The Part Literally Nobody Talks About: The Missing Piece to Achieving Your Goals (Like Weight Loss)

Let’s get real—everyone loves a good before-and-after story, but no one talks about what happens in the messy middle. You know, the part where things feel awkward, frustrating, and like you’re failing? Yeah, that’s where all the real growth happens. And spoiler: It’s also the reason most people quit before they ever see the results they’re working so hard for.

In this episode of Ask Mish, I’m breaking down the missing piece to achieving your goals—whether it’s weight loss, building a business, or just trying to keep your room clean for once. Inspired by a TikTok rabbit hole (shoutout to Odd Muse founder Amy Smols for keeping it real), I had a realization: The middle part of any journey is messy, but it doesn’t have to make you feel like a failure.

Here’s what you’ll learn in this episode:

• Why the in-between is the most important (but least talked about) part of your journey.
• How to stop unrealistic expectations from sabotaging your success.
• A simple 3-bucket framework to break down your goals and actually stick with them.
• What diet culture, social media, and toxic goal-setting advice get wrong—and how to do better.

Whether you’re trying to lose weight, hit a big milestone, or just figure out what works for you, this episode will give you the tools to navigate the messy middle without throwing in the towel. Plus, I’ll share how I’m committing to showing my messy middle moments online—because let’s normalize the process, not just the glow-up.

Resources Mentioned:

• Follow me on IG: @ask_mish and @MishOfNutrishMish for more inspo, laughs, and keeping it real.
• TikTok inspo: Amy Smols, founder of Odd Muse.

Tag me and let me know what you think! And if you’re ready to embrace your messy middle, share your story—we’re all in this together. 💛

Follow Michelle on Instagram @Mish_Blum

Transcript

Hey guys, welcome to this week's episode of Ask mish. As I'm filming this podcast episode, my friend Theo, I was on his podcast two weeks ago, and he said something that I never actually thought about and but now I can't stop thinking about it. He was like, so you he's like, you know, you know, like, I had a guest on last week, but he's like, You normally don't have guests on. He's like, so you just, like, talk at your phone, like, to yourself for the whole like, how do you do that? How do you just talk to your How do you just talk to yourself? She's like, you do it on your stories too. Like you just, like, talk to yourself a lot on your phone. And I was like, Yeah. And it never, like, struck me as a weird thing that I do. But now I can't stop thinking about it. Pretend like I'm talking this. I pretend like I'm talking I know I'm talking to you, but never, never came to my attention that that wasn't like a normal thing. So here we are, all right. So today's question is a question that no one has asked me. I'm going to answer something that literally nobody has asked me, but it's a realization I had this week, and if somebody thought to ask it to me, they would have and I think it's especially permeant. Is that a word? Did I make that up? Relevant? Relevant? It's relevant with New Year's coming shortly. And if you know anything about me, you know I'm not a New Year's evolution girl, right? But, but because of that, is something don't believe. I don't believe in the way that we do that. I'm going to give you guys a framework, and I want you to start thinking about it now, because I want to be the first voice in your ear on the subject. And I also, what I do like about the concept of New Year's is just sort of having that time built into my calendar to reflect on, like, okay, like, what do I want to be better? What do I want to improve on? All of that stuff. I had the craziest realization via tick tock, sort of on the subject
one of my guilty pleasures in life. I love, I love scrolling tick tock. I have learned more on tick tock than I've learned in college. My masters, I learned more about myself on tick tock. Like, if you know, you know people either like, don't use it enough, so maybe the algorithm doesn't know you enough, or they don't use it at all. They think like Instagram reels is where it's at, fine. But if you use tick tock, like, I use tick tock, you know it is like an inner working in your psyche. I don't even care if, like, the people in China somewhere know that I'm, like, a cancer entrepreneur with maybe bisexual tendencies when I joined like, you don't care. I don't care who knows what about me in China, like, it's fine, because they serve me the content that I want to see. And like most people, I think most people do this. Let me know if you do this. Most people, I think, like, find these, like, life changing, life altering, mind blowing, pieces of content that people put out, and they save it, and you're like, I'm going to come back to this. And you never come back to it. I do that all the time, but this particular day, I was Doom scrolling, and this girl popped up on my for you page. Her name was Amy smols. I think it was. She's the founder of a company called odd muse, which is a clothing brand company in London, and she's so young, she's, I think she's like, 2425 years old, and she has, like, this company's like, blown up. And obviously, me, as an entrepreneur, I've had a company a lot longer that has not blown up the way hers has. I was like, what that like, what? So I like, started watching your content. I was enthralled. I like, I usually see people's content and like, I'll save it. That's as far as I'll go. I went to this girl's profile, I scrolled back, like six months, and I watched every I binge watched it like it was like a Bravo show or Netflix, like, I watched every piece of content this girl put out. I was so into it. And then I was like, Why did I do that? I was like, I've never done that with any person that I follow ever, and what I realized was she is brilliant, brilliant at showing the in between, which is what I'm coining the whole point of this podcast.
I've always I'm gonna hop around a little bit, follow me on Follow Follow me on this. I'm gonna make, I'm gonna wrap up in a nice little go for your promise. I personally don't like. I never have liked. It's never resonated with me. Before and after photos. The real reason I hate them, though, is because you're showing a before, you're showing an after. But what the fuck happened in between and the What the fuck happened in between is the part that people don't normalize and people so people don't understand what it looks like. So that when people encounter parts of the in between and the process that are very normal but maybe don't feel good, the fact that they don't know that it's normal, it makes them give up. So what this girl did, which she did such a brilliant job of, she's online as a young entrepreneur, and she's talking about the highs and lows of being an entrepreneur, which every single video she put out, I resonated with so deeply. She even did something which I thought was wild. She talked about cash flow problems, which I've never heard an entrepreneur talk about having cash flow problems on the internet. Because most people on the internet aren't really going to understand what that means. They're going to think, oh, a company's having cash flow problems. That means they must not be doing well, that's not necessarily what it means. It means that she don't have enough money in the bank. It doesn't mean that they don't have money coming in. It doesn't like, sometimes, you know, people don't pay you on time. Sometimes you have to work with a new vendor. Sometimes you have a surprise, like, expense sometimes, like, there's a million reasons why a company can have cash flow problems if you have them for extended periods of time. You know, obviously that could be a problem. But I remember the first time I had a cash flow issue, I was like, that's it. We're done. Like, we're folding, like, we're, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna close. Like.
Like, and if I at that time didn't have somebody in my ear being like, no, like, this is normal. It happens sometimes, like, I probably would have quit. And this girl was talking about it on the internet, I was like, Oh my God. Like, that is, I was so taken aback by that. And then I started thinking about my clients, you know, at New Trish Mish, when people are posting these before and afters online, or people see people's weight loss journey online again, even now, now with everyone taking those like, people aren't seeing like, what that in between looks like, like. They don't know what normal looks like. And because of that, when they encounter things that are totally normal, but maybe you don't feel good, or maybe they feel like it means that something isn't right, they give up. So this is something that I'm going to be doing a lot more of in 2025 well, not start now, because, again, we don't, don't do resolutions, but like, for the next upcoming year, something I personally want to get better at is really just being genuinely authentic and posting the in between. This girl, like, really, really inspired me. Her authenticity was insane. And, you know, I was thinking, I was like, Well, why have I never done that before? And I think, I think I have probably this belief, which we're going to be talking about, these things that hold us back from doing things, beliefs. I was like, Well, I guess I had this belief that if people saw like, what was really going on behind the scenes, other than the positive stuff, they would think I was failing, or they would think like, they would think things weren't good, or they wouldn't think I knew what I was doing, or all of that stuff. But that's not real. In fact, like, you know, my company's been around for 12 years. Like, like, while sometimes I maybe it doesn't feel like we're doing as amazing as I want, or maybe doesn't always feel good, like I've been there for 12 years, like, obviously I'm doing something right, right? And this girl's, you know, she's, she's, she's posting this stuff, and not only are people not turned off by it, people are like, I was enthralled by it, her community is enthralled by it.
So I think that's something that's so important, is to describe what the in between looks like. So I want to start pioneering, helping to pioneer at least that culture. I'm going to be definitely encouraging people in our nutrition community to be posting a lot more of that. Like, like, we always encourage people to post about their wins. No, I want to hear it like, what do you what didn't work? What are you doing about it? All of those types of things, because that's what it really looks like. I'm a little desensitized to it as somebody who counsels people through this stuff, because I know what I because I know what I know what normal looks like, but I sort of take that for granted that the person sitting in front of me maybe doesn't know what normal looks like. And now I'm talking them off a ledge where I could manage their expectations as to like, No, this is normal. So if I have a client that struggles with binge eating, and this week, they didn't binge eat, for example, for the first time, instead of them going through the normal in between and maybe binge eating, like the next week. And now me talking them off a ledge, because they're like, Oh no, I've thought I fixed it. Now I didn't fix it. Now I could say to them after that first week, okay, amazing. You did it the first week. That means that you know how to do it. That means that you can do this, all right, so this is a possibility for you now, but sometimes what happens is it's not like a switch. It's not like an on off thing. So you're probably going to be binging again at some point, but you're going to see the frequency go down. It's going to happen less and less and less. And that's what we're looking for. We're looking for the frequency to go down. So, you know, when you binge again, don't, don't get upset about it's not the other issue dropping. That's not what that is. You prove to yourself that you can do it. Now the goal is just to make it happen less. Now, all of a sudden, I've managed their their their expectations. They know what. The in between looks like. So when they inevitably encounter that, they don't feel like they're failing. So let's sort of talk about the in between. This is a framework that I've been thinking about a lot, actually, because I was talking to my boyfriend. My boyfriend also an entrepreneur, and he works with companies. He helps. He's a fractional CFO. He also he creates like he's brilliant of creating like frameworks and and seeing where, I basically, I call him, like, the John Taffer from heart rescue. He's like, the John Taffer of like, of companies. He goes in and finds, like, where, like, the weak spots are. He's really good at that. And something popped up on Instagram or whatever. And it was like, I forget what the exact stat stat was, but the stat was like, X amount of, you know, small businesses fail within the first X amount of years. It's the stat that I'm sure so many people have heard. And I was like, Why do you think that is I was like, Do you think I actually said was like, Do you think it's a cash flow like, what is it? He's like, no. He's like, I don't think it's a cash flow issue. He's like, I think it's because things get hard and people give up. And then that statement resonated with me in context to this whole in between thing. Because, again, had I not known that, yeah, sometimes you have cash flow issues. Push through them, like you could push through them. There's solutions. I probably would have given up. When I have a client who has a really, a really difficult week for the first time, where they have a string of good weeks, then they have a difficult week where, you know, they maybe have the same expectations that they should be doing just as well on a week of Thanksgiving as they should on a random week in February. You know, when, when, when they're not ready for the for those things, it could make it easy to give up. So it's important to have those conversations. What does the transformation actually look like in real life to get from point A to point B? So this is sort of the framework that I tell my clients about, but I've sort of elaborated on it a little bit more in this context. And you can apply this to anything, any goal that you want to achieve. You could. You could apply this to brief pause in the spirit of realness of the in between. I just recorded this whole thing. It came out so freaking good, and then I look and my mic had died, so literally, none of it got picked up on audio. So now we're going to redo it. And it's fine. We're going to redo it better. So let's do it.
Okay. So here's what we want to do. I want you to picture an overarching kind of framework here, right?
The overarching vibe is going to be at the top here we're going to that's going to be your goal, and underneath your goal, there's going to be three buckets. Your goal is where most people stop. That's like, the numerical thing. That's the thing that everyone says they want to do for the new year's resolution. So that's like, I want to lose 50 pounds. I want to weigh 120 pounds. I want to lower my blood sugar, or I want to spend less time on my phone, or I want to make $100,000
or I want to start my own company, whatever it is that's like, the actual, like goal part, and unfortunately, that's where a lot of people stop. Now, extra bonus points, if you attach a why to it, and I think this is really important, because when you understand why you're doing it, and you're very connected to that, when the in between comes and things get a little bit rocky, and I'm going to describe what that's going to look like. If you are really clear as to why you're doing it, it's going to make it so much more impactful. So for example, if it's weight loss, like it's fine, we can be vain. We can say you just want to look better. You could say that you just feel more confident when you're a certain weight. Weight does not have to be tied to confidence. But if that's a thing, that's fine for you, it could be that you're like, I just want to fit into my clothes. I don't want to have to stress about weight anymore. I just want to finally have a good relationship with food. I want to make more money. I want to, I feel like I'm spending too much time on my week. Whatever your why is. I want to spend more time with my kids, whatever. Know what your why is. For me, my why when I started my company, so I was like, I want to start my own nutrition company, and I want to be making $100,000 for some reason, $100,000 like, stuck in my brain. I don't know why. To me, when I graduated college, that was like the most money in the world. It seemed so like crazy that I could do that somehow, but I didn't. And my why was because I really didn't want to move back home to New Jersey to live with my parents, because I had so much freedom in college, and I did not want to go back to that. So I so to me, like not going back home was my why. So when things got really rocky, I was like, no bitch, you are not going back home to New Jersey, we are going to persevere through and like that was my why. So now maybe you could argue, okay, maybe you could have made that much money over time. Doing you know that for somebody else, but I wanted to do things my way. I truly my why. I believe that my way of approaching nutrition, I would believe that my way of approaching weight loss was so different and so unique and worked so much better than everybody else's way. I did not want to do it following someone else's framework. I knew that I would be a lot more impactful and a lot more I'd be able to do what I wanted to do if I was doing it my own way. So that was my why. All right, so you want to figure out what your actual goal is, figure out your why, and then I want you to picture three buckets underneath that first bucket is going to be okay. What habits Am I trying to put in place to achieve said goal. Some people do this. Most people don't, but some people at least get this part down. So for example, let's say I'm like, All right, my overarching goal is I want to keep my room clean. I don't keep my room clean. I want to keep it clean. I hate coming home to clutter. That's my why it like stresses me out. I don't want to be that person anymore. I want to keep my room clean. So under my the first bucket, my my what I'm doing to achieve that, my habits, I'm going to say, All right, I'm going to, at the end of every day, take 510 minutes and just straighten up. On the weekends, I'm going to carve out like, like a half an hour to make sure that everything is, like, tidy. If I can't do that, maybe I'll hire a cleaning person to come in and whatever it is, right? So you want to make sure you have, like, your your, okay, what are the habits? And doesn't be a ton of them, but you want to put the habits behind that are going to get you to achieve the goal. If we're talking about weight loss, you could say, All right, well, I'm going to eat out less. I'm going to try to cook a little bit more. I'm going to go grocery shopping more often. I'm going to drink more water, I'm going to have breakfast. I'm gonna eat, you know, indulgences less, I'm gonna have less dessert, whatever it is, right? So you want to, like, put those things in place. Now here's another place that is really important, or a piece, I should say, that's important to understand when you are creating this list of habits, two things must be there for each and every habit, otherwise you are highly likely to fail. Number one is, is this habit something realistic for you to do forever, or at least for a very long time? And number two, do you believe if you do this habit, it will get you closer to your goal? So here's what I mean by that. Let's talk about it in terms of weight loss. So if I have a client who comes in and they're like, I would like to lose weight, okay, that's their thing, and I want to do it because I want to have more time with my kids. Whatever it is, okay, fine. You have your what you have your wife, great. And I'm going to do it by cutting out carbs. Okay, but can you cut out carbs for the rest of your life? Probably not. So that's probably not a good thing to do, because then the second you start eating carbs again, you're going to feel like you failed, and then you don't have the habits to support your goal. All right, let's say I have a client come in and they say, Okay, well, I'm gonna try to do this by, you know, I can't have any I'm gonna cut out all sugar. I can't eat sugar. Once I start eating sugar, I can't stop. So in order for me to lose weight, I have to cut out sugar. Let's just say that. But that's not realistic for them to do. So I tell them, Okay, well, instead of just cutting out sugar, how about we have you eating, like, less sugar. That's something we actually do in our program. We tell people how much of the fun foods they can get away with. And so foods they can get away with and still lose weight. But then we'll have people come in and they're like, Okay, that sounds great, but like, I don't believe that that's gonna work for me. Like, if I look at a cupcake, I gain weight, like, I in order for me to lose weight, you don't know me, in order for me to lose weight, I have to eat perfectly. So, but that's not realistic. So then I'm.
So then what I have to do, it's my job, is to kind of like, poke some holes in that belief. Because a lot of times we're carrying around these like beliefs due to, like, diet, culture and trauma, or whatever we have, these like beliefs that we still operate under. But sometimes we wouldn't even say them out loud. They don't make sense. But sometimes, like, you truly believe them. So we have to say, Okay, well, like, is this? Is this real or not? So a lot of people come into my office and they're like, Well, I can't, I can't eat this. I can't. Eat this. I can't I have to eat perfectly in order to lose weight. I can't eat pizza and lose weight. Now the reality is, your body will respond to improvements. So if I have a guy, that's my famous example. If I have a guy who eats 15 cheeseburgers a week, and now he's eating 10, that's less than his body's used to, he's going to lose weight that week, right? Mathematically, that's just, that's how it works. That's how it makes sense. Your body responds to improvements. But if I have a client that deep rooted, she's like, that makes sense for that cheeseburger guy, but that that that doesn't work for me. We need to unpack that. Because if that person doesn't believe that what I'm telling them is true, or doesn't believe it applies to them, they're they're not gonna, they're not gonna do it, right? So then I have to that so that that's one thing that we're very good at unpacking it with nutrition is like these old like diet beliefs and thoughts and thoughts and patterns and things like that. And my cheeseburger is one example. So then I might have have them have a mindset shift of, well, you know, a lot of times when people are trying to lose weight, they think it has to be this all or nothing thing. But most people that just sort of keeps them if I give 100 and then I take 100 I'm always left with zero versus, you know, if I think about something like finances, right? If I have a good relationship with my finances, there's a synergy between the money that I'm putting towards my bills and my mortgage as well as the money that I'm having for fun my discretionary income. And they might be like, okay, cool, that works for money. And I believe that if I wasn't trying to lose weight, I could have some fun stuff, but if I'm trying to lose weight, I can't eat any fun stuff. And then I would say, Okay, well, let's say, let's go back to my money example. Let's say I have the goal of buying a house. Now, I might, with the goal of buying a house, have less discretionary income, but it's not like I have no discretionary income. So yes, while you're trying to lose weight, you might have less fun calories or less discretionary stuff, but you still could have some. And then they're like, oh, okay, this kind of makes sense, you know? So it's just about breaking down some of these, these beliefs. Because if I've learned over the years, it makes sense to me, because I've seen it 100,000 times. But if that person, if this is like foreign information to them, and they're operating off of old food rules, and it doesn't make sense, like they're not going to do it full out. So the first thing is, you need to know what habits you're going to put in place to achieve said goal. And then number two, you have to make sure that a you believe that if I do these things, it's going to work for me. And you also have to believe, and you also have to make sure that whatever these habits are, it's going to be realistic for you to implement for a long period of time, potentially forever. For me, when I was first starting my company, you know, I was like, All right, so my goal is, my goal was, like, my $100,000 goal, my wife was like, I don't really want to move back to Jersey, and I know I could do this better than everybody else. I'm going to that's, that was my why. So I'm like, Alright, so I know I need to get clients. What can I do? I can post on social media. If I post on social media, it's free. It doesn't cost me anything, it'll get me some attention. And if I and then if I keep posting, people will see my stuff. They'll they'll resonate, you know what I'm saying, will resonate with them. And then that's how I can get clients. And I truly believe that that was going to work for me at the time. But if I didn't believe that, then I wouldn't have really consistently posted on social media, and I wouldn't have gotten clients that way, you know. So you have to believe it that if I do this thing, I'm going to get this result, and then you also have to make sure that it's something that's realistic for you to do. So that's bucket number one, bucket number two, and I see people struggle with this a lot, is implementation, which is a completely different skill set than knowledge. And this is sort of part of the in between that people struggle with, is the implementation piece of it. So the first thing I want you to understand is that knowledge and implementation are two different things, getting yourself to figure out what you're going to do to achieve your goal, getting yourself to believe that if I do this thing, it's going to work for me, and choosing things that are going to be something that I could do over and over again is not the same thing as taking those things and inserting those action items into your day and your week. And here's why our brains, which I've talked about before with you guys, automate a lot of stuff. You probably do most of your day without actually consciously thinking. You wake up, you brush your teeth, go the bathroom, go shower. You just take feed the dog. You do the same things over and over again. You drive to work. You don't think about it like how the hell it gets work. You don't have to turn your brain on, because your brain likes to automate as much as possible in order to take new habits and insert them into your day or into your week. It takes time to do that, and it takes and sometimes you have a really good idea, but it just doesn't work into your week. So let's just use this an example. Let's say you're like, Okay, I want to lose weight. I know I want to do it. One of the things I can do to lose weight is I can, I can cook at home more. I eat out so much I'm going to start cooking at home more. I believe I can do that, and I believe if I do do that, I believe that I will lose weight. Cool. So then Monday rolls around. You hit the ground running. You're doing your week whatever. Monday, have a full day work. Then you come home, kids do whatever your day looks like. And then you're like, Okay, I'm ready to cook. And then you're like, Oh no, I don't have any groceries in the house. And then you're like, shit, it's the first day. It's the first week that I decided to do this, and I don't have anything in the house I've already fit now.
Now I have to order in. I'm already failing and blah, blah, blah, and you can spiral, and you can give up very easily over that implementation is a different skill set. Give yourself a grace period. Give yourself a grace period to iterate and see what works and what doesn't work, because interrupting your autopilot is hard. So instead of getting mad at yourself and spiraling be like, Okay, here's what I need to do for next week, I need to put another habit in place in order to make sure that I have that I that I can cook more. So I need to go grocery shopping. So I believe I can go grocery shopping, and I believe I do go grocery shopping, I will be able to have groceries for the week. Cool. Now let's say she's like, so now let's say the time comes to go grocery shopping, and she's like, it's my Sunday. I don't want to go grocery shopping. Like, this sucks. Like, I don't want to do that. And it becomes something that she really doesn't want to do. So she then she doesn't do it, and then she feels like she failed again. She's like, I know I have to go grocery shopping, but I really don't want to go grocery shopping. I hate going to the grocery store. It's my Sunday. It's my weekend. It's my only time to decompress. Okay, so let's iterate again. Let's go back to our habit board. Okay? So you could do grocery delivery, or you can pick a different day to go grocery shopping. So let's say she's, like, I like the idea of gross of grocery delivery, but it's so it's, it's too expensive. That's a belief that she has. She believes it's too expensive, so I'm not going to do it. I can do it for a long period of time, but, like, I don't believe I'm going to want to do it for a period long time, because I think it's too expensive. Okay, but you ended up eating out three or four meals because you didn't have groceries in the house. The grocery delivery for a week is $10 so if you do that, there's your $10 back, you know? So you end up spending $100 because you were ordering in, versus the $10 for grocery delivery. And she's like, Oh, okay, now I believe that that's the logical thing to do. So then she does her grocery delivery. So it's just about kind of like seeing what works, seeing what doesn't work, and iterating that now maybe someday, some weeks she she goes to the grocery store, maybe some weeks she, you know, does the meal delivery, whatever, but she's developing the system of implementation to achieve that habit, right? And then once you do this over and over and over again, it becomes your new autopilot, your brain. You've done it so much that your brain, just like automates it. So so many people will tell me, Michelle, I don't have time to make myself breakfast in the morning, just for example. But what they will do is they will go to the deli or something, and they'll get an egg sandwich, or they'll go to Dunkin, or they'll go to Starbucks and they'll get it there. Now, I've done this before to prove to a client, because I'm annoying, that it actually takes more time to get in your car, drive to Dunkin, drive to Starbucks, drive to the deli, go in line, order your thing, wait for your thing, go back in your car, and then go like I timed it out, and I did it a couple of different places. It took more time to do that than it took for me to prepare my own breakfast at home. The difference is I don't have to think. I don't have to think when I go to Starbucks. I don't have to think when I go to the deli. I don't think when I do all that stuff. If I'm trying to implement something new, I have to think I've turned my brain on. Have to crack the egg into the pan. It actually takes, if you're making just even eggs, for example, it takes four minutes to make scrambled eggs. Four minutes, literally, like less than five. But if you're not, if it's not in your wheelhouse, if it's not on autopilot, yet, it feels like it's a long time, but it's not once you do it over and over and over and over again. It just becomes what you do. So when I even was starting, when I was doing my whole nutrition thing, I'm not a morning person. If you guys know me, I'm not a morning person. And the idea of, like, preparing a breakfast for myself, like felt like it was, it was never gonna happen. Now it would be weird. It would be just as weird for me to do that as not take the time to show to shower or brush my teeth, right? Because if somebody, no one's ever come into my office and be like, Oh my god, Michelle, I haven't showered all week. I was way too busy. It takes like, you know, depending on the level of shower you're doing, if you're a girl, you understand, like, There's levels of showers we do, like a body shower all the way to like an everything shower, you know, like, 20 minutes, half hour. But like, no one's coming in. Tell me, like, Oh, I didn't have time to shower this week, because it's just, it's just part of what you do. It'd be weird for you not to do it. So with our clients for nutrition, at least, we like to get them to the point where it would be just as weird for them not to not to eat well as it would be to, like, not shower or brush their teeth. Like it's just something that wouldn't happen. But you need that repetition in order for it to become part of your autopilot. So the levels are, you know what your habits are. Then implementing it is a totally different skill set. You want to give yourself some grace to iterate and be like, Okay, this worked. This didn't work. Don't get mad at yourself during that process. That's the in between that people don't talk about. They don't talk about the iteration process of that. They just either feel like they failed and they give up, or they don't talk about, like, the struggles, because people apparently don't like showing that on the internet, which we're gonna change that, right? And then once you do it over and over and over again, it just becomes what you do, you know, like it would be
for someone who's never cooked before. Cooking, it's like looking at a recipe. It's like, you might as well be like, looking at, like, like an encyclopedia. It's like, what am I even looking at here? But once you have a comfort level with it, because you've implemented it, and then once you do it over and over and over again, it's just part of what you do. You know nobody has to think when they drive a car, even though that's a very complicated process. If you've driven a car, you just know how to do it. Your brain will automate something that you do over and over and over again. And that's how you create habits that actually stick. That's why people ask me, like, how do you have such a high long term success rate at nutrition? Because that's what we do now. Does.
It take a little bit longer than the average stupid diet. Yeah, no, shit, it does, but it sticks and it works. And the problem is is people will be on and off and on and off and on and off a million diets right before they do this one thing, it takes less time to create a permanent result than people who go on and off diets over and over again. So if you were to start in January, let's just say by like March, you'd be really solid. By, you know, June, you'd be great. Within a year, you would be there, and it would be so autopilot for you. But, you know, people don't necessarily approach it from this way, but that's why people fail at a lot of their goals, because they don't look at it this way. So now, applying this to, you know, my company like we have been very blessed where we've reached a level and we've been able to sustain that level for a very long time, but we haven't really been able to grow past it. So me thinking in terms of this framework, okay, what is my goal? My goal, let's say, is to be able to get more clients right, get more clients in our door. Blah, blah, blah. Now, what do I have to do in order to do that? I have to hire somebody at this point for marketing. I'm at the point where I can't do everything now, I think analyzing it now, in the past, I didn't believe that if I hired somebody to help me, that it would work, or maybe I don't believe I could, like, afford it, or maybe I didn't believe that it was going to work, or maybe I didn't believe that if it did work, like, how now I have to, like, hire and train someone. There's all these, like, limiting beliefs that you have to unpack, let's just say, as an entrepreneur, in order to, like, get to that next level. Now I'm like, let's just pretend like, okay, let's say I do hire a marketing company. Now it's week, one of them marketing, and I'm like, well, the phone's not ringing now I'm wasting money. It's not working. Got like, you gotta stop. No, I need to give them the space to, like, implement. We need to iterate. We need to see what works. We need to give it time and blah, blah, and then when it works, then we do it over and over again. And now it's on autopilot. Now we have more clients. So like, again, you can apply this to literally anything, any goal in life. But I think because we don't talk about that in between, we are either unclear as to like, what, what the things are that we have to do, we have a fear that if we do those things like, it's not going to work, or maybe it won't be sustainable. Even when we then are really clear on those things, and we do believe they're gonna work, then we don't give ourselves any grace to actually, like, implement and iterate and like, give ourselves the space to kind of like figure out, okay, how does this actually fit into our lives and in our day and then, but if you do give yourself that grace, you get the beautiful gift of having it all autopiloted in your brain, where it's just part of who you are, and then you don't have to think about it anymore. So I hope thinking about it this way is is helpful. I want you guys to think about this as you start to think about the the new year's resolution vibe. Not that I want you like, necessarily setting them. You could start today doing this. But like I said, I do like the idea of a New Year's resolution just as like a check in, just as like a like, as a reminder of like, okay, well, where can I improve? Where can I get better? And make sure that you're following me on social media, both at Ask underscore Mish, but also my personal one at Mish, at, at Mish, N, I S, H, of nutrition, u t r, I S, M, oh my gosh. N, u t r, I, oh my god. Guys, I can't spell Instagram at Mish, of nutrition, ish. M, I'll link. I'm gonna look at the show notes. Guys, I'm gonna be really showing a lot more of the journey and the process. I'm gonna be being a lot more authentic online. Like I said this. Go over. Said, this goal really inspired me, and I think it's something that's missing. I'm going to be encouraging our clients to normalize and and share the the inner workings of getting from point A to point B. All right, let me know what you guys thought of this episode online, and I will check you guys out next week. You.