
Episode #147: The Success Mindset
Jan 28, 2025
Summary
Have you ever felt like you’re doing everything "right" but still not seeing the results you want? You plan meticulously, execute your strategies, and give it your all, but somehow it feels like your progress is stuck in neutral. In this episode, I’m unpacking the missing ingredient to sustainable weight loss and success: the success mindset. This isn’t about toxic positivity or wishful thinking—it’s about building a mindset that fuels consistent action, helps you navigate obstacles, and ensures your rocket ship takes off.
This episode is packed with tools to not only burn fat and feel better but also improve how you show up in every aspect of your life.
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What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
- Why the success mindset is the fuel your strategy needs to guarantee results.
- How to uncover and shift your autopilot thoughts that are holding you back.
- The two-part approach to creating a success mindset for past, present, and future goals.
- How a think-feel-act cycle determines your results—and how to master it.
- Why working with a coach can help you see and overcome your limiting beliefs.
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Download the full transcript here.
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After having my success and goal setting workshop in the Unstoppable group, one of the elements that I have seen come up as such a strong theme was the success mindset that guarantees results on and off the scale. I have taken a fine tooth comb. I share this very often, but success. On and off the scale leaves clues and it is absolutely essential that you have an actual strategy and structure around your nutrition, your rest, your movement to lose the weight you want to lose to feel better in your body, to heal your hormone health, to feel better head to toe. But what I notice as one of the most one skipped ingredients, one of the most missing ingredients, mostly because you likely just didn't know about it, is having the success mindset. A success mindset isn't just basic toxic positivity or wishful thinking taking you to the land of rainbows and daisies. Today on the podcast, I am sharing on this episode, how to create the success mindset, the exact steps that I walk my clients through, what I take myself through to navigate the life of a real professional working mom and how to navigate your real life. and hit goals at the same time. The success mindset, in my opinion, is going to help you move the needle the most in feeling better head to toe in hitting your body goal this year. And it is again, one of the most skipped steps. So the reason that I wanted to bring this episode to you is because I see so many women putting forth so much effort in their strategy. They put so much of an effort in the planning phase and in executing. But without the success mindset, it's like your rocket ship never got the fuel in its tank.
So I want you to think about this episode and really the practice that we're going to talk about in this episode as adding lighter fluid to the fire that is going to just really help your rocket ship take off. And if you love this episode, I would absolutely love it. If you could leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform and share this episode. You can actually copy the link for this exact episode with one of your friends, another professional working mom, or in your local Facebook community, where you know that somebody might really benefit from what we are talking about on this episode. Without further ado, let's get into it. 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. This is Dr. Priyanka Venugopal and you're listening to the Unstoppable Mom Brain podcast, the weight loss success mindset. I have not done a conversation on this podcast in quite a while talking about really what I think is the number one. Success variable that we actually have the most control over that. I know that a lot of high achieving working moms like you may not be utilizing and you're not not utilizing it because of any other reason than you just didn't really know about it. I know for me, many years ago, back in 2017, 2018, when I was at my personal heaviest, a little over 200 pounds, I just thought I needed to double down on my weight loss plan. I just thought I needed to be more disciplined and needed to have an accountability buddy. I just needed to find the right structure, the right course, the right person to help me lose the weight. But what I didn't know is that there is this one variable that I had been overlooking for so much of my life. And when I learned about. really having the success mindset. I really skyrocketed a lot of my results. That's how I lost a little over 60 pounds. It is what led me to change my life, not just with how I feel in my body, but it's how I changed my life as a mom with my kids, with my partner, with my work. And the reason that I'm so passionate about this one topic is because in my opinion, it can change generations. It can change how you show up or your children navigating. And this life that we have, which is going to be full of ups and downs and life challenges. When we can come into life challenges with a success mindset, you're going to change our whole lived experience. And I think that all of you are here because that is what we want. So without further ado, let's get into today's episode, the weight loss success mindset. I recently stumbled across a reel on Instagram. And by the way, if you're not on Instagram, get on there and say hi to me I'm the unstoppable mom brain on Instagram. I do a lot of my stories and my posts and I shared this real that I came across by Brene Brown. And I'm going to kind of read to you I wrote it down exactly what you said in the real. And it really struck me. She said don't walk through the world looking for evidence that you're not enough because you will always find it. And I want to take this a step further, this message that she shared on Instagram in this video, real what you think about yourself, what you believe about yourself, the evidence that you look for with weight loss, with burning fat, with feeling better as a working mom, your successes and fails. And this is our human brain's nature of having confirmation bias. Now, nothing is wrong if you notice yourself having a natural negative bias, all humans, you and me. Both have a natural negative bias and that's because it's how we evolved to survive. We're looking very carefully. We're looking kind of like, think about like you're looking for all of the ways of what could be missing, what could be wrong, what needs to be improved, what could be more efficient. What are all of the negatives in your work life, in your personal life, with your weight loss goal, with any goal that you have, I want you to really take inventory for a moment and think about all of the negative biases that you have. Now, if you have been like you and I both in normal human brain mode, you have been in survival mode, which means you're been steeping your brain. You've only think like you're marinating in the soup of negative bias to look for what's missing, what's not there, what's lacking, what could be better. And when we are not aware of it, when we're not aware of our negative biases on purpose, they can really drive us. To feel a lot of discouragement, a lot of disbelief, a lot of perpetual disappointment, which is the real reason that we end up micro quitting, not following through having a whole ton of screw it moments. It keeps us perpetually on the weight loss rollercoaster. It keeps us recreating yesterday's mistakes and really creates less of the life we want. So this episode is really to bring our attention. Because listen, I talk a lot about success strategies, science backed strategies, nutrition science, strategy science, how to really build out a structure for your day to day routine to lose the weight you want. But without having the success mindset on board, you're going to have this amazing plan. Plan the strategy on paper, but it's going to collect dust in a drawer. You're not going to follow through on it if you don't have the right mindset coming into it. This whole quote by Brene Brown really got me thinking how often smart, high achieving and resourceful, confident women go throughout their days in autopilot mode. I know I've done this, I'm sure you have two. It's almost like, you know when you get in the car and you're driving and you don't even know how you showed up at work. It's one of those things, right, and it makes a lot of sense because especially busy professional working moms have. Thousands of things happening in their day, thousands of decisions. We have millions of thoughts in our day to day. So it makes a lot of sense that our brain has created a lot of shortcuts. I want you to think about all the little shortcuts that our brain has created. It is intended to save time, to save some effort, to save energy. And it has put a lot of our brain in autopilot in ways that we don't even realize. So, there might be more than one area where you will basically just find yourself at your destination and you won't know exactly how you got there. If that's the case, maybe you got to work, you don't know how you got there, you ended up in the pantry, you don't know how you got there, you ended up in a pint of ice cream or in a sleeve of thin mint cookies or snacking on the chips endlessly or pouring the second or third glass of wine or scrolling your social media for hours on end. And if you don't even know how you got there, you just kind of like opened your eyes and whoa, what just happened? How did I get here? How did I end up in the pantry in the sleeve of cookies and the bag of chips? It is because that part of your brain that got you there has been on autopilot. Now, before we get into how to shift out of this, because the success mindset is going to really help you do this. It's really important to understand that autopilot is important while autopilot has a lot of useful function in some areas of our life. It is not going to be an effective way to get to your dream goal. Being on autopilot is not going to help you burn fat, burn stress, drop drama. It's not going to help you lose the weight you want to this year. It's not going to help you change your relationships to feel better in your lived experience as a working mom. In fact, if you let yourself Stay in autopilot as it pertains to your personal goals. With your autopilot thoughts, you're going to likely keep recreating the results that you had yesterday. Now, just in brief, I want to give a little bit of background before we get into the success mindset. All of the results that you have in your life today, the result on the scale, your percent body fat, the relationship you have with your partner and your kids, how you are experiencing your time, your productivity, your profession, how, you know, where you are in your profession is the product of the think, feel, act cycle. This means that you don't just show up in your life with weight loss or in the workplace or in your relationships randomly. That's not just you being disciplined or you being lazy. There's a reason that you show up the way that you show up as it pertains to weight loss in the workplace and in your relationships, the way that you show up, the way that you act. And the way that you don't act is happening because of how you feel an emotion that you're experiencing. So for example, when you feel determined, motivated, committed, excited, curious, loving, you show up one way, you take uncomfortable action when you don't feel like it, you follow through, you lean into the hard work as opposed to just think about all the times that you have felt disappointed discouraged, lacking disbelief. How did you show up then? Most of the time, if we're not aware of it, you're going to show up with micro quits. You're going to be half in half out. You're going to make all kinds of excuses, let justifications get in your way. You're not going to follow through consistently. This just goes to show that the way that we show up, the actions that you're taking or not taking is a product of how you feel. But, how you feel, motivated or unmotivated, committed or not, in belief or not, is also not just random. That feeling of motivation, excitement, committed, belief in yourself versus not, is not just dropping into your body because the universe dropped it into you.
The way that you feel about hitting your goal is because of what you are thinking. This is two neurons in your brain that Fire because of a sentence, you tell yourself thoughts like I've got this versus I don't, I'm learning versus I should be further along. I'm so ready versus I should wait. These sentences, these thoughts that we have are living in our subconscious. And again, this is because working moms have thousands of thoughts per day. So it makes a lot of sense that your brain has created shortcuts. So the thoughts that you're telling yourself in your subconscious. It's creating a chemical cascade of a feeling and that is driving you to show up the way that you are. Now, if you have been living in autopilot as it pertains to weight loss, to burning the fat you want, to hitting your weight loss goal consistently, it makes a lot of sense that you might've been recreating yesterday's results again and again and again. But I don't want you to worry about this because It is possible to get out of autopilot. I have shared this sentence before. I'm going to share it here again because I think it really fits this episode. A diet, a plan on paper might put you into a smaller body. You might be able to muscle through that spreadsheet, that PDF that you've downloaded for a short period of time, and you might start to see weight loss wins for a little bit. But if you don't have the mindset, the success mindset to match, The size of body that you want to be living in. If you don't have the success mindset to hit your goals consistently, that weight loss result is not going to last. We need a success mindset to be able to take your success plan and put it into consistent execution to be able to navigate when life is lifing to be able to challenges to drop drama up to stay motivated and you don't feel like it to mistakes and make a chang it takes the small, consi the weight you want this I call this the success mindset and for the success mindset to make sense. I think it's really important that we really discern where we have been and where we want to go to really understand this.
I want to just do a quick refresher that our brain is comprised of two parts, our primitive brain. That's the part that's keeping us in autopilot. It is the one that is conserving energy. It wants. The lowest effort options. It wants to seek pleasure to avoid discomfort. And it will come up with all kinds of convenient, convincing, and very compelling reasons to keep your status quo. If you notice yourself having a lot of convenient justifications to not put in any effort, nothing has gone wrong. You just have a primitive part of your brain that is in the driver's seat, that's keeping you in autopilot. That's all. But you also have this other part of your brain. The more evolved prefrontal cortex. This is the part of you that is really good at problem solving. When you decide to activate that part of you, you overcome challenges, you navigate solutions, you figure out what obstacles you had yesterday, and you solve them. So how do we start to shift away from a primitive state of let's say, autopilot, so that we have a permanent state of letting our and when we're not even aware of it, we're living in a perpetual state of letting our primitive brain drive our car in autopilot. And if we don't on purpose, move our brain, shift out of autopilot mode, we're going to keep recreating our same weight loss results again and again and again, which creates a lot of frustration. So how do we start to shift Out of autopilot to activate our prefrontal cortex to put our car into drive so that we can actually navigate really overcoming this problem once and for all, we have to just decide that we're willing to put in the active, intentional effort to prioritize this goal and to actually get out of autopilot. Let me tell you what I mean. We have to first start to identify. I want all of you to do this. You can pause the episode here and actually take inventory. What have been your autopilot thoughts? The past three months, the past six months, the past one year that has created your results on the scale today, you might've had thoughts.
If you don't love your results on the scale, thoughts like it probably won't work. I'm not getting there fast enough. I couldn't do it last time. What if I can't do it? What if I gain it back? I call these thoughts that are keeping you in autopilot, that are driving you to micro quit, keep your justifications and keep you delaying results. I call these lowest common denominator thoughts. Now, remember whether you believe in yourself or not, you're going to be right. I have not met one person who did not believe in themselves who was successful in hitting their weight loss goals, not one, but you're here because you've decided that you don't want to just be in autopilot mode anymore. You don't want to just be in survival mode anymore. You have worked really hard for this life. You've gotten the degrees, you've worked hard in school, you've gotten the job in the family, and now you're. Here, you're listening to this episode because you can feel this desire that it is now your turn. I have seen so much evidence when women make that decision. It's like this belief switch in a dark closet gets flipped on, you've turned the lights on in your life. And what I have noticed When we take active intentional effort to believe in ourselves, to step into a success mindset, you will start hitting goals, both on the scale and in your life. You might find yourself protesting. I'm going to talk through really how to create the success mindset. And I want to let you know, it's okay. Basically what we are doing in this episode is we're taking your brain To the gym, we're going to be talking about, you know, getting out of autopilot to expend that effort, because remember your primitive brain does not want to change anything. It wants to keep your status quo, but to change anything to hit your goal this year requires making a change. So just now we're taking your brain to the gym. She's going to protest. She's going to say, no, I don't want to do this. I want you to commit to doing it anyway, because it is going to be a game changer in you hitting your goal this year.
The success mindset in my experience comes in two parts. The first part is creating a success mindset as we look at the past. And the second part is having a success mindset as we look to our current and future self. So let's just talk about the past. The very first piece is really finding success already. Now this might be really hard. You might find your brain protesting. If you're saying I have all these fails, Priyanka, I have gained weight. What do you mean? Look for my success mindset. What I want you to do is to allow this to be an exercise where you shift. out of blame, criticism, judgment, and shame to stop telling yourself that you should have solved something by now, that you should be further along, that you shouldn't have gained the weight you should have because you did. So what we actually get to utilize this first step for is actually recognizing that you're here and the effort that you are putting in. I want you to look for evidence and flip the script from shame, blame, judgment, criticism, embarrassment, and guilt. To a new thought that's going to help you lean into creating success. This looks like thoughts. Like as you look at your past, maybe you're looking at a three digit number you don't love. And instead of going down the line of blame and criticism and a lot of embarrassment or shame to actually remind yourself. Thoughts like, I am showing up for myself. I am so committed to figuring this out. I do hard things all the time. These were lessons that I had to learn. These mistakes, these offline moments are a part of my future success. The thing is when you don't love yesterday's results, it makes a lot of sense that your brain goes into that autopilot mode of shame, blame, and judgment because that's what's been practiced. However, when we can stop and drop that part of the story, we can start to actually free ourselves from recreating those results. Instead, I want you to ask yourself if you did not love that number on the. Scale. What was my lesson here? If you don't have the results you wanted today, I want you to remember that today's results in the scale are a compilation of the last six months. I want you to ask yourself in a place of curiosity and compassion, maybe a little bit of tenderness. What was I telling myself? These last six months, why did I show up the way that I did? What was I feeling about myself in this goal, right? Remember the think, feel, act cycle, take inventory. What were my autopilot thoughts that I stayed in? And when you get to start taking inventory of what were the. Thoughts that led me to show up the way that I did over the last six months and drove me to not show up, you know, the way that I had wanted to these last six months, we get to start identifying our autopilot thoughts. The first step before you can even step out of autopilot. You have to know what you're thinking. That's keeping you in autopilot. When you've uncovered what have been your autopilot thoughts that have driven you to not show up the way you wanted to, or to show up in a way that really wasn't a full effort. I want you to write it down and just know for yourself that that's one of your convincing, convenient, and compelling stories. That's taking you out of action. This is learning from the past, and I want you to see how a success mindset is going to help you glean wisdom from yesterday's mistakes, from yesterday's off plan moments. The next step is looking at the current time and the future. So in the Unstoppable group, I have my clients share weekly retrospectives, where we look at the past week and we dive into this in detail. If you hit your goal or surpassed it, we uncover what were your success variables, and I show you how to dial those. If you didn't hit your goal over this week, then it's still a win win because if you didn't hit your goal, we figure out what the learning is. I think about really understanding either you're losing weight on the scale or you are gaining your weight in wisdom, right? Pun intended. This is win wins. Whether you are losing weight or learning in wisdom, you are going to be moving the needle as a part of your success strategy. This will change the whole landscape for how you lose. And honestly, this is the thing that I actually want to pass to my kids when we can understand how we can look at our past and our current present, how we are creating results, whether we like them or we don't, we will change generations for how we really are living our life. And it doesn't have to just be lip service. You letting go of shame, judgment, embarrassment, blame about your results is going to model to your children how they get to let go of their shame, judgment, embarrassment, and blame. I've shared this on the podcast before, but truly for me and for my clients, this is one of the most. Intangible priceless wins that you get when we work together for me. Yes. Losing 60 pounds and hitting my goal weight was amazing without the fads and the gimmicks, but the shift that I had to experience in the success mindset really changed my personal identity, how I saw myself, how we navigated challenges and fails and mistakes. It fundamentally changed who I was. And because of that, the way that I show up as a mom with my kids who are eight and five is coming from that place when, not if, my kid has a fail, I get to meet them without an ounce of judgment, shame, and embarrassment. And they can feel that, and I hope over time, my voice to them, which is free of judgment and shame and blame, starts to become their inner voice.
This is so essential as we start to practice taking our brain to the gym and really identifying what have been my Autopilot thoughts that have been steeped in disbelief. All of these rhetorical, but I haven't done it before. What if I can't do it again? All these whiffies, what if thoughts just know that keeping your rhetorical questions that you have in disbelief is driving inaction is driving you not moving the needle. Just becoming aware of that in itself is going to be huge. And then we get to practice what we were talking about here. Step two, once you've taken inventory on purpose, start to practice thoughts where you can find success right now, having a success mindset, isn't about platitudes. It's anchoring to reality, recognizing yourself for right now, for this effort that you're putting in for believing in yourself fiercely. I know that it's new and it might not. you know, land right away. You might not be perfect at it right away, but allow yourself to simply practice. I want you to start taking your brain to the gym and doing reps on this on a daily basis. And honestly, this is hard to do on your own. I know for a lot of us, for you and for me alike, when you're thinking certain thoughts, You think that you're just keeping it real. I see this happen with my clients all the time, which is why I really recommend working with a coach. You cannot see your own thoughts. You cannot see your most limiting beliefs, your lowest common denominator thoughts to you, which is what's keeping you in autopilot. Just feel real. And this is where working with a coach where someone can show you your lowest common denominator thoughts is so essential to moving the needle with you losing the weight you want to this year. This will not just create weight loss results on the scale and help you burn fat. It is going to change every corner of your life at home. And at work, I hope you guys all have an amazing rest of the day. If you have any questions, For me about this podcast episode or about the Unstoppable group, feel free to send me an email at [email protected]. I really hope that you loved today's conversation around the success mindset, because this one concept for me and for my clients in the Unstoppable group, I see create. So much massive progress, even when you're hitting those really challenging moments, those unanticipated obstacles. And it feels like there is obstacle after obstacle coming your way. This is the one concept that I have seen really help smart, professional women overcome obstacles with a lot more empowerment. No one loves. obstacles. No one loves making mistakes or failing. No one loves those unanticipated stresses that we all experience in our relationships with our kids in the workplace. But imagine that you didn't have to love the obstacles or that you didn't have to love making mistakes or failing, but you just got really good at navigating it. That is what the success mindset is going to help you do, especially when you do it with the help of a coach. I want to make sure if you love this podcast episode that you know, you can get the earliest possible access to my next cohort of the Unstoppable group. If you're on my email list, the Unstoppable group, if you are brand new to me is my six month intimate small group coaching program specifically for professional working moms who want to not just lose weight. But you want to feel better head to toe. You want to support your hormone health. You want to feel better with your time in your relationships, in the workplace, and you want to hit a body goal on the way. So if you want to make sure that you are on my early access list where you get the very first dibs. On one of the spots in my next cohort, make sure you're on my email list by heading over to www.burnstressloseweight.com/magic, drop your information in, and you'll be getting emails from me in your email inbox with a lot of value and a lot of information on how to really start moving the needle on and off the scale. And of course, access early for my next cohort. I hope you'll have an amazing, amazing week, and I will 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 want to take what you're 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 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.