Why Focusing on Weight Loss Might Be Keeping You Stuck

Stephen Box: [00:00:00] Hey guys. Welcome to Unshakable Habits, the podcast dedicated to helping men prioritize their physical and mental wellbeing so you can be the best version of yourself and to create a better life for yourself and those around you. So this week we're gonna be talking about why focusing on weight loss might actually be keeping you fat, and we're going to be jumping into that here in just a minute or so.

Before we do, I do want to give a quick heads up to everyone that we have created a brand new community over on Facebook, and you can find that by going to Unshakable habits.com/community. This is gonna be a place where we can get like-minded men who want to improve their physical, mental wellbeing, become better husbands, fathers, and leaders into one place, and we can let iron sharpen iron

and help each other to grow. So I would love to see you guys over there. so with that, [00:01:00] let's go ahead and get this party started.

Intro/Outro: Are you ready to break free from your old habits and create a better life for yourself and those around you? If so, welcome to Unshakable Habits, the podcast dedicated to helping men be better husbands, fathers, and leaders by prioritizing their physical.

And mental wellbeing. Each week we'll look at health from a 360 degree perspective with inspiring stories and practical strategies for building Unshakable habits that'll transform your life. Join Stephen Box, a board certified health and wellness coach, and let's change the world together. One habit at a time.

Stephen Box: All right. Welcome back guys. so for those of you who might be new to the podcast, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Stephen Box. [00:02:00] I am the founder of Unshakable Habits. I'm also a national Board certified health and wellness coach, and ISSA elite trainer. I also have certifications for sleep, stress management, nutrition, the works.

So when I talk to you guys about weight loss and. What impacts weight loss? I clearly have a lot of credibility and a lot of experience in that area. I've been doing this for over a decade and it was inspired by my own 80 pound weight loss. So I've been where you guys are, so I understand this situation that you might find yourself in.

And speaking of that situation, let's get really clear here for a second who today's episode is for. If you are a guy who finds yourself struggling to lose weight, this is for you. But also, if you're a guy who, maybe you don't struggle to lose the weight, but you struggle to keep it off, it always ends up coming back and maybe with a [00:03:00] little bit of interest, right?

This episode is definitely going to be for you as well, because I think that ultimately is the long-term problem that a lot of people run into when they don't do this the right way. So let's talk about. Why this happens in the first place, right? Why do we all focus on weight loss? and I wanna be very clear and upfront here.

I'm top pointing fingers. I'm not trying to make anybody feel bad. I'm not calling anybody stupid or anything like that because guys, I did this too. I lost 80 pounds and it's a great story. But before I lost 80 pounds, I lost the same 20 to 25 pounds so many times that I lost count. Okay, so I get it. I know what it looks like to make these mistakes.

I know what it looks like to go through this. And I think before we jump into what some of the mistakes that you might be making are, let's actually look at [00:04:00] why them states get made. Let's actually look at what the underlying point is. And it's pain, right? So guys, like I said,I get it.

I was there. I'm only 5'7" and at one point I weighed 245 pounds. My BMI was 38. that's like way above obese. I was pre-diabetic. I also, when he did one of those body fat tests where they put you in the water, and those are supposed to be like really close, they're. Only like behind the DEXA scans in terms of accuracy.

And I was about 40% body fat, so obviously not in good shape, not taking care of myself and that was difficult for me because growing up I was always outside. I always playing, I was athletic and I saw myself as someone who was athletic. Now when I say athletic, I [00:05:00] wasn't getting any D one scholarships or anything like that.

Okay. But nonetheless, I was a very active kid and that was a part of my identity. So when college got in the way, when full-time job got in the way, when life in general just started happening to me, what I found was I just started putting on the weight and I would tell myself like, ah, I can just, eat a little better and get it off right, or I can just exercise a little bit and get it off.

And sometimes that would work and then I'd put the weight back on. But I got to a point where like it wouldn't just come off easily anymore. I was stuck and guys, lemme tell you, especially when you get to a point, if you haven't gotten here yet, this is a word of warning, but for those of you who already here, you know this, when you get to a certain point where you're, I wanna say maybe 20, 30, 40 pounds overweight.

You start to notice the little things that are happening, right? You start to notice that your knees hurt, that your back hurts. You [00:06:00] start noticing that you're getting fatigued easily. You notice getting out of breath, just running up the stairs, right? Things like that. And let's be honest guys, we want those pains to go away.

Want them to go away as quickly as possible, and I think that's why a lot of us focus on trying to lose weight. Because we know ultimately that the extra weight we're carrying is what's causing these pains. And it's not just physical pain either, right? It's not feeling attractive. So if you're in a relationship that's not feeling attractive to your girlfriend or your wife, if you are, someone who is not, married, if you're single, then you know, maybe it's finding a bait, getting someone to be attracted to you.

I've coached a lot of guys over the years that their wives were actually pretty happy with them, but they didn't feel confident and that had a negative impact on their relationships. And when [00:07:00] we start to look at all these things, when we start talking about, a guy with kids not being able to keep up with those kids, or maybe, it's nieces and nephews that you're trying to keep up with.

And you just don't have the energy to do it. Those things also are pains and there's something that takes a toll on you and it's something that you want to get rid of and you make, you want to go away as fast as possible. So again, guys, I get why you want to do this, right? I understand why it's so important to you that you wanna get rid of this as quickly as possible.

And one of the big mistakes that people make when they wanna get rid of this is they start to focus just on weight loss. So we focus on diet, we focus on exercise because that's what we've been told, right? Eat less, exercise more. that's the way to lose weight, right? And we all start looking at, okay, what's the best diet to do?

What's the best workout to do? Should I be doing hiit? Should I be doing, keto, should I be doing paleo, whatever, right? And so we start looking at all these specific diets and all these [00:08:00] specific exercise programs. I'm gonna tell you guys, there's really no secret, right? There's no perfect diet.

There's no perfect exercise for a room that you're gonna do that's just gonna magically fix everything in your life. Not to mention the fact that just focusing on that alone isn't enough. This is why I teach everything from the concept of connected health. So when we talk about connected health, we are yes, looking at the physical.

Which by the way, in addition to diet and exercise, we're talking about your internal stuff, right? Your blood work, just the way your body's functioning as a whole. are you living a pain-free life? we're also looking at things like sleep recovery, right? So these are all important factors on the physical side, but we also have mental.

Which is, I describe it as your thoughts, your feelings, or not your feelings, excuse me. Your thoughts, your beliefs, the stories that you tell yourself. Emotions are the [00:09:00] way that you actually react to those thoughts, those beliefs, and those stories. So I see a lot of times when we as men hear emotion, right?

We think sad happy, whatever, right? And We don't like to talk about our emotions. We don't like to deep dive into the emotional conversations and recognize that we have emotions. That's what society has taught us to do as men. But the problem with that is that emotions are action blueprints, right?

If you're in danger and the emotion of fear kicks in. That fear literally sends signals out to the body and it tells your muscles, Hey, tighten up, prepare for movement. We gotta go. It starts getting your heart going, starts getting blood pumping. It starts literally preparing your body to either fight or flee.

And so when we find ourselves not embracing our emotions, not understanding our emotions, we lose the ability to have that action blueprint. When you hear [00:10:00] emotion, guys, don't, we'll just shut that out please. I really want you to hear, I'm not asking you to be like Carlton's emotional here. Okay? I'm not asking you to go and sit in the fetal position in the corner and cry or anything like that, right?

That's not what we're talking about. I'm just saying I want you to be able to feel the feels because they're action blueprints. They tell us what we need to be doing. They're ways that our body communicates. So the next part is relationships. Then environments. relationships are the way we interact with the people around us.

And environmental health is the way we interact with our environment, the settings that we're in. so the places around us, that's what, and things also, that's the environmental health. And then there's existential health, which some people also call spiritual health. But the big ID here is, Pun intended, that is connecting to something bigger than yourself, right?

So this is your deeper purpose. This is your deeper why. [00:11:00] So when we start to look at this idea of connected health, you can probably already start to get a good idea of why focusing on weight loss alone is not enough. Because you go and you try to follow a keto diet and you're super low carb, and that low carb diet makes you a very unpleasant person to be around.

I. You take that out on your spouse or the people around you, guess what? You just created negativity in your environment. You just created negativity in your relationships, right? And then because you're creating a negativity, depending on how that person reacts to you, that might also now start creating negativity in your mental and emotional health.

And so you now end up with this really negative cycle that starts to go. And now, Even if you had a bigger purpose for this, because you've got all this stuff going on, it can make your why seem less important. And now there's not even a purpose behind any of this. And so now [00:12:00] you find yourself just saying, you know what?

It's not worth it. And I'm not trying to pick on keto here. I just know a lot of people when they do things like keto and they go low carb, they get a little cranky. So that's why I use it as an example. But here's the thing, guys. The good news is you don't have to be stuck in the cycle, right? In my coaching program, I teach people how to overcome these things, and I'm gonna actually share a little bit of that with you today.

it's what I actually call the Unshakable hero blueprint. And what we have to do here is kinda look at what's happening before and where is it that we wanna get to. So most of us right now, We're focused on weight loss. So we're only focused on that one aspect of our health. Just the physical. And we're not even looking at the whole physical health.

'cause the most guys that I've talked to, they're not incorporating sleeping to the equation. They're certainly not getting into the mental and emotional [00:13:00] stuff. They're not thinking about things like stress management, right? They're furthest, they get into mental is thinking about willpower, right? I have to stick with this.

I have to push my way through. And that's actually the opposite of being in touch with your emotions. that's actually completely ignoring your emotions. and here's the good news too, right? You don't even have to do all the strict stuff that everybody tells you. just, I can do one whole episode here just on the diet and exercise piece of what that actually needs to look like.

But I'll just give you guys a little bit of a taste here of my own personal story. I went, started working with a trainer and ended up getting hurt. this was like early on in my fat loss journey. Ended up getting hurt and didn't go back in for about three months, and I went in one day. I was like, you know what?

I'm done with this. I'm just gonna cancel my gym membership. I was informed that I, if I [00:14:00] canceled my gym membership, I wouldn't be able to use my remaining personal training sessions and I wouldn't be able to get refunded for them. Back then, I didn't really have a lot of money and I was a very cheap person, so there was no way I was gonna let 72, yes, you guys heard that correctly.

72 personal training sessions go to waste. So I said, fine. You know what? There were 30 minute sessions double up, put me with two different trainers if you need to. I'm doing hour long sessions, I'm powering through these and I'm canceling my membership. I was done. Then the funny thing happened because I wasn't focused on it, right?

when it came to my diet, I had a similar experience. I looked up, all this stuff, and everywhere I looked, everybody was like, oh, eat grilled chicken and broccoli and all of that kind of stuff, and. I was like, I don't want to just do that. I want my pizza, I want my tacos. I still want to go to Chick-fil-A and get [00:15:00] my breakfast bagel, which Chick-fil-A I'm still mad at you for getting rid of, by the way.

I didn't wanna give up all that stuff. I still wanted that to be a part of my life because I, I realized without realizing it, That if I try to restrict everything, if I try to give everything up, then maybe I get results. But what are going to be the cost of it, right? What is the mental, what is the emotional?

What is the physical toll that it's gonna take on me? And then how am I teaching myself the skills to maintain it long term? I'm not? By cutting all those things out with the intention of bringing them back eventually. All that was gonna happen. I was gonna put the weight back on. So I understood that.

I don't think I understood until the extent I understand it now, but subconsciously I think I got it. And so I made this decision of I'm going to not worry about the, weight loss, or I'm gonna worry about cutting out the foods or whatever. I'm just gonna try to do a little bit better, right? I'm mixed with small changes here and there.

Maybe I'll order smaller portion sizes. That was about it, right? That was the extent of what I was willing to do. So in [00:16:00] other words, yes, I started making some better choices. I started moving a little more. I started, a lot more, I was doing our long personal training sessions, But my intention behind doing them was not to spend money.

Not to waste money. And I started making small changes to my diet and my goal there really wasn't to lose weight. I wasn't tuning any calories or anything like that. And so I. What happened was as soon as I took the pressure off myself, as soon as I stopped focusing on it, and I really started treating myself as a whole person, all of a sudden things started happening.

I started losing weight, and it was a crazy thing to me that all of a sudden I started to see success when I stopped focusing on weight loss. And it was so much easier for me to maintain it guys. So that's, a really big lesson in and of itself. But what I've seen since then is I unconsciously was also using a system.

[00:17:00] I didn't realize I was using the system, but I was, and so what I've done is I've looked in hindsight at what was it I did, and I really broke this down into three pillars. Of what I'd like to do. So the first thing is that I'm gonna teach you here is about creating a vision for what you actually want.

So let's say for example, here for a second, let's pretend that you are just gonna be focused on weight loss. You're really focused on diet and exercise, and that's where you are right now. So even within that context, There's gonna be a difference in how you train and how you eat. If your goal is to be super skinny, whether it's to be thin with six pack abs, whether it's to be muscular with six pack abs, whether it's to look like the rock and just be like huge, right?

So depending on what your goals are, [00:18:00] depends on, or changes the way that you eat and the way that you exercise because you don't train. The same way for any of those looks. So there's a lot of differences that are coming that start to come into place, even if we only focused on the diet and exercise piece of things.

But again, this goes back to connected health. We need to understand what our entire life is going to look like. And inside of my program, I really. Deep dive into this. I help people in all my coaching programs. I help people to figure this out, and I work with people one-on-one and we actually sometimes spend an entire coaching call just on getting this right.

And it is so enlightening and beneficial for people to go through this process. But just to give you my personal story on this was I knew I didn't want to give up certain foods. I knew I still wanted to. Be able to do certain things. I knew I didn't wanna live in the gym because I knew some of the other things I wanted to do in my life.

I knew the things I [00:19:00] needed to have time for and I knew that if I spent all my time at the gym and I spent all my time,trying to avoid certain foods or whatever, I wasn't gonna be able to go hang with my friends. I wasn't gonna be able to go have lunch with my buddies. I wasn't gonna be able to go out and play sports because I was gonna be so sore from working out all the time.

I wouldn't be able to go play basketball, which was really big to me at the time. And, it was just these little things. Now, I will be honest with you guys, I got kinda lucky because I didn't fully have my vision laid out. and I still managed to get there. It took me a while. People always ask and the answer to how long it took me to lose 80 pounds is to be about 10 months.

I truly believe that if I had known then what I know now, if I had this entire system that I've created laid out for me, then I would've actually achieved it even faster. Just like without even really making very many changes, I just would've had a better understanding of what it was that I [00:20:00] wanted to accomplish, and I would've gotten even faster results and I think that's shown up in some of the results I've gotten for clients because I've gotten people some really amazing results.

So the thing is with vision, I want you to think about it from this perspective. So I already explained if you don't have clear vision just on what kind of body you want, you're not even gonna wear exercises to do. You're not even gonna know how to eat. So that's already one example of how vision works.

I want to take this to a little bit higher level. Imagine that you live on the east coast of the United States. You wanna travel to the West Coast of the United States? if you just get in your car and you've got a compass and it tells you that you're heading west, you may end up in California.

So you end up in Seattle or something, right? You don't really know exactly where you're going to end up. you might even just get tired of driving and you might stop in Texas, right? So [00:21:00] you don't know where you're gonna go if you don't have a clear vision of what it's gonna be. But let's say even if you know where you wanna go, let's say even if you have a G P S and you set that G P s and you're like, you know what, I'm going to, we'll just say Los Angeles, 'cause I was out in LA a few weeks back.

so it's just what's on my mind. So let's say that you're like, I'm gonna go to LA and you put, the address into your G P Ss, you still aren't going to get to a specific location. You're just gonna get to LA in general. So if you want. To get somewhere specific. You now have to think about that, right?

You have to figure out what hotel do you wanna be at? what area of LA do you wanna be in? What is it that you're trying to go to LA for? So now you start to understand this vision concept, right? You have to get more and more specific. And then what if there's a tourist site between here in California that, or your starting point in California that you really wanna see?

But the most efficient route. 'cause the G P Ss is [00:22:00] always gonna take you on the most efficient route, right? And the most efficient route won't take you by there. now you've gotta plead for that, right? You gotta figure out how am I going to deviate my pleading to be able to go see this, monument or whatever it is that I wanna see.

And Vision becomes very important because it doesn't just get us in the vicinity. It gets us exactly where we want to be, down to the exact most important points. So that is why having a clear vision is so important, guys, and that's why that's step one in the process always is everything has to start with the vision.

If you don't have a clear vision, and I know a lot of people. Like I said earlier, a lot of us guys especially, we don't like to think about emotions and we don't like to think about things like that. And sometimes when we start talking about vision, a lot of it is how do we wanna feel, right? What do we want our relationships to look like?

And that involves thinking about emotions that involves think thinking about and [00:23:00] talking about our feelings. And a lot of us might not be comfortable with that because we've been taught to not be comfortable with that. There's nothing wrong with it, guys. Okay? Again, it doesn't make you soft. If you think something is hard, if you think something is challenging, doing it actually makes you more manly, avoiding something because you think that it's going to be too difficult for you to do, or because it feels a certain way that's not manly.

Okay? That's actually being solved. So I wanna encourage you, if it feels a little tough to you. All the more reason to do it. Alright, so now that you understand why vision is so important, let's acknowledge the fact that vision alone isn't gonna get you there. Okay? you can have all the vision you want, you can detail it out, you can write it out, it doesn't matter.

As a matter of fact, this is where a lot of people get their self into trouble. and I'll switch gears away from health and weight loss here for a second, and let's talk about starting a [00:24:00] business. There are people out there that they will lay out this vision for what they want their business to look like, and they think, I have to get every single detail perfect.

I, I have to know everything right now. I've gotta know the best software I to use. I gotta know exactly how much to charge people. I've gotta know how many calls to give people if they're coaching right. There's. All these little details, they want to know that and they will overdo it to the point that they will never actually start.

Okay? So I want you to understand that yes, why we're creating a vision, why it's important. It doesn't have to be perfect, right? We have the right to change our minds. Maybe you start on the journey and you go, you know what? I wanna do something a little different. And that's totally cool. We can always adjust the vision to get us where we wanna go to, and there's nothing wrong with that.

We have to eventually take action, right? And that brings me to phase two, which is discipline. Now a lot of times when people hear disciplined, they think willpower. [00:25:00] I'm not talking about willpower. What I'm talking about is habits and consistency. And guys, lemme tell you, I remember being in the fifth grade and last day of school.

they had a little graduation ceremony because I don't know how this is for some of you, but for me, fifth grade was elementary school. Sixth grade was middle school. They were two different schools. so I know some schools actually go like kindergarten through 12th grade or whatever. One location.

I didn't have that. Mine was a completely separate location, and so we're doing this graduation and they're giving out these perfect attendance awards. I remember thinking, this has got to be the absolute dumbest award of all time. You're going to give me an award just because I was here, they didn't matter if I did it right.

Didn't matter if I [00:26:00] did anything, doesn't matter if I was successful. Anything else just, there're literally going to gimme an award for showing up. And I gotta be honest with you guys, as an adult, I can live heck on and I can say, you know what? That's a great award to give because showing up every single day, that is actually the hard part.

yeah, we should maybe want people to do some work while they're there. We should. We should hold people a little accountable when they do show up. But just showing up is the hard part. So even if you do a little bit that day versus a lot, that's still a win. That's still something to be celebrated.

'cause you at least showed up. So to me, having that, discipline to consistently show up every day is gonna be super duper important. Excuse me one second guys. Lemme get some, water here.

So when you are talking about discipline, and again, in my one-on-one coaching programs, I work with [00:27:00] Ians to figure out how to help them show up every day. I show them. Specifically how to show up and do the things they want to actually do and how to, build consistency into that. so I go through all that in my coaching programs when I work with people directly, but in a big picture way here.

When we start looking at habits and consistency, one of the big mistakes I see people make is. They try to make everything super hard and it's this all or nothing mentality. This all in mindset. And guys, the question is how often does all or nothing leave you with nothing? that kind of sucks, doesn't it?

To put all this effort, all this energy into something and you don't even get anything out of it whatsoever. I don't know about you guys, but that's not something I personally want to, have to go through. And You may have heard of, books like IC Habits or Tiny Habits, and the thing is, [00:28:00] those teach this philosophy of make it smaller, make it easier to do, get small wins that make it easier for you to show up consistently.

I used an example here of, and this is a true example of something I actually went and had a client do. so people will sometimes laugh when I tell a story. But this is a true story. I had someone that they absolutely hated working out. they just didn't want to do it. They knew they needed to do it, but they didn't want to do it.

And so what we did is we started off with, Hey, just put on your workout shoes. That's it. You don't only have to go to the gym, you don't have to leave the house. Just put 'em on. And he started doing that, started putting with the workout shoes. And then after a couple days, I said, okay. Let's add to your wardrobe.

Let's actually put on your workout outfit. And so he did that, and that lasted for another couple days. And then he goes, you know what? I feel silly doing this. And I said, why do you [00:29:00] feel silly doing it? He said, I'm sitting here getting dressed every day like I'm gonna go to the gym. I might as well just go to the gym.

Fair enough. I said, so let's go to the gym today. I said, I'll tell you what. If you get there and you're not feeling it, just sit in the car. And that's exactly what he did, guys. he sat in the car for five minutes and then he said, you know what? I just don't wanna go in. And he put the car reverse and he left.

And this went on for probably three or four days. Because again, the idea here is consistency, right? It's discipline. So he had to do something every day, and so three or four days go by and finally he goes, you know what, I'm just gonna go in. So he goes in and he sends me a text. He goes, I'm in the gym.

And I go, okay. I said, just walk around. Just look at the equipment. if you don't, if you don't want to [00:30:00] exercise today, that's totally cool. Just. Walk around and be there. And so he walks around for 10, 15 minutes and finally he goes, you know what? I think I'm just gonna hop on the treadmill.

So he hops on the treadmill and I think he did five minutes or something like that. Some like ridiculously low number, right? And so this went on for, I don't know, maybe like 10, 15 days, right? Like couple weeks. And he goes, And over this time he is like building up, right? So it's not five minutes on the treadmill every day he's slowly building it up and then he goes, you know what, I think I actually wanna go down and try doing some of the exercises with the weights, right?

So we're not talking like full workout programs or anything like that. In total, I think it took about two months or so before we got him to a point where he was ready to actually do a full workout program. But guess what? Now? I can't get that guy to stay out of the gym. He's always in the gym. He might work out more than me.

Okay, so the thing [00:31:00] is, this is someone who started off so small that any reasonable person would laugh at where we started at the idea of, oh, just put on your shoes, seems so insignificant, seems so stupid, but. Getting him to just start really small like that worked. And of course over time, we've added other things in there.

It wasn't just a matter of, oh, we're just gonna keep doing little tiny things, right? that's not the whole process. I just shortened it for you guys, so you could really see the point of the story here. But that's the underlying reasoning, right? That's the underlying. Cause of why he's now really consistent with the jump.

And that's why discipline is so important. But again, a lot of guys, what I see them do is they get to the discipline part, right? They go, I understand the discipline part, I'm gonna start doing that. But they haven't created the vision yet. And [00:32:00] just like I was saying, if you say, Hey, I'm just gonna drive west, maybe you end up in California, maybe you end up in Seattle, maybe you end up in Texas because you just get tired and stop.

So the reality is, Just having discipline, just showing up for the sake of showing up with no real vision for what you're trying to accomplish. It's not gonna get you anywhere. You need both of those steps if you truly wanna start seeing success. Now, the other thing that ends up happening though, is at some point your discipline is only gonna take you so far because.

Your skillset only takes you so far. Your current level of knowledge only takes you so far. And yes, things like hiring a coach and things like that are going to get you even further down the road, but even hiring someone still only gets you so far. The third thing that we have to do, the third phase of the Unshakable [00:33:00] Hero blueprint that I coach my clients on is mastery, and this is all about building and developing your skills.

when my clients started getting more consistent and he started lifting weights, he didn't know what he was doing. He had never lifted weights before. Remember I told you this guy hated exercise, so he had never lifted any kind of weights. He had no idea. There's five different, phases of a movement.

He didn't understand which muscles to tighten, which muscles to loosen. He didn't understand the order of exercises. He didn't understand any of that stuff, right? And so what we did is we started to teach him the skills and look, that's just the example I gave you guys for that client. I can talk about this within the context of eating.

I could talk about this in the context of sleep. I can talk about this in the context of stress management. I can talk about this in the context of improving your relationships. I can [00:34:00] talk about this within the context of improving and optimizing your environment to set you up for success. I can talk about this in the context of becoming more, I.

Engaged in your spiritual, your beliefs and how do you engage more with that? How do you engage more with the people around you? I can talk about it in terms of creating a growth mindset. I can talk about it in terms of recognizing and starting to, be able to utilize your emotions as you feel them to accomplish what you wanna accomplish.

I'm just throwing out things here, but these are all. Things that you can start to learn, you can start to develop skills and you could become this person that you want to be. And that's the really cool part about this process is it's a growth process, right? It's not just, oh, go and do these things and lose 20 pounds, and then hope that you don't put it back on.

It's a growth process. It takes you from someone. [00:35:00] Who is currently doing things that has them 20, 30, 40, 50, whatever pounds over, right? Maybe you're a hundred pounds overweight and it has you at that position. That's your current behaviors, your current lifestyle has you there. And what we have to do is we have to take all of those behaviors, all that lifestyle stuff, everything that's around you, and we have to start to figure out how do we make it better?

How do we make it better for your goals? Not just better period, but like, how do we make it better for your goals? How do we help you become the person that you wanna be? And I wanna be very clear in saying this when we talk about weight loss, because I focused on that today because it is the main idea here.

'cause I know of a lot of people in the company either come to you for weight loss, but guys, there's a lot of you out there that maybe your goal isn't necessarily to lose a ton of weight. Maybe you just wanna lose a little bit of weight. Your goal is just to need more athletic. You just wanna move better.

You just wanna be pain-free, and we [00:36:00] can still use all these same tools I'm talking about today for that, or maybe for you, you're listening to this episode, but the weight loss isn't really a thing for you. But you know what? Maybe you want improve your relationship. Maybe your marriage lacked connection.

Maybe you don't have intimacy in your relationship. Maybe you don't feel like you connect with your kids very well. Maybe you wanna improve that relationship. Maybe you want to be a better leader at work or in your community, right? So regardless of what areas you want to improve in your life, this framework works.

These three steps of creating a vision, discipline, and mastery. When you get these three things right, what you have done is created a growth process that can literally take any of those six elements, right? So that's physical, mental, emotional, relational, environmental, and, existential or spiritual, right?

so when you take [00:37:00] those six things and you apply this framework to them, man, guys, I'm telling you the. The difference it can make in your life is so huge and I'm living proof of it. I've seen it firsthand. I know what it is, and that's why I'm so passionate about teaching. I don't hope you guys can actually hear the passion in my voice right now because it truly is just something that just gets me fired up.

so go out there, try to start implementing these things. Start with that vision, then, once you can have that clear vision for what you want your life to look like. Down to the small details. And again, remember, they don't need to be perfect. You can always change them, but we need to get them there to begin with, right?

We gotta have somewhere to start and then, okay, what do I do? What habits do I need to create? What discipline do I need? What are my daily practices that I need to put in place to start to do those things and then be reasonable, right? Don't try to do everything at once. What? What's reasonable? How can I start really small and then build upon it?

And then as I'm building up those skills, when I start to hit those walls, [00:38:00] What do I need to go out and do? What skills do I need to go out and acquire to create mastery in the process? And that's it guys. that's really the big secret here. now I know that implementing that is a lot tougher than what it sounds.

and the good news is, guys, I've helped a lot of men do this. I've been through this process myself. It's something that I've really helped a lot of people with my coaching programs, and I'd be happy to see if it's something that might work for you too. So if you're feeling like, Hey, this sounds great.

I really love your process, but I feel like I would need help with this. just head over to unshakablehabits.com and click on the button to schedule a roadmap call. no cost to you. And what we'll do is we'll sit down, we'll talk about your goals. What is you wanna accomplish? we'll get a baseline of where you're at now, and I'll start to help you create a little bit of that vision for your life and then, see if you're someone that I can also help out.

so again, guys, if that's something that you're interested in, that's something you wanna [00:39:00] do, you can either shoot me a DM or on social media, or the easiest thing to do is just go to

Unshakablehabits.com, click on the button on the upper hand corner that says, schedule a roadmap call today and we'll get you set up. I just hope that you guys really get great value out of the message today.

If you did, I would love to hear your feedback on it. please leave reviews for the podcast. reach out to me on social media. Let's connect. I would love to hear the impact that these things actually have on you. And as always, guys, I wanna remind you that while none of us are born Unshakable, we can all become Unshakable.

Intro/Outro: Thank you for listening to the Unshakable Habits podcast with Coach Stephen Box. Be sure to hit the subscribe button and help us spread the word by sharing the podcast with other men. If you are ready to create Unshakable habits, you can learn more and connect with us at UnshakableHabits.com.