Episode #114:

8 Tools to Become Your Best Self in 2025

Are you ready to become the best version of yourself in 2025? I believe we all have the power within us to make positive changes and grow into who we truly want to be. But sometimes, we need new tools and strategies to help us along the way.

In this episode, I kick off a special nine-part series designed to help you take inventory of your life and intentionally shape your habits, routines, and mindset. I have eight specific tools to share with you over the next few weeks, and I start this week by giving you a rundown of the eight tools that will change your life in the next year.

Join me this week as I introduce you to some incredible new tool for personal growth in all areas of our life, from nutrition and fitness to spirituality and life purpose. I share foundational tips and insights to help you create your own protocols for becoming your Virtuosa self, making 2025 a year of transformation and growth.

WHAT YOU’LL DISCOVER

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Why we need new tools and strategies to grow and change.

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How the concept of timelines relates to personal transformation.

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The importance of taking inventory of who you are and your current habits and routines.

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8 key areas of personal growth we’ll explore in this series.

FEATURED ON THE SHOW

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Come find us on YouTube for the Dr. Crockett Show and subscribe today.

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Virtuosa Vitamins

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Sliding Doors – movie

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Brooke Castillo

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Eufy Smart Scale

TRANSCRIPT

Every choice that we make, thousands, hundreds of thousands of them a day, probably, have different implications. And some of them are larger than others, but we're going to take you through a little bit of intentional thought today and then give you some new tools for how you make those incremental changes in your life.

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast that encourages you to become your best virtuosa self. Each week Dr. Susan Crockett goes where the scalpel can't reach, exploring conversations about how to be, heal, love, give, grow, pray, and attune. For the first time ever, she's bringing the personal one on one teaching that she shares with individual patients to you on this broader platform. A weekly source of inspiration and encouragement designed to empower you.

By evolving ourselves as individuals. We influence and transform the world around us. Please help me welcome board certified OB-GYN specializing in minimally invasive GYN surgery, internationally in the top 1% of all GYN robotic surgeons, a certified life coach, and US News top doctor, your host Susan A. Crockett, MD.

Well, welcome back to the Dr. Crockett Show. I'm your host, Dr. Susan Crockett. I am a board certified OBGYN in San Antonio, Texas, and I specialize in minimally invasive GYN surgery, MIG surgery for women, which most of the time for me means robotic surgery. And the show that you're watching today is called We Need New Tools.

Now on The Dr. Crockett Show, we go where the scalpel doesn't reach, which means we talk about wellness and lifestyle. And today is the beginning of an eight-part series. Actually, this is the intro and then there are eight topics. So it's going to be a nine part series about how to become the best version of yourself. We need some new tools. We need new tools when we're changing and growing. And so we're going to teach you all about what that means today and get us all set up for the upcoming year in 2025.

But before we get to that, today is a very special day. I am filming on November 30th. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. And I'm wearing my Aggie maroon. Yes, I am an Aggie. Texas A&M today is the historic rematch or the coming back together of the rivalry between Texas A&M and Texas, University of Texas. And I'm so excited to watch the game tonight with my friends and family. We have a watch party planned and I'm just so excited to have this tradition back again.

So in honor of that, Ollie is hosting the show with me today. He is also wearing his little maroon sweater.

All right, so who do you want to become? This is a show, a series that I wanted to do that's different than making your New Year's resolutions. This is about taking active inventory of who you are in your life and where you want to go and how you want to show up. Because there's this concept called timelines. I don't know if you've ever heard about it, but some people talk about jumping timelines and it's a little bit confusing.

Basically, to describe it, there was a movie in the late 90s, I think Gwyneth Paltrow was in it, it was called Sliding Doors. Do you all remember that? Some of you may be too young to remember it.

It's a really good movie. And the whole movie is based on the concept of missing a train, a sliding door, and what would have happened in her life had she not missed that door, and what happened because she missed the door. So, in other words, there was an incident that happened, a circumstance that happened that changed the trajectory of her life, and the movie kind of played out, like, what would have happened on either choice.

And so when I think about our lives and how we are making our choices to do things, but we're also making choices to not change things or to not do things, every choice that we make, thousands, hundreds of thousands of them a day, probably, have different implications. And some of them are larger than others, but we're going to take you through a little bit of intentional thought today and then give you some new tools for how you make those incremental changes in your life.

Now we have a podcast called Becoming Virtuosa. We take the audio from The Dr. Crockett Show, and you can find us on Apple and Spotify. A lot of you are listening there, and I'm grateful for that. So the podcast is called Becoming Virtuosa. That means we're becoming the best feminine versions of yourself.

So my branding for my practice is Virtuosa GYN. That's partly because I started out as a musician before I was a physician and a virtuoso is a phenomenal musician and I had a goal to be a phenomenal surgeon, but I was a woman so I feminized it to virtuosa. But in context of what we're teaching today, we're teaching about becoming the best versions of ourself in the next year. And so the first idea or the first step in that is you have to think about who do you want to become? How do you want to show up?

And so I've got a real quick example for you. If you look at my nails today, they look horrible. So I have had acrylic nails or fake nails on that I've maintained for about 10 years. And so growing up, I never had fake nails. I bet I was a nail biter. I would pick at them and any little thing would just bother me. And so I've made a decision moving forward that I don't want to be somebody who wears fake nails anymore. I want to have the control of my hands. And so I'm going through this transition now where my hands hurt a little bit and my nails look really ugly and it's kind of a painful thing, but I have a vision in my mind of what I want to become in this area of my life. I want to become somebody who takes care of their nails.

Now what is that going to mean for me? It means that I need some new tools for taking care of my nails, I'm going to have to learn how to file them down and to paint them myself or keep them polished and pretty without putting them in my mouth, which is really gross and I know that, but still bad habits, you know? So breaking this habit is going to be a really difficult thing for me. One of the things I'm doing to help set myself up for success is I'm thinking about the tools that I need to take care of the new way that I want to be.

And so another way that this applies is in my business. And I think life in general just feels like it's getting faster and faster. I don't know about y'all, but I am getting like more texts and more phone calls and more spam thrown at me. And the speed at which things are changing and growing with AI and our society just seems to be exponentially changing.

And in my business, I'm going from being one level of business to doubling that business size, actually tripling that business size within two years. And I'm in the really busy, hard growth phase right now, that phase where we're like starting the wheel turning on so many things.

I have these lucid dreams sometimes, or maybe this was one that I had just before waking up, but I get a lot of wisdom in the middle of the night in my dreams. And in this dream, I was winding a ball of yarn and I was winding it faster. Like have you ever seen your grandmother knit or somebody knit and they roll the ball and you're like, you know, trying to keep track of the yarn. And I was in the dream. I was trying to wind this big ball of yarn and I couldn't go fast enough. I couldn't go fast enough.

And then I had this epiphany that what I needed was a different tool. And in the dream I saw myself using my arm as a shuttle. So when you wrap rope, like if you ever go sailing or if you're wrapping up electrical cords, a lot of times we'll use our arm like a shuttle, which means you can just go like this and you can wrap the cord really fast. And it's a much faster way of wrapping the cord or the line up than trying to wind it up into a ball.

And I was thinking about this dream as I woke up, it was right before dawn, and I thought this is the answer I was looking for in the operating room. So I've been trying to ramp up my volume, not trying, I've been ramping up. It's been like drinking out of a fire hose. And thank you for all my patients who are trusting me and all the referrals. I really appreciate all your support of the practice. It's been amazing, but I have gotten to the point where I can't do more surgeries in one operating room in one day.

And I thought with the new model, with the outpatient surgery center downstairs, I would be able to just do surgery five days a week and run up and down and see patients in between. And I just, I'm having a very difficult time keeping up with the volume. And I had this dream and I woke up and I'm like, okay, now's the time to switch to ORs. It's time for me to switch to what we call flip rooms, which means we have two anesthesia teams, two OR teams, and I flip back and forth. And so I'm not wasting the turnover time in between the rooms.

It allows me to do six to eight cases a day without wearing myself out. But it's the difference between trying to wind the ball of string in a ball versus putting the string on a shuttle. You have to figure out a new system sometimes. And so it enabled me to have the idea that I needed to talk with my hospital administration about making the changes that we needed to accommodate that growth and get to the next level. And so I was able to do that.

So that's the kind of thing that I'm talking about when I ask you to think about who do you wanna become? And so I put a little slideshow together for you. I wanna talk with you about the preview of the next eight episodes that I'm gonna do.

I'm gonna see if I can get this to work because this is one of the first times I've done this. So, so good. I'm so excited it worked. Yay! Okay, so we're gonna talk about the way we think about our circumstances, our thoughts, our feelings, our actions, and our results. This is called the CTFAR model. And I'm going to give credit to Brooke Castillo for this at the Life Coach School.

So this is a pathway of circumstances, which are the things around us in our life that influence our thoughts, that we have thoughts that create our feelings or electrical impulses in our body that we can feel. They're generated by our thoughts. And those feelings create our actions and our actions create our results.

So when we're looking at creating new tools, figuring out where we want to go with our lives and what tools we need, I'm going to go through these eight different protocols or eight different ways of looking at our habits to help you think about changing them. And I'm going to teach you how you can plug in at any place on this to change the rest of the whole situation.

In other words, sometimes when you look at where you are and where you want to go, you may want to change your circumstances. You might want to move. You might want to change your job. You might want to change something that's external to you that is a circumstance. But other times you may decide that you want to do thought work. That's where life coaching comes in and I'm a certified life coach.

So in life coaching, what we do is we become the watcher of our thoughts. We learn to look at our thoughts and be aware of them. And then we work on our brain to choose new thoughts that would create new feelings. So sometimes you may want to intervene there.

Other times you may want to start with your feelings. How do I want to feel in this moment? How do I want to feel in this new version of myself? So we can, we're going to teach you how to plug in at that part. And then other times we just do it, we fake it until we make it. And that's the action part, right? So sometimes when we're going from being one way to being the other, we just do the action that we need to do. We put on the tennis shoes and we go to the gym, even if we don't feel like it yet, we're not motivated, we don't have the thought that we love doing that. We do the action first and then it drives the rest of it and then the results follow.

So the next thing I wanted to show you on here was I want you to actually get out a piece of paper or a journal and I love journaling for specific things. I'm not a huge diary person. I've done journaling really well at specific times in my life. But this is one place where I'm going to challenge you to create your own protocols journal and really give some thought to how you want to show up in your life. How do you want to show up? I have a typo in my thing. How do you want to show up? I want to show up without typos in my little presentation.

And the second question is, how do you measure these things? So when I think about my own protocols, one of the things I've done to help myself with keeping track of them is I created an Excel spreadsheet tracker and actually give myself points for, play a little game with myself, giving myself points for how many of the items that I'm wanting to track that I do in a day. And it just helps me keep track of it. So I'm going to share that with you as we go along.

But some of the ways you might measure are if you are looking at changing how your body composition is, you could choose to measure your body composition on a scale. I have a pretty inexpensive one called a Eufy scale that you can get from Target or Amazon. It not only measures my weight, but you can also track your lean body mass, your fat mass, your percentage of water, your bone mass, all of that on it. So those are pretty cool. You might want to check those kinds of things out.

Some of the things I measure are things like blood pressure or my lab work with my doctor. So I want you to think about what your measures may be for your protocols for how you want to show up as the best version of yourself. Is it the amount of money that you make? Is it the amount of time that you have with your friends? Is it how long you get to sleep at night? There's lots of ways to put data to this.

And one of the things that's really helpful when we're going through changing or personalizing our habits or going through growth is for us to think about how we measure it, because then we have a period of time where we do the protocols and then we evaluate them based on the measurements, and then we tweak our protocols and do something different. And sometimes that can be a couple of days, sometimes it can be years, sometimes it can be decades for your goals.

So the eight personalizing habits that we're going to go through for the next eight shows are the following. So we're going to go through how to decide what you want to eat and what you don't want to eat. What supplements do you want to take? What vitamins and nutrition do you need to use in addition to what you're eating for food because goodness, we know that we don't always get the nutrition that we need from our food in the standard American diet. That's the SAD, sad diet, yes, because we have some bad habits and not so great choices for foods.

I've created a vitamin line called Virtuoso Vitamins. We'll put the link down below, but we have a curated boutique line of 12 specific supplements. They're the most common 12 supplements that I recommend in my practice, and it's a high quality FDA manufactured vitamin system that we have. And you can check that out if you want. But whether or not you check out our vitamins or not, this is really not a sales pitch for that. I want you to think about what you need to supplement in your own habits and your own nutrition so that you can be the best version of yourself.

I want you to think about morning and bedtime routines. We're gonna talk about that. We're gonna go through medical protocols. How do you take care of your teeth and your physical body? When do you go to the doctor? Are you getting your mammograms done? What are your protocols for how you want to do your labs? How often are you doing that? What medications are you taking?

Also, we're going to talk about exercise routines. What are your goals and habits regarding physical fitness? Number six, we're going to talk about spiritual practices and mental health routines. I kind of put those together. I think they are different, but we're going to lump those into one episode and we're going to include your spiritual or religious practices and what you are choosing for that, as well as your mental health stress routines for stress management, such as meditation or yoga.

Number seven is what are your sleep routines? And then the eighth one is your socialization and work habits. In other words, your life purpose. I thought that would be a really cool one to end up on.

I want us to think about how we want to move forward in 2025 with each other in community. And I don't mean each other just in the sense of you and me having this conversation, being my patient in my office, I mean, globally as citizens of the earth, how do we want to show up? How do we want to show up as individuals in our communities? And what is your purpose? What is your contribution?

Because I believe everybody has a contribution. What is your special contribution to life and what do you want to be doing moving forward that makes you happy, brings you joy and brings fulfillment and joy to others in your life as well.

That's all I have for you today. I'm looking forward to the next series of eight shows. They're going to carry us into the new year all the way through the month of January. And I'm looking forward to becoming the best version of myself in the new year and helping you with new tools to do the same.

So I wish you all a very blessed holiday season, wherever you

Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming Virtuosa. To learn more, come visit us at DrCrockett.com, or find us on YouTube for the Dr. Crockett Show. If you found this episode helpful or think it might help someone else, please like, subscribe, and share. This is how we grow together. Thanks, and I'll see you next week. Love always, Sue.

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