#38 - You Vs. You
Hey, hey ladies. How are you? How was your May long weekend? Did you have a May long weekend? I don't know if they have May, long weekends everywhere in the world. We have them up here in Canada and mine was fantastic. The weather here, it felt like summer. It was lovely. I spent a lot of time outside walking and hanging out on my patio and reading and yes, it was so good. And now I'm prepping. I, uh, leave for Edmonton. I, in a couple of days, I'm gonna be out there for five days. I get to see some friends, some of my athletes. I'm going out for the WNBF Edmonton show. I'm excited. It's gonna be so good. I'm, I'm just excited, I love traveling and I missed it so much during COVID. I like packing a suitcase. I like working at the airport. I like staying in hotels. I like all of it. It just feels progressive. I'm not quite sure what it is about traveling, but it feeds my soul. Right. Okay, So we're gonna be doing episode 38 today.
I'm gonna call this episode you versus you. And I think this is such an important conversation to have. I think this topic goes way beyond competition prep. This is something that we all should embody as much as we can. I think it just creates a much healthier competition world and life in general, when we pull competing against other people out of our goal spectrum and we compete with our past self. So this is what we're gonna talk about now, specifically in competition prep in the competition world. We get judged. We are literally putting ourselves on stage in very minimal clothing to have our bodies judged. And what happens, especially after doing this a few times, I noticed this personally for me anyway, is I started judging myself and judging others way more than I ever had before, a few years after I started competing. And I see this a lot in the industry, and when we compare ourselves to other people, there never really is a great outcome, right? The outcome is one of two. Either we look at somebody else and we feel bad about ourselves and we think they look better, and we are less than, or we look at somebody else and we think we look better, and that they are less than, which isn't a great way to feel better, right? That's not. That is not a sustainable feel good system, right? Because as soon as someone else, you think someone else looks better, you go back to feeling bad, right? It's not sustainable for you to manage your emotions. It's not an emotional adulthood place to be. So, what I'm going to suggest instead is that you take away a focus that's out of your control, and instead you decide that you're gonna show up in a way and make sure you are better than your past self. This is how I coach you guys. It's you versus past you. So are you stronger? Are you wiser? Are you? You guys, my power just went out. It's a good thing that this entire setup is not dependent on electricity in my house. I think we're still living here. Are we good? We're good. You can still hear me. I'll unplug my laptop just in case the power goes back on. Hey,hey. That was weird. I don't think actually the power went out. I think I blew a breaker. Whoops. I'm running a backup on my computer and I've got a few things plugged in. That's all right. We're gonna keep going. All right. So, how I coach is you versus past you. So are you stronger, wiser, fitter than you used to be? Does your body this year look better than the body you brought to stage last year? Does your stage presentation look more graceful, more put together, more experienced than it did last year? Is your energy level better this prep than it was last year? There's so many things that can compare that you can compare and see growth in it may not always be the aesthetic visual of your physique, although in our industry we want it to be. But you also, like you might have had a much healthier dial-in, maybe you dialed in at a much higher calorie point than you did the year before. So your metabolic system is in a healthier place on show day, right? There's so many different ways that you can outdo yourself. Once you get to the stage, everything else is outta your control. The only thing you have control over is what you bring, how you present it, and your attitude about it. Who else shows up, who's judging totally outta your control. So when you have a you versus past you mentality, it is much easier to stay positive no matter what the outcome, to know that you succeeded no matter what the outcome. I like my athletes to go into show day knowing that they've already won. They are showing up with a better package than they've ever brought before, and everything else is out of their hands. They have done everything they personally could do, and if it's not enough for the judges that show, It's fine. They've still won. They've still improved immensely from the past version of them. And that I think is more important than a medal. And I know so many of you put so much of your emotion into, you know, getting that, that medal or that top three or top five placing. But you guys really in the long run of things that don't matter. What matters is that you are progressing, that you are improving you and how you feel about it. If I won a competition, but I knew I didn't look my best, I look not as good as I had the last year. Maybe my prep didn't feel as good. Maybe I didn't try as hard. It would be a bittersweet win. But if I place fourth or fifth with the strongest, leanest, driest, most conditioned, most healthiest prep I've ever had, I'm gonna feel like a rock star. And you guys, that is all attitude. That's all mindset. That's how we think about it. Right. This is mindset thought work going into comp prep. It's so important to make sure that that experience is positive from start to finish. This you versus past you mentality is something I highly recommend that you embrace, you run with in every area of your life.
So in Lady Sculpt, in Team Sculpt, I really encourage this concept, this you versus you concept, especially when I've got a number of women competing against each other in the same categories, right? How do we connect as a team? How do we support each other and cheer each other on when there's direct competition? When all women together look inward and focus on building, growing, and improving themselves, the dynamic becomes magical and purely supportive. I love the team dynamic that we've created in the team Sculpt. The women in there embody this to a T and there is a quote that was posted up on social media that I saw, I think I read it yesterday or the day before. It was posted by one of my favorite people in the entire world. And I love this quote, and it just reminds me so much of our team Sculpt mentality, how we think about everyone backstage at the show, how we think about life in general. And I wanna pass it on to you. It just moved me a little bit. I took a picture of the Instagram post and I was like, I'm gonna repeat this. The quote is you can't compete with me, I want you to win too. How good is that? Right? It's impossible to be in competition with somebody when they want you to win too. And when we're all working on beating our past selves, we can all win at the same time in the same competition. Right. I love that.
I want to take a minute and talk to you a little bit about the work you can do if you notice yourself judging either yourself or others. First, be compassionate with the fact that you're human. And it is totally in our human nature to judge and to compare. So don't judge yourself for judging. Don't compound the negativeness, right? Instead, I invite you to just step into the awareness of it. So notice the thought in your brain. Notice what you're thinking if you're judging yourself, recognize the thoughts. Maybe you're thinking, you're looking in the mirror and you're thinking, Oh, my ass is flat, or, Oh, my arms are flabby, or, Oh, I wish these love handles would go away. Just notice those little tiny remarks we make that feel heavy and maybe hurtful. They feel deflating, right? This. Even the little, tiny, small ones. This is us judging ourselves and it is not serving you. If you notice yourself doing this, I really encourage you to stop. For a minute, I want you to imagine your best friend or somebody you love, maybe it's your teenage daughter or your niece or your best friend's, six year old daughter. Would you say those things to her? Of course not. I would never, ever say to someone else, Your ass is flat, ever. Period. So why? Why would we say it to ourselves? I really wanna encourage you ladies out there to learn to adore yourself. I'm gonna be doing a podcast soon. I don't know when, but soon on loving yourself is hard because it is one of the best relationships that you can put effort into, that you can grow and develop and it will serve you for the rest of your life. That person is never going anywhere, is your relationship with yourself. Create a relationship with you that is better than any other relationship you have. Adore yourself harder than anyone else possibly could, and you, my friends, will stop judging yourself. Find a way to love your ass exactly as it is, and then build it up from there. Because you love it, because you want it to be the best it possibly can be, not because you hate it and you want it to change. It's a much different energy to put into yourself. On the other hand, if you notice yourself judging others, know that if you're judging others, you're probably judging yourself too, even if you're not noticing it. It goes hand in hand. Often when we make judgment about other people, when we notice negative things, when our brain points out negative attributes on other people, whether we're judging other athletes backstage or judging other athletes on stage or in their photos on Instagram, it often mirrors a personal insecurity. I always like to notice when I'm judging somebody for the way they look, or for what they're saying or for their opinion, or for a choice they're making because it opens up this beautiful opportunity for me to learn more about myself. Why am I judging them? What am I feeling insecure about? Why can't I love them exactly the way they are? Why can't I celebrate what they look like, what their opinions are, what their choices are, what their words are? That's where I wanna get to. My goal, you guys, is to love everybody because the beautiful thing about loving everybody, like everybody, is that you get to experience love. I know, you guys were like, wait, what? what? When you love somebody, this is a whole another podcast topic, but let's just talk about this for a quick second. When you love somebody, when you experience the feeling of love for somebody, you are experiencing that vibration, you get to experience it. It's going through your body, and they might benefit a little bit because love tends to spill out of us, right? And they might get to experience your affections or your adoration or your compliments or your loving gestures or whatever it is, your actions that are taken from that feeling that vibration of love are. But overall, you are the one who benefits from loving somebody else. You are the one that gets to feel the amazingness of the emotion of love.
On the other hand, if you are judging somebody, if you're scrolling through Instagram and you notice a photo of another athlete, maybe it's a direct competition and you start picking her body. You also get to feel that vibration of judgment. She's not experiencing that vibration. She doesn't even know you're looking at her photo, right? You're the one who's now sitting in that vibration of judgment and wasting your time and energy, mentally hating on her, mentally picking her apart, right? And it feels yucky. It feels draining and exhausting, and it doesn't leave you feeling better about yourself. And if it does, it's not genuine, it's not deep, and it's not in a way that is sustainable and beneficial to your mental health, right? So whatever emotion you are feeling, you are the one that is going to either benefit from it or that's going to suffer with it. So this is why one of my goals in life is to love everybody. And one of the reasons why I spend a lot of time working on myself is when I notice someone annoys me or I notice myself being judgemental about something, or if somebody rubs me the wrong way, all it means is that I have some work to do there.
All right ladies, so take this into your competition prep. Take this into your work lives. Take this into your families. If you have sibling rivalry, right, it's you against you. How can you be the best possible version of you? How can you one up you from last year? How can you make sure you win the competition that is your life? Let's go. See you next week. Bye for now.
