Research Paper By Leslie Thornton
(Weight Loss Coaching,UNITED STATES)
Excitement! Fun! Adventure! Ecstasy! Bliss! Freedom! Peace! All day, every day—that’s what I want. I want to feel HIGH. HIGH ON LIFE!! I used to do almost anything it took to get those good feelings rushing in regardless of the cost it had on my health, my mood, my energy levels, you name it!
I exercised too much, I drank too much alcohol, smoked too much pot, drank too much coffee, perused Facebook frequently AKA all the time, ate too much and then started counting calories too much, got crushes on boys too easily, went to concerts for the crazy lights and sounds and SHOW, traveled frequently—all to catch a buzz…to FEEL GOOD. Maybe some of you work too much, watch TV too much, shop too much, gamble too much, have sex or masturbate too much, gossip too much. You may feel out of control when faced with these things or even addicted. How do you know if it’s too much? When YOU feel it is too much. We can try to make ourselves feel better about our too much-es by saying things like,
Some people do this 10x more than I do, or I’m still able to function in society, so therefore it’s not a problem.
Fact: if you feel like it’s too much, it probably is!
Additional fact: these “hobbies” cost lots of money, and more money means more debt and more work and more stress, which will eventually take a toll on your mental, physical, and social health—your most valuable gifts. Is this how you want to live your life?
Martha Beck, a life coach who writes for the Oprah magazine, wrote an article called, “Creating Joy that Lasts”, which is wonderful. But that’s what we’re all after when we indulge in our vices too much, isn’t it? Good feelings that last? The feelings the aforementioned vices give us never last. Monday always comes. The food we’re eating is eventually eaten up. The high we’re feeling eventually runs out. Ready or not, reality awaits us. And yet we continue to search for more.
It is never enough. Things could always be better. Just do more—more drugs, more alcohol, more exercise, more food, more work, and THEN I’ll be happy. The question I’d like to pose today for those of you who can relate is,
What is it we really want more of?
To answer that question, I think it’s best to first ask what happens to us when we indulge in our vices. My theory from personal experience is that when we do these things we only exist in the present moment. Our mental chatter is muted. We feel alive and at ease not thinking about what we have to do next or what has happened in the past or how we are perceived by the outside world. They don’t say drugs are an “escape” for nothing!
This is what we want more of and there is a healthy, balanced way of achieving this kind of joy that really does last.
Growing up, I was really into my Catholic religion. I resonated with the Biblical teachings I was taught in school and really enjoyed the peacefulness I felt in church on Sundays. I prayed to God every night and thanked Him for my blessings and asked for things I wanted to happen either for myself, my friends, my family, or for the world. I had faith and lots of it.
Then I started studying science. (Haha). Feelings of doubt set it. Questions started coming to me like, “If God is so good, then why is He punishing me by calling me a sinner if I don’t go to Mass on Sundays? Screw it! I can achieve that feeling of peace I felt at church with my vices, and given evolution, God probably isn’t real anyway. My faith lessened until it was gone.
That life worked for me…for awhile. Eventually I felt incomplete, without purpose, and like there had to be more of a reason to live than just for the weekends. I was even a little scared of how out of control I sometimes felt.
These feelings led me onto a path of self-discovery. A journey I never would want to take without someone to listen deeply to me, to believe in me and my abilities and resourcefulness, to challenge my thoughts with powerful questions and hold me accountable to the things I stated I really wanted to do. And best of all, how great it was to celebrate my small victories with someone who brought them to my attention! I so often overlook my wins with my natural tendencies to continue striving for more. That someone that helped me so much was and continues to be a professional coach.
Coaching is an up-and-coming profession in which coaches work with clientele who have a desire to better some aspect of themselves or their lives. The relationship is client-driven, future-oriented, and often involves deep introspection of the client’s true self, values, and beliefs that leads him or her to making confident decisions and taking timely actions toward the desired goal.
Human beings’ values and beliefs, habits, self-concepts, memories, and emotions are the results of each individual’s own life experiences. These things are stored in the subconscious or unconscious mind. Our subconscious minds predict the outcomes we get as what is stored there affects our behavior. For example, I may consciously (from my conscious mind) tell myself that I want to lose weight, but when I see freshly baked cookies, it as if something else has taken over and my plan to get healthy and eat nutritiously goes out the window. Because of past experiences, my unconscious mind automatically and powerfully triggers me to eat the cookies. It is not your fault; YOU DO NOT HAVE CONTROL.
So how do we gain control, you ask?
Working with a coach is a superb way to access the subconscious mind and change your outcomes. Powerful questioning, visualization, meditation, hypnosis, neurolinguistic programming, and Time-Line Therapy are just some of the tools used by coaches to make your unconscious mind agree with your conscious desires and needs. These tools help you become aware of what your subconscious mind is holding onto, decipher which contents that are no longer serving you, and change your neuro-pathways. All this new awareness leads to new realities!
My vices of choice were food, alcohol and marijuana. I gave up alcohol and marijuana cold turkey as a result of meeting someone who sparked my attention by asking me questions about myself like “what are your hobbies, why are your opinions so strong about that, and why do you do that?”
I was concerned by the fact that I didn’t know the answers! As a result of my sobriety, I learned what I truly liked to do, who my real friends were, and how to cope more effectively with life’s nuances. You could say this caused me to become addicted to learning about myself and taking action for continued self-improvement because I was then on a mission to continue to get to know myself better. The next thing I knew I had to conquer was food.
I got to the point where the only thing that motivated me out of bed in the morning was thinking about what I was going to eat for breakfast. This was after years of yo-yo dieting and exercising mostly to work off the excess food I was eating instead of for the purpose of keeping my body healthy. I believe that food was my only TRUE addiction as I felt completely out of control when my trigger foods came around and couldn’t stop. Through self-hypnosis, I was able to access my subconscious mind and change my neurology to no longer desire the unhealthy foods I felt out of control over. I immediately noticed that ice cream and trail mix were no longer calling me from the living room! This changed my life forever. LIFE motivates me to get out of bed in the morning now instead of food! I freed myself from something that prevented me from experiencing my SOUL. I became aware of the control I had over my own MIND, and therefore my own BODY, and therefore my own LIFE! I’m here to tell you that you can too! YOU CAN CONTROL YOUR LIFE!
It is unbelievable what there is to discover about yourself and your world once you realize that you only think the thoughts you think because of the experiences you’ve had in your life. If you had grown up in a different place with a different family, you would not be thinking the same things you think today! Your brain is an organ that happens to hold memories that cause thoughts. Your thoughts are not reality. The only thing that is real is our experience of the world RIGHT NOW.
The same goes for our bodies. Our bodies are the physical vehicles that carry us around through life. We are not our bodies, and we are not our minds. We are spiritual beings that inhabit these vessels, and the more we learn to honor our spiritual selves that live inside them, the more we begin to honor our minds and our bodies and learn to master their mental and physical performances.
The outcomes of doing so? Positive feelings of excitement, ecstasy, bliss, freedom, peace, fulfillment, purpose, gratefulness, happiness, truth, understanding, and much, much more.
If you are someone who chases after good feelings, I suspect it is because you are longing to get to know your soul; to discover your life purpose; and to live for something much bigger than just yourself even if you don’t consciously think this. You don’t buy or accept that life is black and white and something you just have to deal with.
You know you are special and unique!!
Society tends to look down upon people who have tendencies for addiction or who are chasing the good feelings
as I prefer to call it. I tend to think more highly of us. We are yearning for truth and meaning in our lives!
It is not your fault that you get distracted with quick fixes. In fact, I’d say it’s downright normal given how much the media flashes cars, cigarettes, alcohol, food, etc. around, making them look all sparkly and fun! But you have a choice: Joy that lasts and feels amazing, or joy that not only doesn’t last, but will eventually make you feel worse instead of better and potentially cause harm and even death.
It all starts with taking control of your life by taking control of your mind. Luckily for you, life coaching as a profession is on the rise. There are people like myself and thousands of others who are just aching to see you UNDERSTAND and LOVE YOURSELF; to transform your life and feel truly happy and fulfilled with the one you’re living. You don’t have to be on a rollercoaster of emotions and feelings that you cannot control anymore. The answers to your own questions lie within you, a coach helps you bring them out to the surface.
My vision as a coach, as a nurse, and as a thought leader is for a shift in society’s perspective of people who are overweight, who drink too much, smoke too much, fill-in-the-blank too much from being people who are weak, disgusting, addicted, and out-of-control, to those of great potential. That those people with high-tendencies to want to feel, REALLY FEEL life bursting out their seams, will become aware that there is a calling for them and a way to unveil it by taking charge of what they cannot seem to control. That one day these kinds of subconscious mind tools will be made accessible to the public and even used by the healthcare system as a way to prevent poor health. That nurse coaches will be the providers who assist people in achieving holistic health of the mind, body, and spirit using these techniques. That this article will be the catalyst for this shift, and that people, all people, can find their own unique way of finding their joy and purpose in life and begin to execute brilliantly.
I have faith.
Do you?
For more, check our Leslie Thornton’s blog at tonofthorns.wordpress.com