Summary 

Believing in yourself doesn’t always come easily—especially when your past is full of evidence that makes you doubt what’s possible. In this episode we’re talking about a subtle but powerful shift: moving from “Do I believe in myself today?” to “Can I believe in my potential?”

Through stories, reflections, and even lessons from her son’s swim journey, I’m sharing how to unlock a new way of thinking about growth, setbacks, and success. If you’ve ever felt stuck because your progress wasn’t linear, this conversation will give you a refreshing perspective on what’s really required to reach your goals, on or off the scale.

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What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

• The hidden difference between believing in yourself and believing in your potential
• Why most of us get tripped up by the “linear success myth” from school and training
• A personal story about years of disbelief and what finally shifted everything
• How failure can actually be the key to unlocking long-term growth
• A practical approach to creating wins without needing full confidence in the big picture

Listen to the Full Episode:

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Download the full transcript here.

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   Hey friends. Welcome back to the Burn Stress, Lose Weight podcast. Today we are talking all about unlocking your potential. This entire episode was inspired by me talking to a good friend of mine. Her name is Steph Crowder. She's someone that I met once I became an entrepreneur, and she's one of my coaching besties, and I was sharing with her because this is a topic that I coach on a lot with my clients in the Unstoppable Group, around this idea of believing in yourself. I coach on belief. I talk a lot about how do you believe in yourself when you don't have the results in hand, and I wanted to share with you some of the realizations that I have had personally for myself over the years. If you have ever been someone that struggles to maybe believe in yourself completely, or you think you need to completely believe in yourself to unlock new results for yourself, then I really hope that this episode is going to inspire you and help you feel an ability to unlock that belief. So when I was sharing with my friend Steph, and what's kind of inspiring this whole story is I was reflecting to her how a few years ago, I didn't believe that I would ever lose the weight that I wanted to lose. I literally had no belief in myself. And I think it's a strange thing because it was very unconscious. It wasn't something that I was really aware of. It's like I was reading the news, I probably won't get there. That was a thought I had. I probably won't ever lose this weight and. That sentence. It was just a sentence in my mind. It was a thought that I was having was very informed by my past. It was very informed by the results that I had on the scale. It was very informed by all the times that I had tried and failed. It was informed by all of the effort that I had put in and never really moved the needle on. So. The thought that I had about myself, which was, you know, a flavor of I don't believe in myself. I don't think that I can ever actually hit this goal wasn't just me being negative or me being a downer, or me just being a critical person. It was informed by my past. It was informed by reality for a very long time, for years and years and years. And if you're listening to this, and if I know you as well as I think I do, you might have experiences as well. You might still be there. It felt like that was just my reality. That maybe hitting this goal that I have for myself, achieving the body goal, feeling my best inside out, having more energy, having more strength, losing the weight that I want to lose is really, that's a result for someone else. It's just not going to be for me. But what I've been realizing is it wasn't just that I wasn't believing in myself and I needed to somehow like have positive thinking and you can do it attitude. The reality was. I actually wasn't believing in my potential. And there's a huge difference. One is not believing that you can accomplish something today. And that was just a true fact. I did not have the results. The scale showed it. Like I could feel the lacking results in my body today. So when I had the thought, I can't achieve this today, that was a very fair and very correct sentence. But what I was also doing without realizing it is I was also not believing in my potential. My future potential. I wasn't believing in my potential to change. I wasn't believing in my potential to grow or to learn or to figure it out. And the part that I think has felt so wild for me and felt disconcerting is I didn't experience this level of disbelief, or I'd never had this issue with potential in any other part of my life, actually, I felt very confident as a student, right? So when I was six years old in Miss Block's class and I would raise my hand, or I was doing my board races against Jerome Funk, I still have those memories so deeply seared in my mind. I was very confident that I was very good at math, I was really fast, and I was going to win the game. Like I just knew that I was going to do it, and that feeling of confidence and in knowing that I was already good at something is what powered me and fueled me into the next era of my education. I was really trying to think about what's the difference between me in the educational setting, me going through undergrad and medical school and residency, and what's the difference between that and like weight loss or a relationship goal or a professional career goal? What's the difference? How come? In one area, I have had more confidence and more belief in my potential, and I could see the road forward versus other areas where I am only able to see my failures. I only have a negative bias on my potential. I don't believe in my future. I don't see it. I remember a time I couldn't even visualize myself achieving a goal. I'm like, what goal? I can't even see it. It feels so far away. And here's what I've uncovered. The difference is that our educational system, and I'm including higher education, higher training, like medical school and residency, it's kind of in this false world that we have constructed that teaches us that success happens on a linear path. If you just do step A and you succeed at step A, then you're gonna get to step B. And if you just get to step B, then you're gonna get to step C. And if you get there, then you get to step D, and then you're gonna have the result. So I was trained as I'm sure many of you have just been programmed to think that that's what success looks like. That's what growth looks like. It's supposed to be you go from A to B to C to D. Then you get the reward, which is you achieve the goal, you become the doctor, you become the lawyer, you become the person that you said you wanted to become, because that is the trajectory forward. And it is something that the educational system and how, at least in the us, how we train our young people to believe that this is the roadmap to success. I still remember when I first started residency as an intern. I didn't know how to even really hold a scalpel. I didn't know how to do a C-section or a hysterectomy. I didn't know how to handle a postpartum hemorrhage. I did not know how to handle anything. I barely knew how to order Tylenol. I still remember when I got a call on my very first day of internship when one of the patients was asking for Tylenol and Motrin. I was looking around like, am I, am I allowed to order this am, me, I'm the doctor and I'm supposed to be able to order this. Am I allowed to do this? I didn't know how to do anything on day one. However, I still believed if I showed up every day, if I paid attention, if I put forth my best effort, if I accessed my smarts. If I asked good questions, if I opened up a textbook, if I learned from my patients and learned from my seniors and learned from my attendings, I believed in the potential that I had to become a board certified OBGYN physician, and I went on and I created that result for myself. The difference between that type of success, linear educational, higher education success is that is a false construct that our society has created in how we learn and grow. The reality of real world growth, real world success is it is almost never A to B, to C to D to E. It actually happens that you make a little bit of progress and you go from step A to step B, which is amazing, and it feels awesome, and maybe you even get to step C, but then you kind of slip around and you forget something and you go back to step A, and then you have to learn from exactly why you went from C back to A, and now you have to try again with new wisdom and new learning and new growth, and now you have to try again and you go to B to C, and then maybe make it to D, but now you slip back to C, maybe you slip back to A, maybe you come back to C. It is that way of experiencing our very normal human existence that is meant to be how humans learn. We were never meant to learn on a linear path, but I think that. At least for me, and I'm thinking maybe for many of you, I was under the false assumption that growth is supposed to be linear and with weight loss. I remember for myself, if I didn't see linear progress or even something close to linear progress, I knew in my mind logically that it's not going to be exactly one pound per week. Over the course of I wanted to lose 60 pounds, like over the course of 18 months, like I knew that it wasn't going to be exactly one pound per week over the course of a year. It should be close, right? It should be around a pound per week. Over the course of a year, it should be half a pound and sometimes one and a half pounds, but like generally on average, it should average out to about a pound per week over the course of a year, and because that was not my experience of achieving success. Because I had tried and failed so many times, I had lost weight, but then gained it back, lost weight, and then gained it back, and I never had a deeply objective, curious, and compassionate assessment and evaluation process for why I ever gained the wheat back. I would start from scratch again. I would just make up the plan again. Let's just count the calories. Let's just make sure we get the macros. Let's hit the protein. Let's hit the sleep. Let's get the water, let's. Put in our steps. I would just try to rinse and repeat a plan, like my whole start from scratch strategy and just cross my fingers and hope that I was a little bit more disciplined this time and just hope that maybe, I hope that I don't have any wrenches thrown into my week. I just hope and cross my fingers that my kids behave and my partner behaves, and my time and my work, and everyone just behaves. So that I have the bandwidth to follow through on what I said, and while I was living that way of believing that that's how weight loss is supposed to be, I continued to hinge my belief in myself on what the scale showed. I was so attached to the number on the scale as my source of believing in myself. If the scale went down a pound, it was amazing. I'm like, this is it. I've got this, I can do it. But if the scale didn't go down a pound, if I either overate, depending on where I was at in my cycle, maybe I didn't get enough sleep maybe I had a salty meal and the scale was up, like it felt like a gloomy cloud was following me around. Because again, not because of the number on the scale, but because I stopped believing in myself, I had thoughts like, see, we knew it wouldn't last. See, there you go again. See, it's probably not going to work, you're not gonna be able to do this. See, this is just more evidence that you are not capable. And I stayed in this cycle for a very, very, very long time until I learned about the impact and the power of mindset. It's why we talk about mindset on this podcast so much, and we talk a lot about how hitting your dream goals, on or off the scale is equal parts science informed strategy and equal parts mindset. So if you're someone that loves strategy, like I see you and I love you, and I'm the same, science informed strategy will only get you so far. There has to be a component that really dives into your mindset. What are you thinking and believing about yourself? Now, here's the amazing, amazing thing, and this is something that I've been really coaching my clients on recently in the group because you may not believe in yourself yet. You remember we just talked about like you have a mound of evidence that you haven't solved this problem yet, and that's okay. It's completely normal. So how do you start to believe in yourself? How do you start to more importantly, believe in your potential? Before we talk about how to unlock your potential, how to believe in your potential, I want to give an analogy because this analogy really gets to my heart and it's something that I hope really touches you. I want you to imagine that your kid is like a really little, really little kid. 4, 5, 6 years old and they are, you know, really into soccer or swim. This is my son. Like, he's so into swim. Swim is his biggest dream and I'm gonna share with you. So last year he got into swim, like it became a really big thing for him. And after doing really well in the summer swim season, which is a big deal in the area that we live, summer Swim is a huge deal. He decided that he wanted to try out for a swim team for the winter season. And this little guy, he was nine at the time. He had just turned nine and he tried out for, I want to say seven teams. I mean quite a lot. I think I'm remembering seven. And he worked so hard. He was the kid. And again, this is just like he's a different flavor of human than any kid that I know. He would wake us up in the morning to take him to morning swim team practice, and then in the afternoon he would make sure that we got there five minutes early. Like he is that kid that just, when he loves something, he is intrinsically motivated. To pursue it. He has been the same with music. He's the same with swim. Those are his two biggest joys in life. And I am not like this. My daughter's not like this, but this has been something very unique to him. And this is the lesson I want to share with you. He tried out for these seven teams for one of the tryouts. He even like on the, on the deck, like there's an area where the parents have to wait and the kids go to try out. There was like a crack in the floor and he slipped and he chipped his tooth. He literally chipped his front tooth at a swim team tryout and comes back and we get rejection after rejection after rejection. He got rejected from every single team, and I think there's a part of him that he didn't even really know what to feel. I know. I felt so disappointed for him. What a lot of us do, and I want you to really take this through, how this applies to your life. I'm using a kid example, but how this applies to your life with weight loss, with a dream goal that you have. It could be on the scale or off the scale. There's a fork in the road, so there's one part of us that might say, see, swim is probably not for you. You're probably not gonna make it. You know, we did try. We tried all the things and it looks like you're just not good enough. And so swim is probably not gonna be our sport, so let's not even bother. I'm making this of course, extreme, but a lot of us will create a three C story, right? Very convincing, compelling, and very convenient to not keep going. We will have a lot of justifications to be very half-assed effort, not take your goal seriously because you're so afraid of the disappointment at failing, that we don't go all in. We don't lean in hard. We don't get so curious about how to solve the problem. So one fork in the road is we're so afraid of failing and we're so afraid of disappointment. That we tell ourselves and we keep ourselves very small. We tell ourselves a story like, it's probably not for me. I probably won't be able to get there. I don't know if I can. Right. Just going back to those thoughts, those disbelief thoughts, those thoughts, full of doubt that keeps you hesitating. So if you remember the think, feel, act cycle when you have a thought like seeds, probably not for me. I probably won't do it. I probably won't make it. Feel doubt and disbelief. What do you do next? Most of us take our foot off the gas. We hide or we put it off, or we don't invest in ourselves or we don't take action. We think maybe, maybe another day, maybe later, maybe when my life is easier. We have so many reasons and justifications that keep our foot off the gas and when this happens. Here's what happens. You never figure it out, right? You never solve it. Now, there is another fork in the road. This is the story. So my son comes home. This is after the seventh rejection, and because I'm a coach and I'm so grateful to this work, I got to ask him some very important questions. I told him, I know you're disappointed and you're disappointment makes so much sense to me because you really tried your best. I know you tried so hard, you didn't make any of these teams and you really wanted to, and I get it. Your disappointment makes a lot of sense, but what do you think was the gap? What was the issue? Did you go to your practices? Were you listening to your coach? Was your technique on point? Was there a skill that you were missing? Was there something that could have improved more? Did we just try out for the team a little bit too late in the season? Let's find the reason. What was the skill or the strategy that was missing for you that you didn't make the team? Because my son is my son and he just, I just adore him so much and I learned so many lessons from him. He said, mom, they only had one spot. We tried out in August. We should have tried out in June. There was only one spot and that kid was just faster than me. I was like, okay. So he realized that there was a few pieces that led to the result of him completely failing, completely not making any of these swim teams. And he said to himself, he said to me, this next year we're going to do the swim club. It's, it's kind of a swim team, but it was something that he'd already been doing. We're going to go back to that and I'm going to go to every single practice and I'm going to just work on getting faster. And the reason that he was able to get there again, we were able to get there together is because he believed in his potential. He couldn't swim fast enough this year to make the team, but he believed in his potential to be able to get faster. He realized this is literally just a math equation. If I show up to my practices, if I follow what the coach is guiding me to do, if I practice my technique, if I fix some of the things that have been missing for me, if I get stronger in these areas, then me getting faster is literally inevitable. It's guaranteed. It's that mindset, that belief in your potential to be able to get better belief in your potential, to be able to figure this out, to find your skill or your strategic gap that might be fillable, that will drive you to show up to do the harder, deeper work to feel the conviction to keep your foot on the gas even when you fail. So I realized sometimes this can be hard to do, especially again, if you have a pile of failures, you have years and years of trying. This can be hard to do. So I want to share with you what happened at the end of the swimming story. Just believing in his potential to get better, to find the gaps, to learn from all the things that he needed to learn. This year on Summer Swim, he broke all of his personal records. He got to swim in the All-Star meet. He got to have some. Really amazing experiences because he kept his foot on the gas and part of the reason. That my son was able to create this result, and what I see with people that are achieving their wildest dreams, it's like he was a dog with a bone with his goal of getting faster and getting better. Are you like a dog with a bone when it comes to your body goal? If you've ever had the thought that, Ugh, it takes so much time. I don't want to have to think about it. I don't want this to be feeling like it's a second job. I see you and I hear you actually recorded a podcast episode on how to stop overthinking about weight loss. But it actually takes a lot more time, a lot more effort, a lot more energy. To not believe in yourself. It takes a lot more effort to hide. It takes a lot more effort to start and stop. To not lean in. It takes a lot of effort to. Not believe in what you're capable of. And the best part about this work is as you practice the skill of believing in your potential, as you start seeing the possibility for it, as you start leaning in to those small moments that will give you those small wins that will move the needle forward, you will start to realize that believing in your potential is actually the cleanest purest form of pleasure that you can ever experience. It tastes way better than a cookie, way better than my favorite nachos or the cool ranch Doritos or the back of chips. Believing in your capability, believing in your potential, and then taking action from that place feels really, really, really good. And then you get to go and prove yourself right there too. So one of the things that I have realized as I translated kind of this swim story into my story with weight loss and definitely my story with entrepreneurship and really. Deciding that I wanted to shake out of my status quo, and I wanted to live a bigger, bolder life. I wanted to experience more. I wanted to be more present. I wanted to feel my best if I wanted that this was the work, because while I kept believing it's not for me. It's only for other people. I'm the special unicorn that you know, cannot figure this out, or I won't be able to solve this or won't be able to hold onto it. I went and kept proving myself, right, this confirmation bias. Here's how I started to change things. I took the pressure of believing myself off the table. This might sound counterintuitive, you don't. Actually have to completely believe in yourself, achieving your goal to achieve your goal. What I simply started to do was instead of focusing on my long-term vision of losing 60 pounds or like that far away, I call these lighthouse goals like the far away goal that maybe you can just see like a spot of light from maybe you don't even know where it is or what it is. I didn't have to believe in that goal. But what I could completely believe in is my potential today. I could believe in my potential for this week. I can believe in my potential for the right now, rather than me living in a time machine where I am marinating in yesterday's failures and worrying about tomorrow's possible failures. I started to focus my attention, my effort, my energy on only what I can control right now. And here's what happens. When you believe in yourself today, just for today, when you believe in your potential for just today, you start taking action from that place. You start feeling that lit up feeling that drives you to show up for yourself. And when you start doing that, guess what happens? It's literally math. You start creating wins. You start creating results, you start creating success. And when you do that again and again and again in really small moments, one day at a time, just one small step at a time, you don't need to look at the whole entire jigsaw puzzle. You don't need to see the whole entire picture. You don't need to see how it's all going to work out in the end. If you just look at the next piece, the next puzzle piece, the next one step, what starts to happen is subconsciously in your brain over time, you start to believe in your potential again, and this is deeper work. This is something that is the mindset element of what we are talking about. Believing in yourself. It doesn't happen for free. Believing in yourself again. If you used to believe in yourself and you've lost belief in yourself. I see you. It's normal. Your doubt and your disbelief is very normal. It's going to be long on the ride for a lifetime, but we don't have to make it wrong. It doesn't have to go away. You don't have to completely believe in yourself. I think what. I have been learning is I can let the pressure of believing in myself go, and instead of me focusing on that, I can just focus on the next small step. Today, I can completely believe in myself for this moment, for right now, and this is the part that's the deeper work. This is the part that will feel uncomfortable, that's going to ask you to access your courage. I had to make a choice, even in just me believing in my potential for today, believing in my potential for this week with the wild ride that I was on trying to achieve a goal that is not a linear path to success. I had to decide that I was willing to feel uncomfortable, that I was willing to feel vulnerable. I was willing to feel embarrassed. I was willing to feel disappointed. I was willing to feel failure. I was willing to try and get it wrong. I was willing. Being willing is a choice. The beauty of this beauty of making any choice or making any decision is it doesn't take more time. You don't need more information. It can happen in an instant. We all get to decide how long we want to take to make a decision or to make a choice, and it was that moment when I just decided I made the choice that I was. Willing to feel uncomfortable, to feel the visceral sensations of uncomfortable emotions and not let that inform my belief and my potential. That was when everything started to change. That was how I even created the framework of the playful scientist. And how I talk so much about evaluation on this podcast and having an assessment process to really take a fine tooth comb over your results. How do you take radical responsibility without shame, blame, or judgment? That is the magic sauce, and I think for me, the way that I have been navigating that, what I teach my clients how to do is there's a choice. You have to be willing to feel uncomfortable to take the fine tooth comb to look with the magnifying glass. Where was my gap? What did I not do? What could I have done better? And there's a tone and tenor with which we can ask these questions. You can ask yourself the question from a place of impatience and frustration. If you notice yourself having impatience and frustration with yourself, it's only because you've been believing it's supposed to be linear. You're in the educational mindset, the A to B to C to D to E. What we are talking about is the reality of most real goals, like non manmade goals, but like real goals, real wild success is it's never linear. Once we really see the truth of that, the reality of that, that's when we can let go of disbelief. When I really made this realization, this was like, again, I was just talking with my friend and I was just reflecting to her all the times that I didn't use to believe in myself. I felt scared to say the goal out loud. I felt scared, like I don't even know if I can, like, that's not for me. I realized that that relationship I had with myself, it was like a parent telling a child, you know, you didn't make the team, so you'll probably never make the team. Like it's just not in you. It's just not for you. You probably will never get there. It's really quite sad actually, the relationship that I used to have with myself. It's sad. And also I think it's a very real experience that I know that I have had, and I know that many of you have had, and it's. Not anything that's wrong with you, it's just the way that we have been. And I think that my favorite part about this entire journey and going through a coaching experience and doing this mindset work is I have been able to heal that relationship. It's like re-parenting yourself to a place where you don't ever think that way about yourself again. You can fail. And fail. And fail. It doesn't even matter, but you can still believe in your potential. And I don't mean magical thinking or delusional thinking, I don't mean just like toxic positivity or blindly believing in yourself. You have to have two parts. This is why I always come back to there being two peas in a pod to your success. One is believing in your potential, which is the mindset piece. The other one is actually having science informed strategy that you decisively take action on. You have to have the mindset, but you have to take the action that actually moves the needle. You can't do one without the other, one won't work without the other, and the other one won't get you sustainable results. So I hope that this episode just bites you with the bug of possibility that it is safe. It is okay to believe in your potential that. There is a mindset element here, and it's something that I think is worth unlocking for you. I hope you'll have an amazing day, and I hope you enjoy this episode and I'll see you at the next one. Bye. 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.