#51 - Empowerment
Hey, hey ladies. How are you this week? You guys, I feel like the craziness is coming to an end. All the birthday shenanigans and most of the summer activities. There's a couple of more things on the calendar. I'm really excited for this coming weekend. I was at the Spartan last weekend and then one of my good friends and clients and just a spectacular human being tour, who ran the Spartan with me, told me about this boat dance party. That's happening this weekend and I was like, yeah sign me up. Let's go! So, I'm going to a boat dance party this weekend, and I'm super excited and having a lot of fun planning what I'm going to wear. And we're going to dance and it's in the afternoon, which is super fun. It's not late into the night. It's not like a 12 hour day. It's from 2:00 to 6:00 PM, we're going to be on a boat. It's going to be gorgeous and sunny. We're just going to move our bodies and shake it out and like, let some of that energy go. I'm excited about it.
You guys, did you listen to last week's episode? My 40 things I've learned. There were a lot of things in there. Hey, did you take notes? I'm going to go back and listen to that episode periodically. I've already scheduled it in for something I'm going to do next month because sometimes we need a reminder, right? Those are important things that we need to remember to do or think or be, or all of it. So I had a lot of fun recording that episode for you guys. Before we get started today, I want to remind you guys. There's two weeks left to sign up for the upcoming September 5th for 16 week transformation program. If your goal is weight loss. If you want to lose anywhere from 20 to 40 pounds before Christmas. If you have really struggled with yo-yo dieting or emotional eating, or you want to get to know yourself better or deep dive into the thought work, maybe you just want a little bit more accountability, some daily guided journaling, more nutrition knowledge, maybe some set workouts. And if you want to have 24/7 pm text messaging with me. You want to get in on this? So, I'm going to leave the link in the show notes, just go over to lylasleona.com, hit transform in the top right corner and register now. We're going to get that party started on September 5th. All right, I'll see you there.
So now, we're on to episode 51. Are you guys ready to hear what this next series is going to be? Episodes 51 through 60. I did a lot of thinking about this. I thought about going back and doing, you know, mindset up-leveled, which might still happen. I thought about doing nutrition up-leveled, which might still happen, right. Of course, muscle development too. I thought about doing an entire series of Q and A. Some of you have been emailing in, or finding me in social media and messaging me questions, which I love, and I'm answering them individually, but also I've been keeping track of them. And I would love to do an upcoming series on just answering questions because, you all. If you're thinking about it. If you're wondering about something, I guarantee you there's a thousand other women out there that are also wondering the same thing. So please never ever hesitate to email me and message me with the question. I love answering your questions. You guys are messaging me, emailing me, finding you on social media. Know that it is never a bother. So many people email me and they're like, I'm sorry to bother you. I know you're busy. No. I want you to engage with me. I want you to let me know that you love the podcast and that you have questions and you want to improve your health and you want to sculpt your life and that you, you need more information because it tells me, what you need from me, what I can give you, what podcasts will help. And that's what I want to create, right? So please message me, reach out. Ask me your questions. Never ever feel like you're bothering me. Okay. Deal done. All right.
So without further ado, this next series is going to be on empowerment. And you may have gotten that already from the title of this podcast , it’s called empowerment. Now, I came to this decision after having a lot of ideas go through my head. And I was really like, what do I want to put out into the world right now? What do I want to teach women right now? And I had this spectacular moment recently with one of my clients that really made me feel strongly about empowering all of you. So we're not just going to do one episode on it. I'm going to do 10 episodes on empowerment.
Today, we're going to talk about why, why is empowerment so important? And then each episode, we're going to break it down into specific subjects and specific ways that you can empower yourself. And yeah, we're gonna, we're just gonna like, crack it open and talk about all the things. So if you have any questions on empowerment, bring them on. Let's go.
So I want to start off talking about empowerment as part of my four E’s. Some of you know that I have the four E's, which I think of as part of my core values for my business and just for the kind of coach and the kind of person I want to be in the world. So just to remind you, the four E's are encouragement, education empowerment, elevate. So, this is kind of everything I put out into the world. Every podcast I release, every product I create, everytime I coach somebody, I like to think of you know, am I encompassing one of those four E’s? So I want to talk about each of them just a little bit before I jump right into empowerment.
So what is encouragement? I think I've encouragement, like me saying, Hey, you can do this. Here's how, like, let's go, come with me, join me on this, let me help you. And so I think encouragement is almost like an external motivator, right? It's being encouraged from the outside inward to do something.
The second is education, and this is kind of, you know, pretty straightforward. It's tools needed for success. So maybe you just need a little bit more knowledge about nutrition or insight as to what kind of nutrition you need to achieve your goals, or maybe you need a little bit more education about form and workouts and body sculpting in order to create the body you want, or maybe you just need to know how your brain works and understand why it always feels like there's an argument going on in your head. I know for me personally, understanding why helps me move through so much discomfort and toughness. When I understand why it's tough and why it's uncomfortable, it helps me really be able to get to the other side of it.
The third E is empowerment, which is, you know, our special guest for this series. And I like to think of empowerment as almost a combination of encouragement and education that when combined create this wonderful belief. Hey, I can do this. And I think empowerment is when you have internal motivation. So, encouragement is external motivation. Empowerment is internal motivation. And I think it is such a beautiful thing. We're going to talk about that more in just a minute.
The fourth E is elevate. And I think that elevation is kind of a combination of the first three, right? You have no choice. These kind of very much go in order. I encourage people to get started and educate themselves. I educate them on what they need to be empowered. And then the empowerment automatically elevates their life, which is amazing, right. So elevation is, you know, what can I do to help lift these women up? What can I do to help lift this person up? How can we all lift each other up? How can we encourage, educate and empower each other to be better, right? So much fun. Join me and the fun. Come on. All right. So.
I want to talk about why empowerment is important to me as a coach because it hasn't always been right through most of my twenties. I was a very typical young personal trainer. And I know a lot of trainers similar to me in my twenties. I also see a lot of young trainers who are training to empower in today's world, which is amazing. I'm so glad that there are young people jumping on this train. It took me decades to figure this out. Maybe even a little bit longer, but most trainers, coach in a way that creates a codependency and they may not even know they're doing this and what this might look like is you creating a meal plan for somebody to follow, or you creating a workout plan for somebody to follow, to get a very specific result. And those of you who are trainers out there might be like, Hey, yeah, that's what we do, we create a program that trains someone to create a specific result and that's great. And then you educate people on form correction and on how to do it properly. But also, I want to encourage you to educate your clients on why, why you're creating a program that looks like that to get that result. What is it about that program that will help them get that result? Same with nutrition, if you're creating a nutrition plan for someone, if you're a nutrition coach and have the authority to create a nutrition plan for somebody. Explain it to your client, give them some education, give them some knowledge with guidance. So that they are empowered to make changes as they go through it. Does that make sense? Okay.
So when a client has a co-dependence then see what it ends up looking like. Let's say a client works with the trainer, they lose 20 pounds. And then a friend of theirs says, Hey, how did you lose 20 pounds? And they say, oh, I hired this trainer, right. The result is because of somebody outside of them because of something external, that's a codependency. So whenever a client wants to achieve a new result, they go back to that trainer and they're like. Hey, this is the new goal to help me achieve this. and this is, It's not a bad thing to hire somebody to get a result you want. However, how I really like coaching and how my coaching practice has evolved is that I really coached to empower now. And I'm going to tell you why because I think it's really important for the coaches out there who are listening to this, the trainers and future clients and women. I want you to know how I coach because some people come to me and they're looking for that codependency. They want me to create something for them to help them get the results they want and the way that I coach isn't necessarily like that anymore. And it really turned some people off. They're like, Hey, I just want you to do this for me. And I'm like, yeah. And that will work for a very short period of time for you. But as soon as it's not working for you, You're going to give up and go back to the way you were doing it before, or find a new trainer or come to me and tell me it's not working, right? There's no empowerment there. So I like to create independent clients. It's really important to me to create clients who are empowered to make their own decisions.This creates a beautiful relationship. And also what I call a self-correcting client or a self-correcting model for the client. So what this looks like is instead of giving a client, a meal plan or a training program, which in some cases I still do like with competition prep, clients, we're just getting started or, you know, I will still help a client design and develop their first nutrition protocol, but I will educate them a ton in the process and then really encourage them to make changes and modifications on their own. And give them the knowledge base and the guidance they need to feel comfortable doing that. And it takes, you know, it takes some time. Like everything does right. But what happens in that? Is you end up with a client, who instead of coming to you and saying, Hey, this isn't working for me. They come to you and they say, Hey. So I didn't feel like this was working for me. So this is what I did, what do you think? And to me that is a beautiful thing. So for example, the transformation, 16 week transformation program. So many people sign up for this program and expect me to give them a meal plan. Most people who sign up now have a pretty good idea that they're getting thrown into the fire. But I do, I throw, I give them an example of what a protocol could look like, and then I have them make their own and the reason I do this is because after 16 weeks of you building and testing and altering your own meal plans. You get pretty confident in what your body needs to achieve the results you want. So at the end of that transformation program, 90% of the women that come out of that program.
Feel very empowered to make nutrition decisions in their lives to create nutrition plans that will help them achieve their goals, to help their friends create nutrition plans that will help them achieve their goals. It's crazy. But it's so highly effective. It is also amazing because clients can't come to me and be like, Hey. This isn't working because I'll be like, Why isn't it working? And they'll be like, well, I don't know. And I'll be like, well, let's try something different. What can we change? It's very self-correcting because I'm not giving them a program where they then give it back to me and say, Hey, this program doesn't work for me, right. They're creating their own program. And if it doesn't work, they get to create a new one and then test that out. Is this making some sense? Some people are just like, I don't like this idea at all. But for those women who are ready to be done with dieting for those women who never want to go on another weight loss plan ever in their life. This is the answer. This is a real beautiful education in yourself and what your body needs. So that going forward, whenever you want to drop 10 pounds for the summer, or whenever you want to tighten up for a photo shoot or a wedding, or you want to lose that post baby weight. You know, And you may, you know, come to me for a little bit of guidance in terms of a refresher or maybe you've got a new goal that you're going after that you want some help with. But so many of my clients are so empowered to make their own nutritional decisions. And they come to me for confirmation, and to me that makes coaching so much fun. Okay. So that is why I like to create independent clients. It's way more fun than creating codependent clients. All right.
First one, tick. The next thing is creating independent clients breeds confidence and success. When you empower people through education and encouragement, you breed people who encourage and educate and empower others. And I think this has so much to do with why our lady sculpt community is such a phenomenal energy. It's amazing. You guys, we have about 50 women in Lady Sculpt right now. And when someone asks a question in our group chat, or someone is struggling, the love and support and assistance and education and all of it, whatever that person needs. If I'm not available, there are seven other people that can help them out with an answer that can help them out with some ideas that can point them in the right direction. So for me as a coach, it's like I have a leadership team of empowered women that I've worked with over the years. Who now are ready to empower and educate and encourage other women. it's just like this domino effect.And it just makes the community so much stronger. Okay.
The third reason why empowering women is important to me is when I create an independent client who is confident and successful on their own, it makes me available to help somebody else. Let me explain. So in Lady Sculpt, I have clients who I've worked with. You know, maybe they came through transformation. Maybe they worked with me one-on-one, maybe I helped them through a competition, maybe two. And now they're in a place where they're designing their own nutrition for competition prep. They're using programs and ladies called, but altering and modifying them as they need for their own goals, they’re in Lady Sculpt to be part of the team, to stay connected to have that community of like-minded independent women, but when they no longer need me to hold their hand to teach them everything, it frees me up to teach somebody new. If I were creating codependent clients that needed me to make a meal plan, whenever their goals changed. I would never have time to take on new clients. I would never have time to help the next generation. So by breeding, confident, successful athletes, who feel comfortable, encouraging and educating and empowering new athletes. It allows me to compound the effects we're having on the world and that is essentially my goal, right? Is to create as many confident, successful, empowered women, elevating each other as possible in the world, right? Big goal, never going to end. We're going to take some massive action. We're just going to keep going. So, these are the three reasons why empowerment is so important to me, just to reiterate again. Empowering clients creates independent clients. Empowering clients creates and breeds, confident, successful clients who empower other clients and empowering clients helps me help more women. To me, empowerment is one of the most important parts of my four E’s, but in order to get empowerment, encouragement, and education as part of that, right. Okay.
I want to finish this episode off with sharing with you the example of what triggered the empowerment series. So a client, I'm going to keep her anonymous, messaged me. This is what one of my sculptors messaged me early last week. And, um, I'm going to actually read you part of her message here. She said, I'm reaching out to you because “I'm struggling to lose my last five pounds and go from 145 to 140. I know it's my eating habits and I've been struggling a lot lately with my relationship with food and life. I've been eating my emotions. I'm very aware of this, but I do not know how to stop it. Do you have any suggestions? I really want to hit my weight goal. Wondering what your thoughts are looking forward to hearing from you.” And then you guys like half an hour later. So I wasn't in the app at the time, so I didn't respond right away. So there was a second message from her that said, “actually hold your thoughts, please. I'm watching the mindset call. I want to finish the video and send you what I came up with.” So I messaged her later that evening and said, okay, let me know what you come up with. And then the next day I got a message from her. Was literally herself coaching herself through it. And she came up with a game plan and she literally coached herself almost exactly how I would have coached her through it for herself. And the beautiful thing about this. You high is that, she did it. She did it all on her own, the tools that she needed, the education that she needed was in the platform was in Lady Sculpt. The information was there. She just needed to go find it. And that is what empowerment can do, my friends. Rather than having a problem and saying, Hey, can you fix this? When you're empowered, you say, Hey, I have a problem. How can I fix this? What can I do about it? What can I try that may improve my situation?
As a coach, coaching clients and watching them go from women who are disempowered and feel like they have no idea how to lose weight or how to manage their bodies. A lot of the women that come to me, don't even believe it's possible for them to have the body of their dreams to watch them go from not even believing it's possible to having hope that it is possible to starting the process of it and going through the, I want to call it the suffering of the education part, but the education part is it is we call it the river of misery because you're, you're having to figure things out and test things out and fail and try again. And there's these waves of emotion that you're having to process, and you're not using food to do that. So you actually have to deal with the emotions. And a lot of people struggle with that part and it's totally normal to struggle with that part. But when you come out on the other side of it, what that struggle creates is resiliency. And what resiliency creates is empowerment. When you know, you can figure it out. It's tough. You might hit a roadblock, maybe your weight plateaus, or you're not getting the result you want when you have created confidence and resiliency and you're empowered to make changes on your own, confidence starts to spill over into other areas of your life as well. And that becomes a domino effect. So I like to think what I do is I start in a very small area of a woman's life that maybe she's feeling really beat up and disempowered and negative about and I like to encourage, educate and empower in her body goals, in her weight loss goals, in her mindset about it. And what ends up happening is this beautiful elevation, of not just her physique, but also her entire life which is so, so much fun to watch as a coach.
Alright you guys, that is episode 51. The first episode in the empowerment series. Stay tuned. This series is going to be so good. You guys, I will see you next week. I'm already excited. Bye for now.
