffee lover. If you love coffee or if you love tea, or if you don't love any hot drinks, what do you love? What are you bringing? You can bring. You don't have to love coffee to be here. But I want us to have a conversation, and I want you to come into this conversation. This is not a casual little chit chat. I know we're having a coffee chat, but I want you to think about this entire series anytime we are hosting a coffee chat as a power move for you this week where you're going to come in thinking that you know one thing about weight loss or wellness, are you feeling your best? And you're going to walk away with believing something a little bit new. So think about these coffee chats as truly a power move. I want to encourage you to come to these live if you miss the first one. If you're watching this as maybe a replay, it's you're not behind. It's completely okay. But just get back on to this entire series live because it is going to really help you open up hitting your goals this year. So today we are kicking off our very first coffee chat with a really high value topic where we're going to talk through the hidden cost of the thought. It's not working, or maybe you have some flavor. It's not working. We're gonna get into what those are, and not only will that sentence or a flavor, it's not working, create a lot of discouragement and preemptive disappointment. What I have found after taking a fine tooth comb over results of not just myself, but of high achieving women in every industry is it is very quietly draining your time, hundreds of hours of time per year. It's draining your energy. It is completely drying up the feeling of belief in yourself and you hitting this goal, and you'll find yourself feeling really stuck or spinning or confused. And if that's ever been you, I want you to know that this is the exact right place. We're going to be getting into that, and it will be because this exact reason, telling yourself a story like it's not working. Before we get into the coffee chat, I just wanna take one minute to introduce myself if you are brand new to me and to my orbit.

  Hello, I am Dr. Priyanka Venugopal. I am a physician, specifically a board certified OBGYN physician, and I am now a stress and weight loss coach, specifically for professional women who self-identify as overachievers. Maybe you call yourself a perfectionist or an ambitious person, or just a go-getter you might not identify with any of those labels. I know that I didn't always identify as a perfectionist, but you know that you are in the right place if you identify someone who loves hitting goals, don't we all? You love getting the A+ and the Gold Star. You love seeing the pound come down on the scale and you use those wins and those accomplishments to validate and give you the evidence that you need to believe that it's working. Lemme just say that again. You use the A+, the gold star, the pound on the scale, the proverbial accomplishment to give yourself permission to believe that it's working. You'll also be someone on the flip side, you know, if you put a lot of your belief and you know a lot of your thoughts into needing that kind of evidence. On the flip side, you're not only going to just hate mistakes and hate missteps, you will use those missteps and maybe missed opportunities or maybe a lack of action or lacking results as a way to really beat yourself over the head. You are going to be someone that really goes into a spin. You might find yourself really ruminating or second guessing yourself, and you might try to walk yourself out of disbelief or those 'it's not working' thoughts with either doubling down with a brand new fresh start, or you're going to do what a lot of us have done. I know that I've done it. You're going to take your foot completely off the gas. You'll micro quit now. I remember for a really long time, and if this is you again, I want you to know that you're not alone in this. It used to be really, really normal for me to think it's not working. Maybe it's just me. Maybe it never will. I can achieve all of these amazing achievements in my life. I can become a board certified OBGYN physician. I can take care of these two crazy kids. I can run a house, I can, you know, jigsaw puzzle my entire life. But this one area is escaping me. It's not working. When it comes to my weight loss and my fitness goals and I used to spend, without realizing it, a lot of bandwidth there, I would spend a lot of either conscious time thinking it's not working or a lot of subconscious time thinking it's not working and it never will. And I've done, I mean, as I've shared before here and on the podcast, I've shared before that this cost me thinking it's not working and believing it might never work cost me a lot, and that's what we're getting into today. I want to just take a second to leap forward to the very end of the chapter, very end of the book. I want you to imagine what the impact will be if you never, ever thought it's not working ever again. Imagine you spent no minutes of your time, no energy, and no bandwidth ever believing it's not working. Can you imagine where your brain power could go if we just never thought it's not working ever again. This is one of the, I call these power moves, I'm calling these coffee chitchats power moves because for me, when I stopped thinking it's not working, and again, this was not a perfect practice and it took some practice and some intentionality, but back in 2019 when I started this work, when I weighed a little over 200 pounds, I started to catch how often and how insidiously I had been telling myself it's not working. And once I saw it, once I saw the cost of it, which is what we're getting into today, I couldn't unsee it. So imagine every single time you hit an obstacle. Even if you gain a pound on the scale, every time you have a sticky, messy moment, every time you're imperfect in the way that you wanted to show up, imagine that you did not ever think it's not working. I truly credit this one skill of knowing how to direct my thoughts on purpose. To the sustainable success that I've had. So I've lost a little over 60 pounds and I've done it without the fads and the gimmicks and without chasing the hormone rabbit down the perimenopause rabbit hole. And I did it as a busy physician with an unpredictable schedule and two young kids. Yes, there is specific strategy, which we're going to be getting into in this coffee chat series, but the reason that I wanted to start with this specific concept, the, it's not working. Concept is because I think about this as a foundational skill that we are going to be leaning on and leveraging over the course of this coffee chat series. So we have to do this work for any plan that you ever have to work for you to be able to navigate any obstacle that you have as a busy professional. The topic of today is not just, it's not working. The topic of today's coffee chat is. A concept that I call thought currency. So in the Unstoppable Group, which is my small group coaching program, I teach a concept called thought currency, and it's where we can really just take a little bit of an inventory for every thought we have when it comes to our dream goals. This could be a professional goal, a personal goal, a weight loss goal of relationship goal is either. A withdrawal from your bank account, the bank account of your life, or it's a deposit. Either you are quietly bankrupting your belief, you're quietly bankrupting your time. You're quietly bankrupting your ability to hit your goals because you're not believing in yourself. Or you are depositing into that bank account, you are creating more time, more bandwidth, and more energy to do the work it takes to hit the goal that you have. If you just let yourself dream for a minute. For just this year, I feel like we all woke up on New Year's Day. You know, some months ago we all woke up on New Year's Day with this idea of what we wanted for ourselves this year, right? I know I did. I thought a little bit about what would be such a dream for me to hit by the end of this year. I think New Year's are such like amazing examples and amazing times that we get to do this little mini assessment. So just take a second and think about what was your goal for yourself this year? What would it felt like, such a win? What would you feel so proud of accomplishing for yourself when we think about that goal? When we think about whether it's a weight loss goal or a relationship goal or maybe a productivity goal in the workplace, we can start to break down the thoughts we have about our ability to achieve that goal into what I'm going to call low currency thoughts and high currency thoughts. So low currency thoughts will be like a block. Think about it almost like you're driving a car and there's just a wall and you don't see a road around it. So you get stopped in your journey to hit your to, to achieve, to to reach your destination. So you know, not only will you be blocked in achieving your goal, you will stop taking action.

  You might turn around, you might undo some of the progress you've made, and you'll probably spend a lot of time and energy. Feeling blocked in achieving your goal. So that's a low currency thought. We're going to get into some specific examples. Again, if it's you, you're not alone. We all have low currency thoughts, they're normal. High currency thoughts I think about as our ability to overcome the roadblock. So either you see a small pathway, a. You know, on either side of the wall, or you find a way to tunnel through the wall, or you find a way to jump over it as a hurdle. So high currency thoughts might have roadblocks, right? All professional working moms have real roadblocks. We have real constraints on our time and on our ability to achieve what we want to hit. Like all of the goals that we have. Imagine that high currency thoughts were our ability to navigate any obstacle. This sounds really good, right? In theory, low currency thoughts and high currency thoughts. But we might ask ourselves, why would smart overachieving women have low currency thoughts to begin with? Like, why would we have these roadblock thoughts? It's, it's getting in the way of us hitting our dream body goals. It's getting in the way of us achieving our professional goals. Why would we ever do this? So I wanted to start by saying that the biggest reason that I know for me, I have. Kept low currency thoughts and lived and marinated in low currency thoughts for many years is because it simply feels practical. So you could just think about, you know, thoughts like, I have no time, or It's not working, or It's so hard, or that's so unfair. Like just sentences like that. Like you say, a sentence and it's period. It just feels like you're stating the news. You're just keeping it real. You're being practical and it feels like. Nothing else that you could say would feel believable. It's like you might be thinking, Priyanka, what do you want me to say? That it's working, that I have so much time that I believe in myself completely. That's not exactly what we're talking about here. So the goal of today's coffee chat is not to go to delusional thinking or toxic positivity, but what we wanna do is to really take a look at the toxic effects of some of the thoughts that we've been having on autopilot. I call this like your inner soundtrack. What have you been telling yourself? So one of the biggest things that we know is when you have low currency thoughts, we know that it will impact your results. So you might be asking yourself, how do I know if I am having a low currency thought, or how do I know if I'm living in the land of low currency versus creating high currency thoughts? So here's how you'll know if you are having low currency thoughts. 'cause it can be kind of hard to spot on your own. So I want you to just take this kind of list and just ask yourself, which of these is it? If you feel me calling any of yours out, just know that's because I've done this for a while and I want you to drop in the Q&A which one of these maybe resonates with you? You feel stuck in your results on the scale you might be gaining and losing the same five to 10 pounds. So you feel really stuck on the scale. You feel stuck in a relationship. You feel stuck in your professional career. You'll know that you are in low currency thoughts if you keep planning and planning and planning. But you never quite follow through. You might be stuck in low currency thoughts if you find yourself over-indexing for Fresh Start Energy, you really love the Monday morning fresh start, the fresh month, the brand new year, the new birthday. You really are over indexing. And what I mean by that is you're relying very heavily on wanting to feel motivated first before you take action, you'll feel your brain constantly humming with rumination thoughts or worry thoughts. You'll find yourself really thinking a lot about the problem and not a lot about the solution. You always start thinking, maybe it's my hormones, right? You might start finding yourself going down hormone rabbit holes or long research rabbit holes on the internet simply to solve this problem. And the ultimate sign in my experience that you are in a low currency thought is you don't feel good about yourself. Right? Ultimately, it's one of those feelings that you have, you feel in your body that you're just not feeling good about yourself. You're being unkind to yourself. You're judging yourself, right? For the lacking results that maybe you've had. No, I think it's really important that we really acknowledge that low currency thoughts are normal. So the intention of these, coffee chat is not to villainize any of the thoughts you've ever had. They're very practiced. They're very habitual. They're normal because you're a normal, messy human with a messy human brain. But we also really want to take a look at, think about like you're a detective with a magnifying glass, that the most primitive parts of our human brains are the ones that will have the most negative, biased thoughts. So thoughts like it's not working or it's so hard or it's unfair, right? Any thoughts that that are, you can kind of feel the tone and tenor are just depleting you of time and energy. Why do we have these thoughts? The most simplest explanation for it is that your primitive brain is simply scanning for danger. Low currency thoughts to me are a sign that your survival brain is on overdrive. It's scanning for, you know, this is really what it comes down to. Why would I ever expend any additional effort or energy? As a busy, professional working mom, I'm already spending a lot of energy on my kids and my partner and my work. I already have to do so many things. You have a laundry list of things to do. Why would I spend any extra effort or e or or energy on something that might. Not work. Can we hear that? Your brain is simply scanning for danger. It's saying, why would we expend extra effort or energy if it might not work? And when you're operating from this place, this is what I call low currency thinking, your brain is simply trying to conserve energy for survival. So I think one of the, the biggest things that I realized when I was thinking about today's topic and today's conversation around. It's not working. And why is it that smart women who have achieved so much in their professional careers and in their personal lives, why is that? We would think this about weight loss or your fitness goal. It is literally the number one reason that I had is because I didn't wanna waste my time. I didn't wanna waste any more time, any more effort, any more energy. If it's not going to work anyway, then let me not even bother. Right? So I think that it's really important that we call this. Out because we will tell ourselves that we don't want to waste time on something that might not work. And then our brain, because we love confirmation bias, will completely start looking for all the ways and all the reasons that it's not going to work. And what do we do next? We take our foot off the gas and our result is that it just never works. So I wanted to just do a little bit of math. With anyone that has ever told themselves it's not working and I don't wanna waste my time. I don't want to waste any energy on something that may not work. Right? We are telling ourselves a lot of these thoughts to conserve energy. We're doing it because we don't wanna waste time, but I wanna take a low currency thought and actually walk through how much time it's actually costing us. To keep a thought like that.

  So let's just imagine that even for five minutes per waking hour, and let's assume that you're sleeping for eight hours every single night. I'm kind of smiling at this because the chances as a busy, professional working mom that you're sleeping for eight hours every single night. I mean, I would love it if that was true. That's one of my goals. It's not really there yet. If you were spending eight hours sleeping every single night and you spent. Even five minutes per waking hour, having a low currency or roadblock thought steeped in something like it's not working. It's too hard, it's not fair. I don't have enough time. What if it doesn't work? What if I can't figure this out? What if I waste time? What if this is a waste of energy? If we keep low currency thoughts for even five minutes per waking hour, that adds up to 9.333. Hours per week. If we take that over the course of the year, it is almost 500 hours per year, just shy of 500 hours, and that's only if we are having low currency thoughts for five minutes per waking hour. Now, I love doing a good math equation. This is like me putting my scientist hat back on because a lot of times overachievers are trying to save ourselves so much time. We don't wanna waste time, we don't wanna waste energy, but it's actually keeping our low currency thoughts. That's the actual source of us wasting hundreds of hours and depleting our ability to achieve the most massive epic goals that are actually within your reach. How many of us have had thoughts like. It's not going to work. I don't wanna waste my time. What if it doesn't work? What if? What if it doesn't work? What if I gain it back? What if I can't figure this out? What if it's too hard? We have so many. What if thoughts that create a lot of fear and nervousness and right. It makes you pull back, takes your foot off the gas. The result is. It never works. And I think that I really wanted to highlight the math of this because the reason we will keep our low currency thoughts is because our primitive brain is trying to save us time and energy. So I just wanna say it's, it's kind of wild, right? When we really think about our primitive brain which is just wanting us to survive. It wants the lowest effort option. It wants to make sure that we are alive and well, that we are not in danger. It wants to conserve energy, it wants to conserve our resources, which for the professional woman is time and it is mental energy, right? It's absolutely going to be your time is your number one most precious commodity. So if you. I can imagine your primitive brain just wants to save you time, but it is wasting hundreds of hours of time in second guessing and having low currency thoughts. I want you to really think about what that costs you over a lifetime. I'm promising for anyone that's coming to this coffee chat live, or if you watch this replay, you'll get back at least two hours per week. But if you really do this work, you will get back almost 10, 10 hours per week simply from catching. Your low currency thoughts, really seeing them for what they are. They're just a sentence in your mind, trying to keep you out of putting in effort and actually doing the work of turning it around into high currency thoughts, which we'll talk about later in today's coffee chat. So I wanna just take one very specific sentence. That maybe you've told yourself. So some flavor, I want everyone to think of one. You can drop it in the q and a. And if you're doing this as a replay, then I want you to share with me what is the one most common, the soundtrack that just gets started playing in your mind. For me, it used to be something, some flavor of what if it doesn't work? What if I can't figure this out? What if I gain it back? What if I waste my time and energy? Right? So some what if thought like this. Let's walk through. What happens when you keep your low currency thought so you see a number on the scale, or you see the effort or an action plan. You have a thought, what if it doesn't work? What if I gain it back? What if? What if? And I want everyone to answer what is the feeling that you have when you think that way. About your goal for the year, about the work that it takes when you have a thought, like, what if it doesn't work? What if I gain it back? What are some of the emotions that you have when you think, what if it doesn't work? What if it doesn't last? What if I gain it back hopeless, discouraged. Disappointed, weak. These are emotions that we are having. We don't feel overwhelmed or discouraged or disappointed because of a three digit number on a scale or because we gained a pound over the weekend. That's never going to ever be the reason that we feel discouraged or overwhelmed or defeated. We're going to feel overwhelmed and discouraged and defeated because we have a low currency thought about our results, about what happened over the weekend. So let's just take this one example and follow it through. Let's say you think, what if it doesn't work? What if I'll never figure this out? What if I gain it back? You feel overwhelmed, discouraged, disappointed or defeated. Hopeless. What do you do next? You might like take that negative thought, the negative low currency thought that you have, and you turn it into a weapon. You weaponize it. You start judging yourself for this problem being so hard, you perseverate on it for a long time. You get mad at yourself. Maybe you get mad at the people around you. I know I used to get mad at my husband, like, why is this so easy for you? How come it's so like, like really righteous, right? How come it's so easy for you to just be whatever weight you wanna be and it's so hard for me? Let's all just really take this, right? You see it three dig number on the scale, or maybe you see a pound up on the scale, or maybe you didn't. You were perfect over the weekend and you simply have a thought about it. A low currency thought, what if it doesn't work? What if I can't maintain this? What if it doesn't last? Some sentence like that and you feel overwhelmed or discouraged or hopeless, and then the next thing you do is you give up or you get mean to yourself. You start judging yourself. You ruminate on the problem. You go off track even more. It's like, I've already given up, so might as well really give up. One meal is off. So let me just give up for the whole weekend. I want you to think about while you're spending your time, your effort, and your energy doing all of those things, what are you not doing? Okay, so while you're thinking the thought, what if it doesn't work? What if I can never figure this out? What if I gain it back? You feel hopeless and overwhelmed and then you go further off track. What are you not doing in that moment? This is equally important, right? So what you're doing is you're going off track, right? You're giving up on yourself one thing, one pound turns into five, which turns into more. What are you not doing? You're not getting curious with yourself. You're not treating yourself well. You're not compassionate or patient, or treating yourself like a real human who sometimes goes off track. You're not identifying, this is the most important one when you are spending your time and your energy and your bandwidth judging yourself or telling yourself it might not work. What you're not doing is you're not doing the higher quality work of identifying your strategic gaps. Lemme just say that again. While we spend our time and our mental bandwidth and the thoughts that are occupying our conscious brain with it might not work. What if it doesn't work? What if I never figure this out? While we occupy our bandwidth with that, what we are not doing is occupying our bandwidth with solving for our strategic gaps. We're not asking high quality questions around what actually happened this past weekend. Why is the number what it is? So here's the the cost of this. This is why I really wanted to walk through a specific example. You're not only spending the five minutes in your low currency thought of, what if it doesn't work? What if it's too hard? What if I gain it back? Not only are you spending the five minutes there, you're also having the trickle down effect, the compounding effect. The compounding cost. This one insidious sentence that is costing results on the scale. It's costing you peace, it's costing you clarity. It's costing you compassion for yourself. It's very much costing you belief in yourself. It's costing you confidence in the next step. It costs you actually figuring this out and solving the problem. So this is where I like to get, you know, I like to put on my scientist hat and get a little math out. We can really calculate. What is this one insidious sentence? We probably have multiple of them. That we tell ourselves in different flavors. What is it actually costing? What's it creating for us? And if we keep these thoughts, how much are they robbing us of the dream life that we actually want? As busy professionals, how much is it robbing our bank account, of being present in our life? Being present with our children, with our families, not thinking about this problem as a like forever problem of actually feeling your best in your body and in your gut, feeling good in your skin. It's robbing us of all of this, but I really want to highlight earlier in the coffee chat, the reason that we are doing this is not because notice I haven't even said the word discipline, even once. This is not a discipline problem and it's not a time problem. It is because our very normal human brains, very normal, messy human brains are simply trying to save you, putting in effort and save you time. And because I really wanted to walk through the math of this, I want us to just start to catch. Because once you see this is really, you can't unsee it. I want us to just notice every time that we are having our low currency thoughts and then keeping it on purpose. We are taking our foot off the gas. And every time we do that, our brain learns a lesson. Our brain learns. Every time I think of this low currency thought, and I shove this into her brain, the more energy I will consider for her. So this, these thought patterns of what if it does all these what if echo, these what if thoughts? What if it doesn't work? What if I gain it back? What if it doesn't? What if I waste time? What if, what if? What if all of these, it's not working? Thoughts? They turn into super high weights in our brain, they're like very fast, very habituated. You won't even realize how often you're thinking them, and it's really wild. And also kind of brilliant that our brains have done this to save us time, to save us putting in an effort towards something that may not work. But what the intention to these coffee chat is, is also to show us the cost of keeping some of these thoughts you might wonder. Okay, so I can see the cost of keeping certain low currency thoughts. Thoughts around your time and your effort and what it takes and what if it's a waste? I hope that I have convinced you, or at least compelled you, that actually keeping low currency thoughts are robbing you of your time, your presence, your energy. Do we feel that? Have I, like, have I made the case that keeping low currency thoughts is actually robbing you of your actual results that you want? Feeling good in your body, having the results you want. So the next question you might ask is, how do I start to uplevel my low currency thoughts? Like how do I trade in this $1 bill for a hundred dollar bill? I want you to imagine that you're going to an ATM and you have a lot of $1 bills and you want, these are like this low currency, $1 bill's, like a low currency bill, and you want to exchange every $1 bill for a $100 bill. Can you imagine how wealthy you would feel if you could trade in every $1 bill for a $100 bill? And if you did that with all of your $1 bills, all of your like loose change in your purse, like, I mean, do any of us even have I I do everything on digital Apple Wallet. So this is a figurative example, this like proverbial example. I want you to imagine you took every loose change, every quarter, every penny, every dollar bill, and you put it into an ATM and we're gonna talk about what the ATM has to do. The ATM has to expend a little bit of effort and a little bit of energy to spit the a hundred dollars bill back out. It's not going to happen on its own. It's not for free. Right? So the ATM has to do some work for the $1 bill to turn into the a hundred dollars bill, right? It's not magical. It's not going to magical thinking. It's not going to be toxic positivity, and the univers will also not just drop it into your lap. So the very first thing I want to. Invite everyone that's listening to this that's like, wait a second, how do I create $100 thoughts, high currency thoughts and replace my $1 thoughts with high currency thoughts is we have to first accept that it will require a little bit of effort and that it's worth it for you. Is it worth it for you to have high currency thoughts? Is it worth it for you to stop bankrupting your bank account with your time and your energy and absolutely with your weight loss results, is it worth it to you? We have to opt in. We have to opt into, yes, I'm willing to put in some effort and energy to turn my $1 bill into $100 bill. If you are not opting into that, this is just a really great passive consumption exercise that you get to just feel good listening to. But if you're saying, yes, I want to opt into this, I want the ATM that will take my $1 bill and turn it into $100 bills. I want to learn how to convert my low currency thoughts into high currency thoughts.

  I've opted into the fact that this will take a little bit of effort and some potential discomfort. This is what we have to do. The very first thing is we have to have an actual way to respond to our low currency thoughts. This is my solution to how do we not toxic positivity ourselves. We don't wanna just be delusional. We don't want to just, you know, rah rah, blindly cheerleader ourselves with lip service. If you're believing it's not working, telling yourself stop thinking it's not working, is not actually going to solve that problem. Right? So what we have to really do is learn how to respond. With compassion and some patience and some gentleness and some curiosity to our low currency thoughts. So I'm gonna paint a picture. I want you to imagine that you're in a boardroom and one of your members of the boardroom is a low currency thought. It's just a member of the boardroom. They're very valuable. They're there to make sure that you survive. That's all it is. It's fear, it's nervousness, it's anxiety, it's worry. It's just an emotion. It's a member of the boardroom that's simply saying, Hey, what if this is a waste of our resources. Hey, what if this is a waste of our time and our effort? We just have to catch that this is just a member of the boardroom making a very valid concern known. We have to start thinking about instead of letting that low currency thought, lead the company and waste our resources and right waste our time that we've been talking about. As the CEO of the boardroom of your life, we have to learn how to respond to our low currency thoughts and the way that I recommend doing this. Is by asking really high quality questions and actually answering them. So this is what it might look like. For example, let's say you're in this boardroom and you hear in your mind, messy human brain, just being a messy human brain and going to what if it doesn't work? What if this takes too long? What if I expend all this energy? What if I gained that pound back? We have to actually answer. All of our what if questions. This is the reason. The reason that so many overachievers will sit up late at night ruminating on problems. You'll completely deprive yourself of high quality rest is because your brain is ruminating and perseverating on what ifs. What if this, what if this, what if this? It's just your brain scanning for danger. It's very normal. And the higher up you get in your life, and by higher up, I mean like the more problems you have, the higher up you go in your professional career or the bigger goals and dreams you have, the more problems that your brain is going to try to solve.

  So we have all of these what if thoughts? The reason that we will stay up at night for hours. The reason that we will. Feel that perpetual worry and the perpetual anxiousness and the perpetual fear that makes us take our foot off the gas is because we aren't actually answering the what ifs. We let one, what if, turn into the next? What if, turn into the next. What if I'm just thinking about my son after school, I'm like, oh, how was the, how was your day today? And it's fine. It was fine. That's it. That's all I get. But when I'm putting my kids to bed at night, that's when it all comes out. Like, but what if, what if this happens? And what if that happens? It's like one, what if after the next, it's like he's been holding all of these questions in his mind and they come out when he is trying to go to bed at night. What we have to do is we have to start answering our what ifs. So I wanna give you an a very specific example. Let's say that your low currency thought is what if. I gained this pound back, right? I put all this effort in. I have this plan. What if I do the plan? I lose my, well, what if I gain it back? What if it doesn't work? We have to actually have an answer. Otherwise, we're gonna keep feeling fear. We're gonna keep being afraid. We're gonna keep taking our foot off the guests. We're going to stop leaning in and solving problems, right? So the way that I do this is I actually answer the question, what if you gain a pound back? What's your plan? What if it didn't work this week? Why didn't it? What if you wasted a lot of time? Why did you, I think it's kind of one of those. Things that it feels really simple, but sometimes it is one of those things, steps that we are just blowing right past we think that we can, you know, answer a lot of these questions in our head, but again, you'll know that you're stuck in low currency thoughts if you're staying stuck on the scale. If you're staying stuck in repeating your actions, it's because we're not asking high quality questions and answering them. So we really want to start trading in that $1 trading in the low currency thought we're trading up. To a hundred dollars bill or to a high currency thought. I want you to just realize that this doesn't take time. It doesn't take time to trade out a new thought, but it does take a little bit of effort. So I don't have enough time. It might not work. What if I gain it back? We have to actually answer that question, and this is one of those areas. This is. Coming back to what I was sharing at the earlier part of today's coffee chat. This is how you identify your specific strategic gaps. A huge problem that I've seen as I work with very smart overachieving women in every industry is we use a broad paintbrush to paint a fine painting. We say things like it's so hard, broad bean brush, or I have no time, or we have these really broad sentences that we tell ourself, and asking high quality questions is going to force your brain to answer a question that it hasn't answered. It takes an effort to ask ourselves, I wonder why specifically did it not work this week?

  Did I snack when I wasn't hungry? Did I eat the way that I said I was going to? Did I eat dinner and then snack late into the night? Did I use food to celebrate myself? Did I use food to take a break? Right? Can you see how I'm asking these questions and the more. High quality questions I can ask myself. The more specific I can be with what my strategic gap was. The example that I really like to share, kind of to paint this picture, as you can tell, I love painting pictures. It's like what we sometimes do is we are are treating our menstrual cramps with antifungal foot cream. So lemme tell you what I mean by that. We have what if thoughts. What if I gain it back? What if it doesn't work? We have low currency thoughts and a lot of times overachievers especially think that the solution is just to buckle down, fresh start new plan, count every point, right? We just like revert back to kind of these low quality solutions. But as you know, if you're still stuck in. Your results. We know that that solution is not matching the problem. We know there's, you would've solved the problem. So this is like treating an your menstrual menstrual cramps. With antifungal foot cream, you can have the best antifungal foot cream. It will never treat your menstrual cramps. It will just never work. So what we have to do, taking this example to the next, you know, following the thread with this is we have to actually ask ourselves, wait a second, this antifungal foot cream didn't work. This is my proverbial, it's not working. I wonder why I'm rubbing my foot raw, but my. Stomach is still hurting. I'm still having these cramps. I wonder why. I wonder if it's because I'm applying this cream to my foot, but the problem is in my stomach. So what we start to do when we ask high quality questions is we start to find our strategic gaps. We start to diagnose the real problem. The real problem is I never had a foot problem. I had a menstrual cramps problem and I think that, you know, when we start to just direct our brain start to catch, this is a low currency thought, this is my $1 thought. It's costing and slowly bankrupting me in feeling my best. In my body, in feeling my best in my life as a professional mom, it's costing me to keep this. We have to actually see that it's costing us and there's a solution. I have to put a little bit of effort. I have to put a little bit of energy. It might be hard to do on your own. This might be work you want to do with a coach, but what is the gap for me here? How can I turn my low currency thoughts into high quality high currency solutions. And just remember, if you think that this takes a lot of time, it doesn't. It's just another very, very simple way that your brain is trying to not put forth an effort. And that's always gonna be the case because we have very human brains. So here's the key piece. I really wanted to talk through the cost that it has for you, the time that it takes, the bandwidth that, that it's bankrupting for you, and really take what you're learning today, which is this concept of low currency thoughts and how to shift it into high currency thoughts with asking better quality questions and answering all of your what ifs. Having a strategic plan in place, what if you gain the pound back? What are you going to do? What is your exact strategy? What was the reason that you gained that pound back, like having an actual plan in place For that moment, I want you to take today's coffee chat and not have it just be passive consumption, but really feel inspired to take action on everything you learn. Otherwise, you know, a coffee chat like this or a conversation like this, you might feel inspired for a few minutes, but then it's like forgotten by dinner. So I am actually going to be giving you homework on this coffee chat. It's not like a traditional coffee chat where you just leave. It's a coffee chat that I'm giving you homework because I want you to anchor to what you are going to do differently just from learning this one concept. So I'm going to be posting this entire coffee chat as a replay in our private Facebook group. And if you're here live, I want you to come to our private Facebook group and share with us. Two things. Number one, what has been your top low currency thought that you have had about hitting your weight loss goal as a busy professional woman? And number two is what is going to be your specific uplevel? How are we going to solve and trade in your $1 thought for a hundred dollars? Bill, what are you going to actually tell yourself instead? Now, if you're confused about how to get into the private Facebook group, don't worry. You can actually get into the private Facebook group. We have a link for when you signed up for the series. There's a link that shows you exactly how to sign up for the private Facebook group. It's totally free, but I really wanted to have a space where we can have a bustling conversation around this topic. This one concept. Because as we leap forward to all of our future coffee chats, if we're going to come back to this concept of low currency thoughts and high currency thoughts, and I want you to feel supported. I'm going to be in the Facebook group. I'm going to be answering your questions. I'm going to be commenting on the things that you're saying. If you have a specific question on any part of today's coffee chat, then you get to ask it in the Facebook group and I will answer. And the best part is you really get to see the community of women that are. Also doing this, so you get to get ideas for how to level up your low quality, low currency thought into a higher quality one. If you're still not sure how to get into the Facebook group, don't worry. You can just email us at [email protected] and we will get you taken care of and get you into the Facebook group. So I hope you'll enjoy today's coffee chat. I will be back with another coffee chat one week from today. We're going to have a brand new topic. You better believe we are going to be leaning on today's conversation. We're going to be building on today's coffee chat in next week's coffee chat, so make sure you come back next Monday, May 19th at 12:00 PM Eastern, we're going to be talking about urges, cravings because I don't know about you, but we can all have a really solid, amazing plan and then come Monday night, it feels like the plan just goes right out the window because you have this urge to just snack and nibble and treat yourself right. So again, it's not gonna be you, but we are going to get into it in next week's coffee chat.

   

  I really hope to see you live. If you want to grab a seat at the table, you can go grab your seat over at www.burnstressloseweight.com/coffeechat. I hope you all enjoyed today's. I hope it was valuable for you. If you are taking something away from today's conversation, bring it to the Facebook group. I wanna hear from you and I will interact and answer any questions that come up for you. Hope you guys have an amazing day. Bye. I hope you enjoyed today's coffee chat series on all of the low currency thoughts that are very quietly and insidiously bankrupting you feeling your best, not just feeling your best in your body and in your weight loss results. Though we really walked through how low currency thoughts will completely sabotage your ability to create wins this year, but low currency thoughts are bankrupting your ability to feel your best in your mind, in your day to day, in your relationships when you have these insidious low currency thoughts in the background. They keep you up at night. They keep you worrying and ruminating and taking your foot off the gas in you feeling your best. So I really hope that today's conversation and this topic resonated with you. And if it did, I strongly encourage that you don't just think about this conversation as a passive consumption topic. I really want to create a conversation with you. I want you to ask questions and get in there and anchor to what you're taking away. So make sure you grab your seat. Over at burnstressloseweight.com/coffeechat where you can come live, meet me at the coffee table at our very next coffee chat and get into the Facebook group so you can engage, ask questions, and I will be there to answer any questions that you have.

  I hope you all put a little bit of that effort into turn low currency thoughts into high currency solutions this week, and share with me what the impact is. Have an amazing week, my friends, and I will see you at the next one. Thanks for spending this time with me on the Burn Stress, Lose Weight podcast today. I hope that you are leaving today's podcast episode feeling a little lighter and more inspired than when we started. It turns out. That you don't need to have a stress-free life to hit your goals on and off the scale, but when you feel more empowered to respond to your real life stresses. With true strategy, we will game change how we show up, and how we hit our goals. If you wanna take what you are learning here on the podcast and put it into real life implementation, it might be time for us to work together in the Burn Stress, Lose Weight, Feel Unstoppable group coaching program. Head over to burnstressloseweight.com and you can learn all of the details, the nuts, the bolts, when the next group is starting and exactly how you can join. Okay, friend, I'll see you next time.