Thank you so much. Letters and numbers reviewer. This is our dream, right? Our dream was to create a podcast that was both inspiring, but also practical. So you guys would take what we say and you would go out and live it. Please share this podcast with other people. Just find that little button that says, share, and send it to a friend and just say, Hey, I thought of you. This one’s been really great. It’s been helping me. People need an extra hand sometimes. So even just mentioning something to them isn’t enough, but sending it to their phones is really helpful. And thank you to everybody who just goes in and gives us five stars. We have so many, five star reviews. We have a total of 90 reviews now. And so even if you don’t want to type something out, just hitting those stars is really helpful because what it does is it shows the podcast databases that people like this podcast.

And then what they do is they show it to more people as a suggestion. So that’s really what we’re trying to do here at made for greatness is just reach more Catholic moms so we can show them, Hey, you might be believing some things that aren’t true and are holding you back from being who God wants you to be. That’s our mission. We just want women to live the life that God has planned for them and to enjoy it. So today we’re going to be talking about loving the plateau. And as I’ve shared on the podcast, I lost 70 pounds last year, which was such a huge deal for me because I had been heavy for my whole life. And once I learned these mindset tools, it just completely changed how I viewed food and how I viewed myself. And also the confidence that I had that I really could lose this weight for the last time. I mean, I think for those of us who have been on roller coasters, where we gain weight and we lose weight, it starts to feel really disheartening. It starts to feel like, well, I’m just an overeater. I just struggle with my weight. I’m always going to be like this, and it’s really easy to be hopeless. And then of course, when we are in a hopeless model, we’re never, problem-solving, we’re never praying. We’re never doing the things that are good for us.

So I always pay attention. What am I feeling hopeless? And I still feel hopeless, but now I don’t make any decisions. I don’t know [inaudible] any opinions about myself. I just noticed, oh, Sterling, you are feeling really hopeless. That’s right now that’s okay. Let’s just sit with it. I just process those feelings. Sometimes I can do it in a few seconds. Sometimes it takes a lot longer, but when I am ready, I bring God into the city and he is my hope. And I know that with him, I can do all things and I can borrow his strength. I don’t need my strength. I don’t need my super smart genius ideas. They all come from him. Anyway.

It is very difficult for us to solve problems when we feel hopeless. And this is important because when we hit play toes, hopeless is off. And what comes up, especially if we’ve been struggling with a particular topic for a long time. And so, as I mentioned in the mindset cycle, all episode, we cannot even do the mindset work when we are hopeless. We have, I can move past that. I was doing some coaching and someone said, oh, they were hopeless. And then on their action line, I said, you know, what do you do or not do when you feel helplessness? And she listed a few things, but then she listed prey. And I said, well, we don’t pray when we’re hopeless. When we’re hopeless, it feels like a dark place. It feels like we fallen into a hole. It feels like we can’t see the light, but there’s a split second, a simple thought that we have that pulls us out of it enough to want to pray. So it might be like, I need the Lord and you have this thought I need the Lord.

And you might feel curious, hopeful, willing, interested. Then from those feelings, from one of those feelings, you will pray. We don’t pray when we’re hopeless. And I think that’s really important to slow down for all of you, because I think we know that the answer to hopelessness is prayer, but I want to show you the power of your mind. Our feelings come from our thoughts. It’s our actions are driven by our feelings. So we don’t feel hopeless and pray. We might feel hopeless and then go over, talk about something to our husband, or we might withdraw from him.

So we might even have a conversation about something, but when it’s coming from the feeling of hopelessness, it won’t be an effective conversation. When you have a conversation with your husband and you’re feeling hopeless, he will probably be turned off in some way. And he will say, why are you making such a big deal out of this? Can’t you see that you’re being a little silly about this. And it’s because you’re bringing the energy of hopelessness. And that’s why that’s the feeling from which you’re talking from. So we don’t pray when we’re hopeless. We don’t have productive conversations with people. When we’re hopeless, we tend to do a lot of not showing up in our lives, not problem-solving and numbing ourselves out.

And so instead, when you move into prayer, it’s because you had a thought, I need the Lord. I should turn to God. The Lord is my hope. Maybe you have a scripture that you’ve memorized, but that thought will create a new feeling, which will drive new actions, leading you to prayer. And I want you guys to know that you always have access to that tool. And so that’s the tool that I pull out. Now, when I’m feeling hopeless, I need to pray. How can I encounter God? Sometimes I’ll think you should take a walk. I noticed the feeling of hopelessness. I feel it. I don’t deny it. I’m like, oh, I am feeling really hopeless right now. But I have a thought that pulls me out of it. Maybe you should go for a walk. Maybe you should make some tea. Maybe you should read your Bible. Maybe you should read the diary of Saint Faustina.

You guys have the power to move from one feeling to another, with your thoughts. And if you are feeling hopeless, it is not because of your circumstances. That’s what we have been kind of led to believe. I’ve had another fight with my husband. It’s never going to get better. I gained two pounds. I’m always going to struggle with this. My child, you know, was sassy and didn’t listen to me. I’m never going to figure out this parenting thing. We think that those circumstances are the reason that we’re here hopeless, but they are not. It is just our thoughts about them. And when you notice that you’re in a hopeless model, what can you practice thinking that leads to a different feeling, something about prayer, something about self care, and it might be even about your husband. You might think he can help me feel better.

My husband can help me feel better, but then that might make you feel, I feel hopeful or curious or love. And then the way you talk to him then will be so much softer. And it will actually, when you come with that energy, he might actually be able to meet you there and talk to you and help you. So I want to talk about plateaus today because we do a lot of weight loss coaching. And you guys, you should just see the testimonials that we have. It’s utterly amazing how much weight women are losing at all ages with or without children and babies and all of it. I’m just continually amazed at how the masters members are showing up and doing the work and finding success and really having a similar story to mine. I’ve always struggled with this and now I’m not. And it doesn’t mean that every day is easy, but there’s just a solid belief that, wow, this is it. I now know what to do. I’m going to keep doing this until I reach my goal.

But in every good weight loss story, there is always a plateau. And I thought about that. It was like really everyone. And I thought back to every person that I had ever listened to. And every single one of them had a plateau story. I was losing my weight. And then all of a sudden it’s stalled out. And oftentimes when we have more than, you know, 20 pounds to lose, we might have multiple plateaus or we’re losing weight. And then we get down to a point that our body was comfortable weighing maybe a weight that we’d been for many years, it’s called a set point. He has these set points like, oh, I’m comfortable here. Let’s hang out here. That’s when we tend to plateau.

And when that happens, what does our brain do? Oh, no, something’s wrong. This is bad. We might give up the tell us really freak us out because we think we might give up. If we stop seeing success there, just going to throw in the towel and give up. But here’s the thing about knowing that your thoughts drive your feelings, which drive your actions, which create your results. It is not the scale coming down that has made you feel confident, happy, motivated, excited. The number on the scale is not what has created the feelings that have driven the actions of you taking care of yourself and then losing weight. You may have seen the number and had the thought this is working. This is so fun. Yay. I did it. Those thoughts are always available to you. And so here’s what I wanted to share with you today. What if we learned how to love the plateau? What if I told you you were going to lose all your weight and you were going to go through two plateaus and each one was going to be a couple of weeks long, but you absolutes your weight. And in order to lose your weight, you have to go through the plateaus. Now, I don’t know scientifically if that’s true, but I will just say again, everybody’s story. That’s lost a bunch of, I had a plateau for six weeks, for six weeks. I didn’t lose any weight.

And I had to learn how to manage my mind during that time to still believe this is working, I’m going to hit my goal weight. I’m becoming a woman who doesn’t struggle with food. I got to use the plateau to strengthen my thinking so that I could keep going. I had to learn it. Wasn’t the scale that was creating my thinking. That’s just a neutral circumstance. And so if I told you that you had to go through two plateaus, what if you felt excited about getting to one of them? What if you felt like it was this necessary Rite of passage and you finally got there. What have you felt smiley? Like Sterling Sterling. I got to my plateau and we jumped up and down and I said, yay. I knew this was working. You are going to lose all of your weight. What if the plateau was evidence that this was working?

What if in one plateau you were like, oh, I am so glad I’m going through this right now. And I only have to do it one more time. Cause we’re going to have two of these. What if instead of feeling hopeless and discouraged, you felt excitement. What if it made you in more belief that you were going to lose your weight? Did you think you were going to have any plateaus? And it’s funny. I mean, I really just, this just came to me last week because I was coaching on plateaus because we all talk about them. Like they’re so terrible in such a big deal. And yet we’re all very familiar with the fact that this is how it works. So why are we not happy knowing that literally the success story requires the plateau. So I want you to picture being at your goal, weight or being at Christmas, Christmas is about six months away. And seeing some people you hadn’t seen in a while and they’re like, oh my goodness, you look amazing.

How did you do it? Maybe someone and she hasn’t lost her weight. And she really wants to know how did you do it? Tell me about it. And you were like, well, I learned how to feel my feelings. I learned how to write down these urges and not give into them. I kept track of them on an urge worksheet. I learned that my thinking creates my results and I had a bunch of garbage thinking about my body and food. And then I had this plateau for me right in my plateau was when I really realized that I couldn’t eat ham. I couldn’t eat ham and I couldn’t eat like sausages of any kind.

And I also learned how to manage my mind and love and trust myself, even in a plateau. I’m so grateful for that. And as part of my story, I love sharing it. I love sharing it because now I can be encouraging to other women who are going through it. So what if that’s part of your story too? And come Christmas time is you’re telling your friend or your sister. And you’re like, and you know what? You’re going to plateau maybe two or three times. And I want you to call me when you plateau, because I’m going to cheer for you. Because that means this is working.

That is the power of mindset work is that we can completely reframe a situation that we used to think was bad into something. Good. This is you guys. I think this is the key to sainthood. God promises us peace and joy in any situation, how do you have peace and joy in any situation? You just learn to think about the circumstances in a way that creates peace and joy. If we can love the plateau, if we can be excited about having a plateau, imagine what else we could do with our lives. It is a lifelong work. It is, is why we created a membership and not a course because people love to sign up for memberships, right? We don’t like to put our credit card information in and think, oh my gosh, I’m going to be signed up for that every month. And I have to remember to cancel, but we wanted it to be like that on purpose, because we wanted you to know that you are going to continue to do the work and you’re going to be happy about it because I was just reading a quote in our, just to post in our Facebook group.

And she said something like, oh my goodness, I came here for weight loss, but I just didn’t realize that I had manuals for so many people in my relationships. And you guys have totally transformed my relationships. And that is such a common thing where people come to masters for one very painful problem. But when they get in, not only do they shift that problem, but it’s such a wonderful feeling to think what’s next. What else can I shift? It almost feels like magic to believe that something is painful or bad or yucky or a problem. And to go through the experience of reframing your mind and learning that, that thing, isn’t a problem you could feel neutrally about it. You could feel slightly positive or you could be all the way excited.

How can we feel all the way excited about somethings? No, we don’t want that all the time. Like, I don’t think if I had a cancer diagnosis that I would use this same idea and be like, I’m so excited about this cancer. I know how I would do it. By the way, I would just, I would just assume I’m going to be a really big Saint. And the cancer is part of my story and that this is what God has chosen for me to be a really big Saint. That’s how I would feel. Maybe not excited, but determined or willing to go through the cancer journey.

You can do this with anything negative about your husband in August. We’re going to be doing this really fun husband makeover challenge, where we spend 30 days making over our ideas and thoughts about our husbands. And then of course the funny part is we’re not going to change the husband at all. It’s not that kind of make-over, we’re going to talk more about that in the next podcast episode, but it’s the same concept, which we can take something that feels yucky in our minds, but it only feels yucky because what we’re thinking. So some of you aren’t losing weight, but really everything that we do in life has a plateau. So for those of you who are entrepreneurs and you’re building businesses, you know, that success comes in waves. So you’ll have a really great month. And then you might have a month that isn’t really great to same thing. How can we love the down months and know that they are necessary to have a successful business? You absolutely need to have challenges and dips in sales and angry customers and the experience of all of that in order to build a very successful business that lasts for decades. So what if you could reframe that and think when one of those things came up, oh, here we are.

We must end up being a successful company because all the successful companies have to deal with things like this. And what if we thought about marriage like that? What if we thought, you know what? We’re having a really difficult season right now, but a hundred percent of the marriages that we would call good, happy marriages when they end up, you know, in that, with that glowy look on their face and they’re at 75 and they’re celebrating their 50 year anniversary. 0% of those people go. It was just pretty good the whole time. They’re always like, and there were some hard moments. There were some rough times, there were some dark things we went through, but we made it through and we are stronger. That’s always what they say. So how can you view the challenges in your marriage as a sign that you are going to have a good marriage? Like, oh, we had to have this as part of our story and the same thing with parenting, we can, we can view the struggles with our kids as a sign that they’re going to turn out really well. Just imagine giving a toast to that, their wedding, you know, I can already see it with the boys and those boys, they drove me bananas. We weren’t sure how they were going to turn out, but look at them. I’m so proud of you right now.

That story is so much more interesting when we say, well, there were some years where we thought maybe you were going to be a criminal. And not that I’m wishing for that, but I am not naive. I know that having three boys in three years and watching them grow up is going to be like watching a pack of wolves, Russell through my house, love each other, fiercely beat each other up fight to be known. I’m not like him. I’m like me. I choose this other thing. Right? That’s what children do in large families. And some of that will be a great joy to me. And some of that will be frustrating, but I know I’m going to end up toasting them at some point and saying, I love the whole thing was a wild ride. I’m so glad that God chose me to be your mom. How can we learn how to love the plateau of any area of our life? I want you to think about that this week. I want you to think about what thoughts

Could help you reframe the difficult moments, the hard things the times when you think I’m not reaching my goal. Because of course, when we, when we think something is wrong and we don’t have a good marriage and our business isn’t working and we’re not losing weight, those will lead to negative feelings that will lead to often inaction.

It might keep us stuck in that place. So I just want to give you this tool, picture it like a screwdriver picture. Like you have a screwdriver in your jeans pocket or your purse and that when

You have these moments and your brain offers you, oh, this is terrible. Something’s wrong. You’re never going to get the thing that you want. That’s your brain’s job. It does that all the time. We’re never going to get rid of that.

But then you have this screwdriver that you can pull out and you can be like, remember Sterling said, we can love the plateau. You can just find thoughts to reframe this thing right now. So we don’t feel hopeless. When we feel hopeless, we feel very far away from the Lord and he doesn’t want that. It’s why he says, be not afraid and peace. Be with you so many times in the Bible. You do not need to be scared. You do not need to be hopeless for, I am with you. All right, ladies, I am praying for you and your journey and your plateaus.

If you want to email us or post on social media or come to Instagram, I’ll post a graphic called loving the plateau. Tell us what plateaus are you going to love? Text your friend, or the next time somebody tells you they’re losing weight, but they’ve kind of stalled out. Clap for them. I want you to start clapping. How powerful would that be? Let’s create a community of women that really support each other and help us stop believing lies because the lies are not serving us and are not helping us be who God means us to be.

All right, ladies, thank you for listening and never, ever forget that you were made for greatness.