Episode #8:

Write Your Story

We are finishing up the transformation tool this week, and this last step in the process is called write your story. As you work on all the prior steps to getting where you want to be and becoming your virtuosa self, it’s important to think about how your new state of being will look long-term. There’s no point in making a change without it being sustainable, and so that’s what I’m diving into today.

As I go through the final step in the transformation tool, I want you to draw a picture of what you imagine you’ll look like in five years, or a visualization of your new state of being. Being able to maintain a certain level of transformation over time is challenging for anybody, so I’m offering three tools that you can use in this process, to ensure your success.

Join me this week as I show you how neural pathways and grooves work in our brains, and how the three tools I’m offering today can help to automate your habits and behaviors in the long-run. This is the final step in your transformation, and this powerful tool can be used in any circumstance that you want to change in your life.

WHAT YOU’LL DISCOVER

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The key to sustainability and change.

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3 tools you can use to practice sustainability.

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What a brain groove is and some examples of how they work.

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Why habits can be difficult to change.

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An exercise to develop your determination and persistence to create sustained results.

FEATURED ON THE SHOW

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Check out more episodes of the podcast here!

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast, with Dr. Susan Crockett. You are listening to episode number eight, Write Your Story. This episode is dedicated to my parents, Anne and Jack, who have been writing their story for over 60 years.

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, where women learn to love their lives. Do you find yourself frustrated by society’s expectations? Looking for practical advice on how to discover your talents and level up your life? You’ve found the right place. Here’s your host, US News top doctor, robotic surgeon, and certified life coach, Dr. Susan Crockett.

Hello my virtuosas. Hello, how are you today? It is spring. I am so happy. I am somebody who does not do great with the winter, long nights and short days. I feel so much better once spring starts to come. I’m your host, Dr. Susan Crockett, and you can call me Sue because we’re doing girl talk here and I am not your doctor today.

Spring has sprung in Texas. There are blue bonnets all over the side of the road. They are going crazy this year and the sun is out and shining and I am so relieved. It’s amazing. And guess what else? This marks our eighth podcast. I’ve been doing this for two months y’all, I can’t believe it. It’s awesome. Thanks for tuning in and listening.

It is an honor and a pleasure to be able to speak with you this way every week and I look forward to it every week. So this week, we’re going to talk a little bit about sustainability. We are finish up our series on the transformation tool. And to start out, I want to talk a little bit about - I got a story for you.

So I have a son, I’m not going to tell you which one. I have five of them, so you can guess if you want, if you know them. But they’re teenagers and I have one who’s really in the process of learning about eating and exercising and being healthy. And his idea of exercise is to go to the gym once a week and just absolutely kill it on the treadmill and the elliptical and he does 1300 calories in a day.

And then the next day he is absolutely exhausted and hurts and takes Motrin and feels terrible. And I keep having this talk with him about maybe it would be better if you did 300 calories every day and were easy on yourself and you would still burn more calories over a week than what you’re doing now.

So he’s not quite getting that yet, but that’s kind of what we’re talking about today is sustainability. So just to review a little bit about what we’ve been talking about, I’ve been talking about a transformation tool, which is a way for you to go from the current situation you’re in into the situation you want to be in, or to become the most virtuosos or virtuosa version of yourself.

A virtuosa is a woman of excellence and we’ve been learning about the process of transforming ourselves and renewing our mind and growing into the better versions of ourselves over time. So we’ve been doing this for seven weeks and if you’re just now tuning in, you can go back and listen to the prior podcasts or you can download the PDF transformation tool off of my website at virtuosacoaching.com/transformation.

So today we are finishing up the transformation tool and we are doing the seventh step in the process. It’s called write your story. And what this is is about sustainability and what will your new state of being or your new virtuosa self be like long-term.

So, so often when people make a change, like they lose weight or they gain a lot of money, like we were talking about this in the operating room today, how lottery winners often don’t sustain their wealth. It gets used up and they go right back down to the poverty level they were before when they won all the money.

What good is it to make all those changes without sustainability? And I firmly believe that the key to sustainability and change is in our brains and in our thoughts. So that is why I’m so committed to teaching this process and to teaching these principles to my patients and to you guys on this podcast.

So for this week, we want to have a picture of what our new state of being is, what your end product looks like, what will you imagine that will look like in five years if you practice being your new state of being that long. So earlier in the teaching, we had talked about picking one thing that you wanted to work on, so it’s easier to work on one thing at a time.

So maybe your one thing was becoming a better mom or CEO, moving up in your career, maybe it was to have more money or to stop overdrinking or lose weight, whatever it was. We worked through the process of starting from where you were, like I was not a podcaster when we started, to the process of where you want to be. I’m actually a podcaster now.

So now what we want to look at is how do we maintain that. And we’ve changed these thoughts in our heads. We’ve worked through ladder thoughts and bridge thoughts to create new neural patterns in our brain, and now what we want to do is set those into our subconscious so that they are automated pathways in our brain for how we want to be.

So we’re going to start this week’s lesson actually with the beginning of the exercise, which is I want you to take out a sheet of paper and actually draw a picture of what you think yourself will look like in your new state of being or your desired situation or your desired state of being in five years. What will she look like if you’ve been practicing wearing your crown for that long?

And while you’re doing that, I’m going to talk a little bit about our giveaway offer, the virtuosa wireless earbuds. I have been talking for the last couple of sessions about a giveaway for some virtuosa branded wireless earbuds, and I don’t know if the instructions were just difficult or if y’all didn’t get them or what, but the process for doing this was to write a review, hopefully positive, hopefully you love the show, to write a review on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, and then to email me at virtuosacoaching.com.

Remember, it ends with an A. Virtuosa. At virtuosacoaching.com, to verify and let me know that you had done the review. And to give me a contact for you so I could email you the earbuds. And the idea was I was going to give away two pair of earbuds for four episodes. So I’ve got eight pairs of really cool wireless earbuds to give away.

Well, I haven’t had any emails from any of y’all, so right now, I thought about what to do. I wanted to stay in integrity for the show, like, I didn’t want to not give away the earbuds, and I started looking at what was going on, and I thought, I wasn’t sure what to do.

So instead of just like, making up something and faking it, I am just coming out with it and saying I got eight earbuds. Eight sets of wireless earbuds that are really pretty with the virtuosa logo on them. I got them to give away, and I’d love to give them away, but I’d love to hear from you. So email me. Drop a review and email me at virtuosa@virtuosacoaching.com and we’ll put you in for the drawing hopefully for next week I’ll get some responses. That will be fun.

Alright, so today we are talking about write your story. Writing your story. And how that happens long-term. So if you finished drawing the picture of yourself in five years, I’m going to give you three tools to be able to get to that place. So in order to become yourself like you want to be in five years, or to write your story and to continue to write it in the direction that you want, that is what we call sustainability.

So sustainability is the ability to be maintained at a certain rate or a level over time. And that can be a big challenge for lots of us, so the three tools I’m going to talk with you about today to practice for sustainability are resilience, tenacity, and legacy.

So I mentioned a little bit about neural pathways and grooves, and the way our brain works is when we make a change in our conscious mind, over time, if you practice that change or that new habit, it creates subconscious neural grooves, which automate the behavior. So a good example of this is when you drive.

The first time you follow a map and go to a place, you’re having to very much use your conscious mind to go to the place. But after you’ve gone to that place 100 times, it’s your place of work and your car is used to driving that way and your brain’s used to going that way every day, there is an automated groove that gets in your subconscious memory.

And I bet I’m not the only one who’s been driving along one day and realized that I didn’t remember how I got to where I was, or I don’t mean in a memory loss kind of way, but just like, not even paying attention to where I was going. My brain was just so automated to going towards work that that’s where it went.

In fact, this is what happens sometimes when we think we’re going to go one place, but our brain is so automated into going to the workplace every day that we end up taking the wrong turn. We do a oops, I wanted to go the other way. I really wanted to go to Costco today, not to work.

So that’s a good example of a brain groove. Another really good example of a brain groove is what happens with bad habits, like drinking too much alcohol. Your brain gets into a neural groove with a dopamine pathway loop where it gets fed off of the positive dopamine release from bad habit. And the habit starts by making a conscious decision to pick it up, but over time and over practice, those neural grooves become very worn pathways and can be very difficult to change.

So when we think about transformation, like using this transformation tool, you’ll notice we started with looking at what the circumstances we wanted to change, how we wanted something to go from the way it is to the way we want it to be, but we very quickly got into how our thoughts play the role in that transformation.

So once we’ve actually grabbed ahold of the idea of our brain controlling what’s going on in our lives and that we are in control of our thoughts, then we can start working on retraining those thoughts, like we did with ladder and bridge thoughts to get to the desired result. And then this last step is how do we create deeper neural grooves or the habitual pathways in our subconscious for how we want to be, instead of how we were.

So let’s talk a little bit about the three tools that we’re going to use to get there. The first one is resilience. So resilience is the capacity for us to recover quickly from difficulties. It’s our toughness. And that can be either mental or physical. So when I was talking about my son’s example of exercising really hard, he was having trouble with resilience after really hard exercise.

Resilience also is the ability of a substance or an object to spring back into shape or elasticity. So if you think about a rubber band getting stretched and then it goes right back to its same state of being after you take the stress off of it, that’s resilience. And we can think of our mental resilience and our physical resilience or our businesses, we can think of those in the same way.

We all get stressed from time to time, we get stretched and stressed. And our resilience is our ability to bounce back, to get up after a failure, to recover from a setback or an illness. And resilience isn’t something that we just naturally are prone to do. It’s really difficult sometimes to get up after you’ve been knocked down, or after a perceived failure.

And it actually takes a purpose, it takes you stopping and thinking about what’s going on, it takes you a minute to think about what your purpose is and where you want to be to actually have the courage to get up and have that resilience and keep going.

The second tool that I’m going to teach you about is tenacity. So tenacity is a little different than resilience. Tenacity is the quality of being able to grip something really firmly, or to hang on. That’s your determination or your persistence.

So if resilience is being able to bounce back after falling down, tenacity is the ability to keep hanging on and persisting no matter how many times you get knocked down. So examples of this would be building a business. So when I was in the process of building my current business, we went through a series of problems at the very beginning.

It was a very rocky two-year start. In fact, two and a half years into the business, I was facing bankruptcy within three months. I looked at my bank account and I sat down with my accountant and my business practice consultant and realized I only had reserves to cover for the next three months.

So we sat down and we thought, how are we going to pull this business up into profitability and sustainability? And we put together a plan to change our business model a little bit and bring in some new lines of revenue. And within three months, we had created a profitable business and now it’s four years later and it’s a sustained business.

So that is a really good example of tenacity, or that’s actually resilience, I guess. I went through that, but the tenacity was I had also gone through a series of other knock downs that had gotten me to that point. So that was my resilience and not giving up on this business and making a decision to dig in and hang on and be determined, rather than to just throw my hands up in the air, faced with financial struggles and declare bankruptcy and go do something else.

So that tenacity is part of your success, and if you’re going to have a five-year sustained result from the changes that you’ve made in your life and becoming your virtuosa self, you have to have a picture in your mind of what that’s going to look like, and then you use that to develop your determination and your persistence. It’s your why for why you’re going to keep going.

The third tool I want to talk about is legacy. So legacy is handing down to future generations or to future people, and legacy is important for sustainability because when you think about writing your story and how you want to be, not only is it the story of who you are right now, but it’s the story of what you’re going to leave behind after you’re gone.

It’s the teaching that you’ve done to students so that they can propagate what you’ve taught them or grow into their own. It’s the inheritances financially you may pass down to your children or your grandchildren. And that may be financial, it may be heirloom, it may be wisdom, it may be blessing, it may be genetics.

So our children and our grandchildren are genetic legacies. So I want you to think about your five-year sustained goal, that five-year version of your future self, your virtuosa self, and I want you to think about what that looks like in terms of legacy.

Like, who have you taught what you’re doing? Who are you passing down your knowledge and your wisdom, your finances, your gifts? Who are you sharing those with? How are your children affected differently? Maybe some of you have a goal to move from being in a financial place of stress to a financial place of abundance. How are you going to pass that down and teach your children that? What are you going to give them?

Alright, so now to finish out the exercise, I want you to take these three things into your mind. The resilience, your tenacity, and your legacy, and I want you to redraw the picture that you started at the beginning of the podcast. I want you to now draw a picture and write out words around that picture that truly represent who you want to be in your sustained virtuosa version over the next five years.

And then I want you to think about how her world and the world around her, her people, her family, her colleagues, how are they different because of the changes that she has made in those five years? What would your five-year into the future self say to you? What would she tell you in your current state?

If you could talk to your future self in five years, what does she tell you now from that place of virtuosity that’s five years into the future? Another way to think about this is what would you tell yourself five years ago if you could speak to yourself five years ago now? If you could have told yourself what you would be like now.

Think about that in the future. What would your five year in the future self, what do you want her to be able to tell you now to encourage you? I want you to take those thoughts and place the description of your five-year virtuosa self in the last box on the transformation tool.

This becomes your seventh and final step towards transformation of yourself regarding this circumstance. And this is a tool that you can use again and again in your life. If you finished the transformation tool, congratulations. You’ve done a great job.

I want you to realize from these exercises that your thoughts are your power. This transformation tool is extremely powerful. It gives you something that you can use throughout your life, over and over again, to help set your mind straight and to move forward in the direction that you choose. You get to choose this. Your thoughts are your power. They drive your feelings, your actions, and your results in your life.

What is your story going to be? Write your story. Alright, so now we’re getting to the part of the episode where we get to talk about what we’re listening to and reading. So for this episode, what I’m listening to is a song called The Story by Brandi Carlile. One of my favorites. And I’m going to encourage you all to go to YouTube. The link is in the podcast transcript at virtuosacoaching.com/podcast.

So this song, I love it musically, I love the haunting nature of it. Brandi’s voice is beautiful, but this is really a personal song about writing your story and about the audience. And I am just so grateful to even have one of you to be able to talk to and to teach to, and I want to thank you for tuning in and so appreciate that.

So I want you to consider the music this week my gift to you. And the book that I’m reading this week is an older book that I just truly love. It’s Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Some of you may remember this book. It came out a couple years ago, but it’s where he talks about what makes greatness and one of the ideas he presented that’s become very pervasive in our culture is the idea of 10,000 hours of practice.

And that 10,000 hours is his analysis and idea about how long it takes to practice something to get the grooves into the subconscious for greatness. And that is something that I’ve taken very much to heart when I think about being a musician and I think about the 10,000 hours I put in, or medical school, and the 10,000 hours that I put into now being a robotic surgeon. The hours that I put into that, I’m coming up on almost 2000 robotic surgeries.

So that’s a lot of hours. Not quite 10,000 yet, but when you think about changing your virtuosa self and building those neural grooves for your new state of being, I want you to be encouraged that you need the persistence, you need the diligence, you need the resilience and tenacity to get those grooves in place. And I know you can do it. I have confidence in you.

So next week, we are going to start a new series. I was going to talk about failure and success for the next four series, but I think I’m going to change that. I’m going to postpone that series, and instead we’re going to do a series on living greatly, and I’m going to do a couple more in-depth individual podcasts about resilience, tenacity, diligence, and leaving a legacy.

Okay my virtuosas, that’s all I’ve got today. To celebrate the launch of the show though, I’m going to be giving away a pair of virtuosa wireless earbuds. Each week for the first four weeks of our podcast, I’m going to be giving away one pair to a lucky listener who subscribes, rates, and reviews the show on Apple Podcasts.

It doesn’t have to have a five-star review, although I sure hope you love the show. I want your honest feedback so I can create an awesome show that provides tons of value for you. You can visit virtuosacoaching.com/podcast-launch. That’s virtuosacoaching.com/podcast-launch to learn more about the contest and how to enter.

You can also take a peek there of a picture of these beautiful ear pods that will encourage you every time you use them that you are on your way to becoming your own virtuosa. I’ll be announcing the winners on the show in an upcoming podcast.

So I hope you’ll join me. I hope you’ll tune in next week when we talk about resilience in a much, much deeper deep dive. I want you to practice your newness of self with courage this week. Be mindful of what your story is that you’re writing and what you want your legacy to be and have a wonderful week. Love always, Sue. I will see you next week in episode nine.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming Virtuosa. If you want to find out more, come check out virtuosacoaching.com. That’s virtuosa - with an A - coaching.com. See you next week.

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