How to Change Your Mindset for Fitness After 40

Nikkiey: Real quick, the only ask I could ever have of you guys is to help spread the word so we can help more women lose body fat, build muscle, reach their goals, and feel insanely confident. And the only way we can do that is if you rate, review, and share this podcast. So the single thing I ask you to do is leave a review. It will take you 10 seconds, and it will mean the absolute world to me and may change the world of someone else.

We can break the habit of being ourselves. In other words, we can rewire our brain to support new habits and behaviors that move us closer to our goals. And you can do this in three ways. And look, when I mention these three ways, your brain, because of where you're currently at in your current state, in your current thought processes, in your current emotions, if you're the one struggling and having these limiting self-doubt narratives going on, these three things are going to feel weird.

Hey, you guys. What's up? Welcome back to The WarriorBabe Show with Nikkiey Stott, co-founder of WarriorBabe. On this podcast, we talk about mindset, methodologies, and tactics that will help you lose body fat, build muscle, be strong, and feel insanely confident. I'm your host, Nikkiey Stott, and welcome to today's episode, episode number 191.

Today I'm really excited to talk about this topic. We haven't brought a mindset topic to the podcast in a little bit, and I think this one will be super beneficial for you guys. So we're going to deep dive into a topic that goes beyond workouts, macros, meal plans, strength training. Although strength training is going to be tied into it, and fitness is going to be tied into it. But I want to talk about how your thoughts and your feelings control your actions, or even inactions, on a daily basis to ultimately shape your success or non-success in your goals moving forward. So in this episode, I really want to explore the mind-body connection, how your mindset can either propel you towards your goals or hold you back.

I've been listening to a ton of Joe Dispenza. I don't know if you guys have ever heard of him. If you've never heard of him, I highly recommend checking him out. He has an incredible book called Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. He teaches how our thoughts, emotions, and beliefs create our reality. And I want to show you guys these principles today and talk through them a little bit. I'm clearly not Joe Dispenza, so I'm not going to do it as well as he does. But if you want to check him out, I highly recommend that you do.

I'm going to talk about how these principles apply to strength training, to eating right, to proper nutrition, to macros, to you achieving your body composition goals, like building muscle, losing body fat, getting toned, and having a physique that you're proud of. So let's freaking get into it, you guys.

I'm really excited to talk about this because I shared a couple episodes, but I haven't really dove into this transformative period that I'm going through personally. It has a lot to do with mindset. It has a lot to do with uncovering aspects that I have been suppressing for a long freaking time. And as I tease it up here, I'm sure one day I will be able to hold the space to share this with you guys and let you into this world. I'm still processing it all. All that to say, I'm excited to bring this aspect to you guys in a way that's going to correlate and resonate with you, with fitness, health, goals, all of the things.

It starts with our thoughts, then it goes to our feelings, and then it goes to our actions. Thoughts, emotions, actions. The thoughts that control the emotions that control the actions are either going to help you move forward towards your goals, or they're going to pull you in the opposite direction and keep you stuck where you are.

So I hope at the end of this podcast, if you are stuck, this helps you break free on the mental aspect. And if you are propelling forward but feeling stagnant, and it's not necessarily like the plateau episode I did a couple weeks ago, it's more that you're stagnant in your mind, maybe there are some aspects of this podcast that will help you, and I hope they do, to get more in alignment with yourself so you can get out of the stagnation and move forward.

So first, let's kick things off with one of Joe Dispenza's key ideas that I think is going to carry us through this entire podcast: thoughts become things. This means that the thoughts you think on a daily basis shape your actions and eventually your results. If your thoughts are negative, if they are self-limiting, or if they're filled with doubt, they're going to manifest in behaviors that undermine you and your fitness goals, whether that's skipping a workout, overeating, making poor food choices, excuse after excuse. I'm too busy. I don't have enough time.

To break it down to the science, when you repeatedly think certain thoughts, they create neural pathways in your brain, making those thoughts habitual. Over time, your thoughts become automatic and your brain operates in a kind of default mode. So if you constantly tell yourself that you can't achieve your fitness goals, you are programming your mind to find ways to make that belief true.

But the good news is that just as you developed those limiting thoughts, you can also reprogram your mind to think differently. And that's what I love so much about the WarriorBabe program and what we've built over the last six years and have continued to optimize, improve, and redefine. It's not just, hey, here's your workout program, here's your nutrition protocol that you have to follow. It's, let me understand where this human is at. We call our clients babes. The coach shows up to the Zoom call at onboarding, and they're meeting the client where they are at. And every single client is drastically different. That client is going to have different thoughts, different narratives, different limiting beliefs.

Maybe they are self-limiting. Maybe they're filled with doubt. Maybe they're positive and hopeful and energetic, and they're super excited about their journey moving forward, that they signed up, and they can't wait. Or, like I said, they're self-limiting or filled with doubt and they think they can't do this. Then it is the coach's job to hear this and see how this human is operating in terms of thoughts. That's where the professional comes into play, knowing that these thoughts are not going to be conducive to a successful journey moving forward. So the coach needs to help this human reprogram her mind to think differently.

That's where we're breaking old habitual thoughts, habitual patterns, and habitual actions. But it starts up here first: the thoughts, the emotions, the actions. Thoughts first. We're breaking those. We have to rebuild them. We have to reprogram them. And we have to create better behavior changes, which come from the emotions, which then go into the actions that are going to get you to where you want to be and help you be successful.

That's why it's so much more than just, here's your workout program, here's an app with all your workouts, sets, reps, here's your macro numbers to follow and apply. If you have self-limiting beliefs around nutrition, do you think you're going to go follow those macros? No. If you have self-doubt or negative narratives going on in your brain about how you feel in your body, so thoughts and feelings, do you think you're going to go to the gym to do your workout? No.

And maybe you're the person I talked about who's super excited and hopeful and has all the faith in the world at the beginning of their journey. But guaranteed, two months in, once it starts to level out and those emotions dip, you're going to feel these thoughts. And that's where you're going to have a coach to hear you saying those words and help reprogram that type of mindset, because otherwise you're not going to be as successful as you want moving forward.

So think about that science I just broke down, how your brain operates in a kind of default mode because your thoughts become automatic over years and years of programming these neural pathways to think one way. And when you have these types of thoughts, the brain will find ways to make that belief true. I'm going to dive into how this applies to fitness. If you want to achieve a toned, strong body, if you want to build muscle through strength training, if you want to do macronutrients and eat right, it is so essential to first train your mind to believe that's even freaking possible.

What I would recommend, and personally what I've been doing for myself where I've recognized my shortcomings, is to become aware of your thoughts. I had to become aware of why I acted the way I was acting, because my painful emotions were driving it. And those painful emotions come from thoughts, come from trauma, come from X, Y, and Z from so many years ago. So when you become aware of that, and you become aware of your self-talk and the way you have been operating so far...

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...you're able to switch it. And it doesn't happen overnight, trust me. You have to become aware of it first, then you have to be consciously aware of it when you're in the act of doing it, and then you have to be consciously aware to make a change.

So are you telling yourself, I'm too old to build muscle? Is that one of you guys? I'm 60 years old. My best days are behind me. I'm never going to be as fit as I want to be, or as I used to be at 20 years old. I'm too busy now. I'm never going to be fit. I'm just stuck this way. Those thoughts feel harmless. Even me just saying it, it almost feels harmless. I'm too old to build muscle. It sounds harmless, right? But those thoughts are silently shaping your actions or your inactions.

So let's talk about emotions next. Joe Dispenza says your emotions are energy in motion. The way that you feel affects how you act. When you're stuck in emotions like frustration, fear, and stress, your body goes into survival mode. This triggers your fight or flight response, which raises your cortisol levels and makes it harder for you to make rational decisions, like sticking to a workout program, honing in on tracking your macronutrients, learning about macronutrients, and then making healthy food choices.

For example, have you ever noticed, you guys, that when you're stressed, you tend to reach for comfort foods? Or maybe you feel way too drained after a work day to go hit the gym and get your workout done. That's your emotions driving your actions. But when you shift your emotional state into one of, I'm excited, I'm empowered, I'm inspired, I have belief in myself, or my coach is giving me the belief, my coach believes in me, so I need to show up for my coach, and then eventually you believe in yourself more, you are far more likely to follow through with your fitness program. You are far more likely to go into the gym and do that workout. You are far more likely to have your macros aligned for the day and stick to eating the healthy choices you have already planned for yourself.

Now here's where it gets interesting. Positive emotions, such as excitement about your goals, can create a cascade of beneficial effects. They lower your cortisol levels, they improve your focus, and they increase your motivation to stick to taking action. This is why setting fitness goals that genuinely excite you can help you stay committed.

This is what I was saying at the beginning of the podcast. If you've had success but now you feel stagnant mentally, you need to set new goals for yourself. Let's say you have a year down and you've accomplished some awesome things, and you're like, I don't need this anymore. No, no, no. You still have work to do. It doesn't just happen in one year. To truly be successful, it could take years. Maybe you break some habits in the first year, you're seeing some results, you're 13 pounds down, but then it's, oh, I still have more work to do. There are still other limiting beliefs I have to break. There's still other knowledge I have to gain. So this is my next goal. I want to lose another 10 pounds, but I also want to gain more knowledge about how this past year led me to this result and why. I want to ask more questions, and X, Y, and Z.

When you are emotionally aligned with what you want, you're more likely to take actions that support those goals. Whether it's, I want to gain more knowledge and ask more questions. Or, I could have done better with meal prepping in the last year, so this next year I'm going to do better with my meal prepping, and I'm going to stick to the plan, tracking my macros and hitting them. Maybe you were at 80% with hitting your workouts, and you want to make it 85% and get in the gym regularly. If you show up a little bit better than you did this last year, you're going to see even more progress than you did in the last year, because you're showing up more and showing up better.

That's what's interesting. Positive emotions from being excited about goals create so many incredible effects. You're attached mentally to those goals, and you start thinking of ways to show up better for them. Or things come into your space from the universe, like, hey, I know you set this intention or this goal, so here's something that's going to help you get to it. Sometimes those things don't even make sense, but you go do it because it feels intuitively right. And then you're like, whoa, that helped me. Four weeks ago I did this, and I see the progress from it. I didn't even recognize it came into my space, and it's driving me to my goals.

Example: I just spoke to an incredible human. I showed up to surprise a WarriorBabe. She said she was going to the doctor, and her doctors were saying, you're 55 years old, this is just what life is now. She was almost accepting of that until she saw our ads. You guys know WarriorBabe runs a ton of ads on Facebook and Instagram. I think she said she saw it on Instagram. And in that moment she felt like she had hope. That's a feeling. That hope drove her to sign up for the program. And then the positive emotions that came from setting goals with her coach once she got inside cascaded into a slew of beneficial events and effects. It improved her focus and increased her motivation to take action. That's why it's so important to set goals that genuinely excite you, because those feelings are going to drive your actions.

[Ad break] Ladies, are you feeling frustrated with body changes you're experiencing during menopause? It's time to take control. If you're between 45 and 65 years old and tired of struggling with body fat and muscle loss, WarriorBabe is here for you. At WarriorBabe, we've helped over 18,000 women just like you lose body fat, build toned muscle, and understand their bodies better with personalized plans based on hormone and thyroid testing and more. Imagine knowing exactly what your body needs to see real results, and results that last. Don't wait anymore. Take charge of your health and join our community of strong, empowered women. Visit warriorbabe.com/apply today to start your transformation. That's warriorbabe.com/apply. All right, let's get back to the show.

How can you apply this understanding to change your thought patterns? I'm sure you're thinking, okay, Nikkiey, you're making tons of sense, but how do I change my thought patterns? How do I change my emotional state to align with my goals? This is where the book I mentioned at the beginning comes in. Joe Dispenza teaches that we can break the habit of being ourselves. In other words, we can rewire our brain to support new habits and behaviors that move us closer to our goals.

And you can do this in three ways. And look, when I mention these three ways, your brain, because of where you're currently at in your current state, in your current thought processes, in your current emotions, if you're the one struggling and having these limiting self-doubt narratives going on, these three things are going to feel weird. Your brain's going to be like, that's stupid, because that's where you're currently at. So you have to rewire your brain. You basically have to rewire your subconscious to be in alignment.

I'm not 100% right in terms of my words here, but you need to operate consciously differently. We operate so much from our subconscious, so how can you operate consciously differently? You have to rewire your subconscious brain. That takes effort and that takes work, because that subconscious is years and years and years in the making. You can go all the way back to when you were five years old and remember a thought that was probably either good or bad. That thought has probably created some type of neural pathway in your brain that has some attachment to old habitual habits or how you think about something on a regular basis. It alters our reality as well. That's another rabbit hole, and I'm not going to go down it.

So if these feel weird to you, good. Embrace that. Even question it: why does this feel weird to me? Why do these affirmations, which is one of them, feel weird? Affirmations are going to feel weird because you're talking about a future-state you, but you're in a current-state you. You're not at that future state yet. And the current-state you is going to do everything in its power to keep you where you are right now, because it doesn't want to change. That's your ego. And again, these are little buckets I'm dropping here in the last three minutes that each have their own rabbit hole. Reality distortion, rabbit hole. Ego, rabbit hole. I'm like, Nikkiey, bring it back.

So affirmations are one of them. If it feels weird, good. Saying positive affirmations can reshape your thought patterns. If you create affirmations that reflect the body and the lifestyle you want, the future you, that's going to help train your subconscious to believe them, which in turn impacts your actions moving forward.

I remember when I first started my fitness journey, which was also around the time I was starting WarriorBabe, I didn't have a business mentality. I didn't have a fitness mentality. I maybe had a fitness mentality from when I was younger, but I was stuck in alcohol and drinking and all of the things, and I wasn't happy in my body. X, Y, and Z. That's where a lot of people are when they're starting. I need to make a change, right? You feel a lot of pain, and you're like, I need to make a change. I had three pages of affirmations that I used to read, because I was hellbent on making a change. I was so tired of being where I was and stuck in my patterns, stuck in my habits, stuck in these thought processes, and stuck in not being happy.

Those three pages consisted a lot of, I'm a businesswoman, X, Y, and Z. I don't remember exactly what they said. Now I have new affirmations for where I currently am in my process, a healing journey and getting rid of old traumatic thoughts from when I was younger, to help rewire my subconscious brain to believe them so that I can take better actions and grow and evolve from it.

I highly recommend this as the number one thing if you are struggling with your current state and these thoughts and this narrative going on. Take the time to write out affirmations, and make sure you write them out the right way. You can also seek support. You can go online and read affirmations, the ones you'll probably see if you Google. ChatGPT is amazing. If you go on ChatGPT and ask it to help you with affirmations for what you're specifically struggling with, it can help. No matter what, though, make sure they are in your own words, because you have to believe them. Your future you has to believe them.

So here are some examples. Think about where you want to be, the body and lifestyle you want to achieve. That can look like: I am getting stronger every day, and I feel confident in my skin. It's "I am" where you're currently not at right now, but where you want to be. I am getting stronger every day. I am a macro genius, because I understand that macros are fuel for my body to give me the results that I want. I feel empowered and resilient on my fitness journey.

See, you're not a macro genius right now. That's where your brain's going to trick you and try to keep you where you are. But you want to be a macro genius, right? Because you want to understand this stuff. You know macros are important to getting to your goals. So reading those every single day is you rewiring your subconscious brain to believe that. And guess what? If you are saying these things, you're going to think about different ways you can show up for yourself on a daily basis. Your brain isn't finding ways to prove old habits true anymore.

Because what I said earlier is, if you're operating from a program, your brain will find ways to make those beliefs true. So if you say you're not a macro genius, or you don't understand macros, or macros are too hard, your brain is going to find ways to make that belief true. That's going to make you feel frustrated, and then the actions you take are inactions towards your fitness goals. I hope this is making sense. It's getting me fired up.

And then at the end, add "I feel," because it's a feeling. You rewire the thought, and you rewire the feeling, because when you do those two things, it's going to drive you into different actions. You need to repeat these. I would say write five to start, up to ten. Make them good. Read them every day. Read them in the morning and read them at night. Read them in the morning because you're about to start your day and you want good thoughts to fill your brain. At the end of the day, you're about to go to sleep, where we dive into our subconscious brain. So you want to read them as the last thing before you go to bed, so that's the last thing you're thinking about when you fall asleep. You're rewiring your subconscious brain while you sleep with those thoughts.

There are other ways you can do this. I think affirmations are one of the most important. You can also do visualization. Visualization is a little bit harder for people to do, but it's a very powerful tool when it comes to reprogramming your mind. How I do this is I write out who I want to be. I'm currently not that person, right? But I actually have a page defining who I want to be and how I'm operating differently from now. I'm still in the healing journey of figuring things out, but I know future me has figured it out, and this is how she operates.

So for you, it's, okay, I'm stuck in a painful feeling in my body. I'm not happy with it. So who do you want to be? What does that person look like? What is she doing? How is she showing up? How is she acting differently? You want to visualize her. Imagine yourself lifting heavier weights, eating your macros, eating healthy foods, feeling confident and strong.

You can take a few minutes and just think about it. You don't have to write it down. You can sit and meditate on that person, though that might be a little harder to do, because again, current state. Or if you want to write it out like you did with the affirmations, you can write out the visualization in your notepad, on your phone, or on paper, and read it every day. Taking a few minutes to visualize yourself reaching those goals primes your brain to start looking for opportunities to make those visualizations a reality.

The last thing is gratitude. Gratitude is another way to shift your emotional state. When you're focusing on gratitude, whether it's for the progress you've made so far, the fact that you can move your body, the fact that you're seeing the results you want, or that you're grateful for the options you have to eat healthy foods, or grateful that you get to work out. You don't have to work out. You get to work out. You put yourself in a more positive emotional state, and that positivity motivates action. It helps you stay on track with going to the gym and doing your workouts, following your nutrition, and getting the results you want.

So those are three powerful ways you can change your thought patterns and your emotional state to align better with where you're going and who you want to be. You have to break the habit of being yourself where you are right now. You have to break those old habitual thought patterns and rewire them into new habits, new behaviors, and new actions that are going to move you towards your goals.

So let's tie this back to you achieving your body composition goals: helping you get toned, helping you build muscle, helping you through strength training workouts, helping you do the macros. The mental aspect of strength training is absolutely huge. If you believe that lifting heavier weights is something you can't do, your body will follow suit. But if you shift your mindset and tell yourself, I'm getting stronger with every rep, you're more likely to push yourself further, better, and harder in the gym. These are the ways I really want to tie what I'm talking about in this whole episode to what it looks like tangibly on a daily basis.

There's that saying: if you believe you can, you will. If you believe you can't, you won't. And it's so true. If you believe you can't, your body's going to follow suit. The last rep should be hard, but you're not going to try to push yourself as hard as you possibly can, because those thoughts carry into those types of feelings, and that's going to be the way you take the action. But if you go into a set and you're like, I'm getting stronger with every rep, I got this, I can do this, and you're telling your brain that, then you're more likely to push yourself further in the gym.

The same goes for nutrition. Building muscle and having a toned body requires the right balance of macronutrients. It requires that you eat protein, fats, and carbohydrates, and that you learn how to do it sustainably and not do these fad diets, like I talked about in one of the last episodes. But without the right mindset, sticking to that plan can feel like an absolute chore. By reframing your thoughts around food, you can turn nutrition into an empowering freaking tool.

Instead of thinking, I have to eat this healthy meal, shift your thinking to, I'm fueling my body to be strong and healthy. Do you see the difference in that simple mindset shift? I have to eat this healthy meal. I have to track my macros today. I have to do this. Shift your thinking to: I am fueling my body to be strong and healthy with every single macronutrient that I eat on a daily basis. I am getting stronger with every single rep that I do on a daily basis. And I can't wait to see what my body is going to look like in 12 months. Those simple shifts in the narrative you say to yourself are going to make it easier to stick to your nutrition plan, to stick to tracking macros, and to learn how to do these things that support you and your goals.

I think this concept goes far beyond working out and nutrition and following those plans. Your mindset literally makes or breaks your success in your fitness journey. It makes or breaks it. If you are operating every single day from I can't, or this is too hard, or excuse, excuse, excuse, or inaction, inaction, inaction, where is that stemming from? It's stemming from your mind. It's stemming from your thoughts. So rewire them. Make a mindset shift.

If you are thinking better things in support of your goals, you're going to find ways to show up better. The universe is going to give you things to help you show up better and get more in alignment with yourself. And guess what? It's not going to be easy. Some of the things are not going to make sense. But you have to believe that what's being handed to you, or what's being told to you, is the right way to get to your goal. And you have to go execute on it. That's one of the hardest things to do, taking the action.

And the action is the most important thing. You can have these thoughts. You can have these feelings. But if you don't do anything with them, you're stuck in inaction. You're stuck where you are right now and not making any change for yourself. If you start rewiring these thoughts, that goes into the feelings and emotions you're feeling, and you're hopeful, you're excited, you feel faith, X, Y, and Z. Then the action is you're going to drive to go do the workout. You're going to spend 30 minutes at the end of the night, instead of watching Netflix, tracking your macros for the next day, so you can wake up in the morning, put all your meals into your bag, head out for your work day, and know you have a plan because you packed all your meals the night before. Instead of feeling drained at the end of your work day and sitting and watching Netflix.

Those are two different ways you can show up. Thoughts: I'm too drained for my workout. Feelings: I'm drained. I'm not going to take the action. And then you're in inaction. You sit down on the couch and watch Netflix for the next three hours. Instead, the thoughts are, I want to go accomplish this goal for myself. I have a goal in mind. That's what we talked about at the beginning of the podcast. You have the thought of a goal, the thought of what you want to accomplish. The feelings are, I'm excited, I'm hopeful, I'm empowered, X, Y, and Z. So then your action is, I'm going to spend 30 minutes to an hour putting my meals together and packing up for the next day instead of watching Netflix. Do you see how those are two drastically different realities?

So all in all, you guys, I think this is a really good one. These are concepts that are hard to understand, so if you need to listen to this podcast again, I would highly recommend it. Or if you need to listen to Joe Dispenza, I would highly recommend that as well.

The takeaway is that your thoughts and feelings have a direct impact on your actions. If you shift your mindset, you can unlock your full potential when it comes to the goals you're striving for and who you want to become. Everything starts in your mind. Whether it's a strength training workout you have to go do, or I need to track my macros at the end of the day, or I need to make sure my macros are aligned for the day, or achieving the goals you set out to achieve. Everything starts in your mind. Everything else, the workouts, the macros, those are the tools and resources to get you there. But if you don't believe you can do it, you're not going to do it. If you believe you can, you will go do it. And it starts there.

You have the power to change the way you think and feel about your journey. It is all in your control. If you reprogram your mind to believe in your strength and your abilities, to visualize your success, and to take consistent action that is aligned with those thoughts, the body you want and the results you want are so freaking possible. But it all starts here.

All right, guys. So good. Do what you've got to do to get more aligned with yourself and rewire your thoughts. Do those affirmations. I'm telling you, do it. And then write down a future you. If you don't know how to do it, go Google how to do it. Or if you're a WarriorBabe, go talk to your coach about how to do it. All right? Go do it. I love you guys. I'll see you next time. Peace out.

Hey, guys. Real quick. If you're interested in taking your body to the next level, losing body fat, building more muscle, and feeling more confident, do it alongside one of our 30-plus professional coaches. Work one-on-one with her to eliminate all of the guesswork you may have. All you need to do is the work she tells you to do to get to those goals of yours. To learn more, click the link below this podcast and apply to our VIP program right now.