Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, everyone. I'm isabelle lesteviz, and this is every single day above ground. Hold on. It's not every single day.
I don't even know my own show name.
Survivor. What makes your heart sing believe in you achieve anything every day above ground.
Hey, everyone. I'm Isabelle Estevez, and this is every day above all ground.
Welcome, welcome, welcome. Let's get right into it. So last week, we talked about the. Never mind. In my nirvana voice, but really, the episode was about Kobe Bryant and the idea of the fixed mindset and how we can go from the fixed mindset to a growth mindset and really begin to make things happen for us. In today's episode, I'm calling it. But how? But how? Isabel? If I want to go from the fixed mindset, and I've been there my whole life, how am I going to get to the growth mindset? You're in luck. I have you covered, as usual. Let me tell you this. In order to go from the fixed to growth mindset, we are talking about some serious, fundamental change in your life. And so today, in my jay Z voice, I'm going to give you the blueprint. Okay? So here's what we're going to do. In the fixed mindset, we have a set of beliefs, and these beliefs are what keep our mind going. They allow us to do things or not do things. These are all of the beliefs that we are making decisions off of on a daily basis.
So if I was to give you an example, let's say I'm overweight and I want to lose weight, but as a child, I was called fat or I was made fun of, or someone told me, and this is true story. I had someone tell me a few years ago, like, Isabel, like, you can lose weight, but you can't get down to your college weight. These are examples of beliefs, beliefs that we have and we keep, oftentimes, subconsciously, that are running our mind today on what we think we can or can't do. So in the example, I love to use weight loss because I think it's a very popular one, where people tend to have a fixed mindset.
And in this idea of weight loss, when you have the fixed mindset and you think that you want to lose weight, but you're like, oh, I don't. I don't have a trainer, and I don't have the money to eat right, and I don't. I don't have this and I don't have that. And, Beverly, because of all of those things that you feel like you lack you use that as an excuse to not push any further on your weight loss goals. It's also the reason we keep seeking things like crash diets or the latest pill or a surgery to help move that weight loss along, because you think you can't do it without those things. And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying, I'm not judging anyone on pills. I'm not judging anyone who's had the surgery, because I do think there are circumstances where that may be true. But I think more often than not, it's just this set of limiting beliefs that have come from others or come from ourselves that stop us from pushing forward on things we want to achieve. So again, Isabel, how?
How do we get out of this mindset? What would we do if we wanted to make a change?
This is what I introduced to you today, the idea of how, like, Isabelle, why do you keep saying how? How, how, how? Because how is the acronym for honesty, openness, and willingness to try.
These three steps are going to be an absolute game changer when it comes to making real and fundamental, lasting change in your life, particularly to go from the fixed mindset to the growth mindset. We are going to use this acronym, how to do it in this acronym how I actually learned in a book, one of my favorite books on Planet Earth, an absolute game changer. And a life changer for me, really is called codependent no more by Melody Beatty, how to stop controlling others and start caring for yourself like as well. What does codependency have to do with the fixed mindset? Because when you're in a codependent world, and I love it when people are like, I'm not codependent. But then I read them this chapter where it's like a chapter on low self worth, repression, obsession, care taking, dependency, controlling denial, you may have a lot more of these tendencies. Lack of trust, weakness, boundaries, anger. A lot of these things are related to codependency and people don't realize it. And so, yeah, I think this book is phenomenal in breaking all of that down. And one of the things it talks about, and it might have been a acronym that came from Alcoholics Anonymous actually, that fueled this, but it's this idea. If you want to change, you've got to start with the honesty, openness, and willingness to try. A lot of us, myself included in the past and even a little bit in the present on some things, float along the river of denial. Okay, we don't want to see things that we see for our own eyes, but we are in total disbelief. We're in flat out denial of those things. So if I continue on the example of weight loss or healthy eating, we think certain foods don't taste good, they're not affordable, we're totally fine. We get decent results from the doctor's office, and as long as we're not in the red of things, we think we're doing well.
Pants don't fit. And we're like, oh, it's just because I was bloated or I ate too many tacos or whatever. But you're not there yet in terms of your consciousness of something that you necessarily want to change. Because I think the other piece of denial is, especially when you recognize that you have denial about something, it's because you perceive the idea of change harder than just staying the same. And so when we're on this river of denial, it doesn't really matter what anybody says or what even ourselves think, we're just going to continue on a path because we think that's the path of least resistance.
We need to get you in the growth mindset out of that thinking.
We need you to just hit whatever it is head on and acknowledge, okay, I'm not at the weight where I want to be, or I'm not at the job that I want to be in, or I'm not doing things that are making me happy. Actually, they're taking me further away from happiness. We need to start getting very, very real and honest with ourselves about where we're at. Because if we cannot even accept where we're at, we're in trouble. No change is happening, and we're going to stay in a fixed mindset that just isn't going to take us anywhere. That's the thing. The river of denial takes us nowhere. There's no end to it. It's just circular. You're just going in circles and you're not really growing at all because you're laying in all of this denial. So how do we assess where we are?
One of the best things and greatest things that I do in all aspects of my life is I create goals.
Once you have an awareness around where you're at. And I'll tell you another thing, I'm going to keep bringing up this book an awful lot today because I highly encourage people to read it again, it's codependent no more by Melody Beatty.
And in a section, if you're kind of thinking, well, like, where would I even start? What I absolutely love about this is she has a chapter in the book and she has all these different areas of improvement, of self improvement that you can work on. And you can google this and you can do chat GPT to kind of come up with a list of questions to see where your blind spots are.
But I absolutely love the way that she lays it out in this book. So, for example, this idea of codependents may be caretakers. And so she lays out about 20 questions that you put either a zero, a one, or a two being the highest concern about as you're answering these questions. So let's say, for example, you're a caretaker.
A person who is a caretaker and a codependent may feel anxiety, pity and guilt when other people have a problem. I marked it too. I am very much a caretaker in life. They like to anticipate other people's needs and feel angry when their help isn't effective. And so what this list, by the way, which was, I don't know if you can see this, but it was all twos, okay? It was bad.
When you're going through a list like this and you're trying to come into self actualization, one, it's going to hurt, okay? You're going to be embarrassed to put twos along all this stuff. But it's okay. It's okay. Because in the honest phase, that's what we need to do. In my brother's, and it might be my mother's infamous words constantly said by my brothers, we need to face the music, okay? We need to face the music about where we are in life. And this kind of list, it burns. It sucks. No one wants to admit that they feel safest when giving. Like, that's kind of embarrassing. You know, they over commit themselves. That sucks. Why am I constantly doing that? Feel, believe deep inside other people are somehow responsible for them. These are very hard things to admit. But here's the silver lining.
When we are in the honesty phase of our how this is going to really set the blueprint on what we need to work on. So again, it's being honest about where you are, not just being honest, but accepting. Like, okay, this is where I'm at. It's not great. What can I do to change that? And so in this book and what I would recommend, kind of what I've always done in life in general, is this idea of building out goals. So in this example, if you're a caretaker kind of person and you want to change that, you can. As a reminder, we're in the growth mindset. In the growth mindset is about learning and sometimes unlearning things that we've known along the way. And we have the capability to do that. That's the most important thing, is that we have the capability to change anything at any time. All we got to do is put in the effort. And so if we start with the how and we're honest with ourselves and we're accepting, what can we do next?
Again, we need to be open, right? So that's the next piece of how is to be open.
Open to the idea that change is even possible, open to trying new things. And that's going to dip into a little bit of the last portion there of how. But we have to be open, right? Like, we can't just say, oh, I've never liked vegetables, so that means I'm just never going to eat vegetables. No, you can. You can. I hated vegetables. I'm using these, by the way, guys, as examples because it's something that I have personally experienced and grown from. So back when I was younger, we never ate vegetables. Like rarely ever. I mean, if it was, it was like mashed potatoes and corn, and that was about it.
And I used to think like, oh, I'm just not a person who likes vegetables.
If you're like me or like I was, what I would do then is be open and say, okay, I never liked vegetables, but maybe there's some ways that I can begin to incorporate them. What would that look like? We have to be open. Open to ideas, possibilities, people, places, things. If we're talking about the job and we want to switch careers, we have to be open to the idea that it's even possible that we can do it, that maybe we meet new people, maybe we try to do something different in our current day to day. We put ourselves out there, whatever it is, but we have got to be open to even this idea of moving forward. So that's our o in how.
And I think on the last one here, which is the willingness to try.
I think it's a very simple acronym. I think once people get into the idea of being honest and accepting of where they're at and they're open to the thought of change and new ideas, very manageable.
Where I think most people would fall off is in the willingness to try.
Because in the willingness to try, it's not just going to be a one and done. It's not like you're going to sit there and again, to use the idea of food. It's not like you're going to sit there if you hate broccoli and all of a sudden, one day you're like, you know what, cold turkey. I'm just going to start eating all this broccoli. I'm going to put it all on my plate and now I'm going to learn to love it. You could do that. The problem is, is that a lot of times people are going to fall off very quickly. It's why crash diets crash. They don't work. They're not sustainable. The type of change I am talking about, when we talk about the growth mindset is fundamental. Meaning it's baseline, the foundation of your life, of your house, that everything else is going to be built upon. That's not done in a day. So when I say here, willingness to try, like, you really got to put in the effort more than once. You got a going back to last episode about the idea of falling and getting back up and falling and getting back up. That's where this is going to happen. It's going to happen in the willingness to try.
And that's okay. That's what we want.
Let's say you go for a work event and you try to network with people and it doesn't work out. That's okay.
Let's say you take another job and you thought it would be your dream job, and you got into it and you realized you didn't like it, and now you got to go back to your other job. That's okay.
Let's say you were doing really, really well with your healthy eating journey. And then one day your brother comes over with a Giordano's pizza from Chicago, and you eat the whole entire pizza.
It's okay.
It's going to be okay. It's going to set you back a little. Okay. But Giordano's might be worth it, but the idea is, it's going to be okay. It's not the end of the world. In the willingness to try, we got to be willing to try and retry and try and retry over and over again until we start to see the pattern or the new design of the beliefs that we're putting into place to take it a step further. If I. Again, I love food, so we're just going to keep talking about food here. And this idea of hating vegetables, what I had to do on my own weight loss journey when I was 70 pounds heavier, super depressed, and just totally non existent in life, I said, all right, I don't like vegetables. I didn't grow up eating them. People always give vegetables a bad rap. How can I change those beliefs? One is being open and honest. I don't really like vegetables, but I recognize if I want to eat healthier, I'm going to have to learn how to eat them. So how do you learn how to eat vegetables?
Well, with that openness and willingness to try, for me, that was saying, okay, well, I like potatoes.
What if I put a little bit of cabbage into those potatoes? So if I have these potatoes and I just throw a little bit of cabbage into them, could I, like, stomach it? Could I muscle it down? And so I swear it was like, you know, a whole half pound of potatoes and a little bit of cabbage sprinkled in. And I seasoned that up and I was like, all right, actually, this isn't bad.
And so I kind of kept using that as my way of sneaking vegetables in. And then over time, so a next day, I'll throw in just a little more cabbage and a little less potato, and then the day after that, a little more cabbage and a little less potato. And I kept going until that side dish of mine was nearly all cabbage and just a couple of potatoes.
So you see how over time, I used to despise the idea of cabbage, and now I can't get enough of it. But that took time and the willingness to try and the importance of honesty and openness about where I was at with something as silly as vegetables. But over time, it worked. And so that's how I began eating a little bit more vegetables, to the point now, as I continue to work and refine on my diet and accept, like, okay, there are some vegetables that just till the day I die, I'm probably not going to eat, but I'm not going to be totally closed off to them either.
Maybe I just haven't had them prepared the right way.
Even that, that is an idea of being in the growth mindset. But it's also about finding different ways to incorporate things in. If you're not a fan of exercise, but you love a podcast, every day, above ground perhaps, and you want to use that to kind of take your mind off of going for a walk while you're trying to get your steps in for the day, you can do that. There's all sorts of sneaky ways you can incorporate little small changes that are going to have a huge impact in the grand scheme. Back to the idea of diet. I'm now eating plant based foods and plant based meats because I have to work on my cholesterol. It was something that I needed to work on, and so I'm working on it, and I never, ever thought I would be the type of person to eat and plant based foods. But I have been eating Morningstar's hot, spicy chicken patties non stop. And the amount of protein I get in this plant based food is unreal. And it tastes so good. But I had to be open. I had to be honest. I had to be honest that my cholesterol, at 42 was way too high and what could I do to change it before I have to start taking medication to help do that? And it's these little things that I'm doing day by day on the how method, the honesty of where I'm at, the openness about the ideas and possibilities of change, and the w, the willingness to try.
So those are the three pieces of the how formula in the blueprint on how you would begin to go from the fixed mindset to the growth mindset, little by little, changes that you define, refine you, break down your old beliefs, you create new ones that are impactful and positive in your life.
And so the last thing that I would say about all of that is, and I kind of alluded to it earlier in the book, again, codependent no more by Melody Beatty, talks about this idea. You got to have goals.
You got to set some goals. And so if you use something like this book that has all of these questions, I'll read you some here on low self worth, because this is a section that basically had all twos. I'm not even a lie. Terrible self worth, even in the most fit form of life. I was just in the absolute gutter. And so some of the things here come from troubled, repressed or dysfunctional families. I know I can't be the only one. Okay?
Pick on themselves for everything, including the way they think, feel, look, act and behave.
Get depressed from lack of compliments and praise.
Feel different than the rest of the world. If any of these things are speaking to your soul right now, you may also struggle with self worth. She's got a ton of questions here to ask yourself to get really honest about where you are in terms of your own self improvement. And what I would say and what she says in the book is to set goals around this. So if you know you have low self worth, what type of goal could you set to maybe begin to work on that? And I'll give you again my real life examples. When I marked all twos in that book and I was just, like, looking at myself in the mirror, continuing to beat myself up in my low self worth era, what I did was said, okay, what's one small thing, one small thing that I could do to work on my self worth today, right this second. If I'm going to make a change, if I'm honest about where I'm at, and I'm open to the idea of change, and I'm willing to just try something to get out of that mindset, what could I do?
And what I started to do was a couple of things. So I started to research, like a mad woman online and saw and tried to see what other people were doing. And so some of the things that I tried, that other people had done successfully was I started writing little post its to myself and putting them in highly visible places. My absolute favorite was my Nicki Minaj. Bad bitches like me are hard to come by. It's in my. It was in my bathroom, on my mirror. And every day, I challenged myself again in a very small matter, we're talking a matter of seconds throughout the day to just say, all right, every single time I pass that note, I'm going to read it out loud. I'm going to look at myself in the mirror when I say it. And so the first few times I did this, I was all like, I didn't even want to look at myself. And I'm like, bad bitches like me or hurt to come by, bad bitches like me or her to come by. And then one day, folks, it happened like that. It went from just saying it in my head to becoming a habit and saying it from my heart. And when I walked past that note one day, I was like, bad bitches like me? It's hard to come by in my best Nicki Minaj voice. Yes, that's right. I also do voices.
So I love that story. And I love what I love about that is that's something very true and real. It didn't cost me any money, really didn't cost me any time. It just cost me the effort, the effort to try something outside of the box, something totally different that radically began to change the way I felt about myself.
So again, post it notes all over the place. You don't have to do the Nicki Minaj voice, but man, it feels good and it feels fun when you do. It is one way that I began, like, as improving this goal of having better self worth is something that I did. Another thing I did was again, related to the mirror. The mirror can be your ally or your enemy. It's up to you. For a long time, it was my enemy. Now it's my ally. How did I change that again? Honesty, openness, willingness to try. In this instance, it was going into the mirror and just saying, I love you, Isabel. I love you, Isabel. Or saying nice things. If I caught myself getting ready to call myself fat, whether internally or saying it out loud, I would say, no, that's not true. No, you are worthy right now as is. You are worthy right now as is.
Just as you are.
And doing these little things, again, cost me no money. I was going to look in the mirror anyway, so it really didn't cost me any time. It just took a little bit of energy and effort to the point. Now, again, if I feel a little bit of negativity creeping in about the way that I look, I immediately change it on the spot and I say it out loud and I take away its power, because that is what we were doing in the growth mindset. We are always learning and growing. But just know now, you are worthy right now, as is, you are valuable.
What else? What else did I do for my low self worth?
I started dressing up just for, like, no reason. No reason. I started to learn how to put outfits together and really just let my personality shine through my clothes. I kind of feel like I always wanted to do that. But people, I had someone for a long time tell me that I was, like, not good at dressing. And I believed it, guys. Like, I believed it. I don't know what to tell you.
And so I had low self worth.
What I did was I began to just take time and learn about how different colors work together and different patterns. And if you're going to do something loud one way, how do you tone it down another? It's just tiny little changes. Tiny, tiny little changes. But you gotta be willing to try. You gotta be willing to see what works. Some of the outfits were bangers. Some of them fell flat.
But at the end of the day, I'm trying. I'm doing new things. And that has given me a whole brand new foundation to build off of in this growth mindset. And I'll tell you what, if I can do it, you damn sure can do it. No problem whatsoever. You got this. All you got to do is begin to adapt this how? Mindset.
You can work again to change anything. That could be your job, your career, that could be your weight, your health, that could be your personality. I mean, people, I do think it's a hard, fundamental change, but you can change things about you. One of the things that I worked on earlier this year, back in last season of the podcast, was this idea of having three goals for myself this year. True love, inner peace, and surrender to God. I am well on the path of that journey, just getting stronger and stronger mentally. But again, it takes daily, tiny effort, little by little, seeing what works, seeing what doesn't work, and when something works, pushing it all the way to get closer to these achievements. So if, again, if I can do it, I know that you can do it, too.
[00:30:20] Speaker B: How can someone practice honesty with themselves to identify areas where they need to grow?
[00:30:25] Speaker A: Look for something on the. Look for an existing list on the idea of happiness. Or if you kind of have a sense about the area that you want to change but you don't know if it's really worth it, go to Chantgpt, go to Google, go to YouTube videos and find a list, or even this book, and get the list out of this book of the different areas where one might want to change and answer some really hard questions. But you got to be open and honest. And I think, you know, I. We keep hammering down on this idea of open and honest because if you're not accepting, truly accepting of where you're at, this ain't gonna work. Okay? You got to be open and honest in how you do that. Ideally private.
Write them down in a notebook, do it on your computer where no one else is going to see it, and you just be honest with you. You can, you know, delete it afterwards. If you're really that nervous about people seeing your true inner feelings, you can rip it up and you can burn it. But I think you got to be open and honest about where you're at and sitting and really thinking about questions, deep, fundamental questions, is a great place to start.
[00:31:44] Speaker B: Brian, in what ways can being open to feedback from others enhance your growth mindset? Or do you even want to consider how others are viewing you when you're trying to be open?
Do you see that as more of, like, your own personal openness, or is it being open to, like, hearing what people are saying, hearing what, you know, what's out there?
[00:32:07] Speaker A: I think, actually, that's a great question. Yeah. Good. Did you come up with that one on your own, too?
[00:32:13] Speaker B: I sure did. I brought my A game.
[00:32:14] Speaker A: Oh, two for two. Someone is adopting the growth mindset to date. I dressed properly, and he dressed a pretty. He dressed like he's going to church. Guys, I think being open to feedback is massive in the growth mindset because you're not looking at. And we talked a little bit about this last episode, but being open to feedback, you don't have to take and accept it all, but you take what you need from it, and you have got to be open and not take it as a negative. What happens with feedback is, especially if you have a fragile ego and you're in the fixed mindset, you take everything as a threat, you take everything personal, and you don't think anyone's trying to help you grow. You just think they're trying to be mean versus in the growth mindset, you're seeing someone helping you, wanting to aid you in the idea of growing and learning in whatever space that is. So giving the example of a personal trainer, one of my former personal trainers would just be like, dude, stop saying I can't. Stop telling me you can't. You can maybe say you can't yet, but stop saying you can't. You haven't even tried. You don't even know. And it's probably one of the most valuable pieces of feedback I've ever gotten because it made me change the way I was thinking in the gym versus looking at all of the equipment or the weights or being able to pull myself for a pull up. And it was like I'd psych myself out before I even try. I would just look at it and be like, no, I can't. That was me operating in a fixed mindset, not even being open to the idea that, hey, Isabel, maybe you can.
Maybe he's seeing something as an observer that you could not see that could help you. And that's what it is a lot of times is those people who help us are more like observers who are seeing our blind spots and sharing them with us. But the thing is, we take it so personal that we don't value what they're saying. So I think feedback is incredibly important. But again, as you continue to work on yourself and as you continue to grow, you'll begin to see what you're willing to take in and what you're not. But it's just being even open to the idea of receiving that feedback because we can all learn from each other on anything.
[00:34:46] Speaker B: And then I do have just one more, because the whole how I just want to hit each one, obviously to the last one of willingness. How can one overcome the fear of a failure that often accompanies trying new things and being open to new things?
[00:35:05] Speaker A: Flip. Fear of failure on its head.
Failure is nothing more than a lesson.
Get the idea of failure out of your mind. If you try, you never truly fail. The only failure in life is in never trying. So if all you look at is the idea of failure as just a lesson, then you totally flip it on its head and you're able to push forward. I love to use the analogy, and you just showed me a video earlier of my nephew walking. He fell and what did he do? He got right back up and he went right back at it. He skipped the crack, by the way. But he didn't have any fear. There was nothing in him as a baby to be like, oh, I fell and now I'm never going to do this again. Fall. Fall all you need to, but just get back up. That's it. And in a future episode, we will be talking about resilience and it's going to hit the nail on the head and it's really going to bring things together as we talk about that. But it's just the idea of flipping failure on its head. It's nothing more than a lesson. Some lessons are going to be more valuable than others and you're going to repeat the lesson until you get it straight.
[00:36:22] Speaker B: So it's so funny you mentioned that because I do have, and it's weird. It's not quite exactly an example of yours. I think it's interesting to see the parallel and how it doesn't need to be a post. You don't need to write something out of. I got something in like a shampoo gift set that was like a positive, like, note, like to the customer or whatever, but like, it had like a positive affirmation kind of type. Yeah, I put that in my bathroom wind mirror and like, for some reason, every time I look at it, I just gets that kind of like, boost.
[00:36:54] Speaker A: That's why I think it's great to keep them in places. I mean, you see, you can see my desk. Yeah. Like my. My desk is riddled with them. I have them in my closet. I have them in spaces where I spend the most time. A lot of mine are music lyrics just because it's something totally different and outside the box. But positive affirmations could be anything. It could be a positive note from someone. It could be your favorite quote. And I love the idea of just having it printed out and seeing it because it can live in your mind, but there's something about it when you can visually see it that makes you believe and think things are possible. So it could be anything. I just love the outside of the box idea of. And I'm also obsessed with song lyrics.
[00:37:38] Speaker B: And then just, you know, when you think you're mentioning first thing first, which was, you know, people's fixed beliefs and fixed mindset beliefs on people, have you ever encountered, like, and especially when you're talking about weight, someone even closer, like, say like, even, like a parenthood, just mentioning when you got back from vacation that you look, how do you take that in, and how do you, like, if that's ever happened to you?
[00:38:08] Speaker A: Oddly enough, it has.
It has. And I think I talked about it before, but I did just. I paused for a moment when she said it, and I recognized that she was right. I did gain a little weight, but was I going to do anything about it?
That was up to me. But I think even that was in the honesty. Even though the honesty came from someone else, someone else's observation, I was okay with it because one, I recognize where that person is at in life, and two, it doesn't have any bearing on me because I know that I have made massive amount of change and I can always have the opportunity to grow and learn. So just really was about taking it less personal than I may have in the past, which means I'm growing. That is today's episode. Again, we talked about the growth mindset. We're getting out of the fixed mindset is so 2023. We are over it. Okay? We are in the growth mindset. We are the Nicki Minaj bad bitches like me are hard to come by. Okay? And in order to be that, we got to start making these small, fundamental changes along the way. And how. How we're going to do that is using that exact acronym. Honesty, openness, willingness to try.
If we can nail this down, our mindset is on to big and better things in 2024 and beyond. All we got to do is try.
Until next time. Remember, every day above ground is a great day.
