Making Lifestyle Changes pt 1 - YLAM240016

SPEAKER A This programme presents ways to optimise health and wellbeing when considering lifestyle changes. Please consult with your health care provider to ensure they are suitable for you. SPEAKER B Hello and welcome. I'm Kaysie Vokurka. The Knowing Doing Gap, a book by Pfeffer and Sutton, published by Harvest Business School Press, was written to help companies turn knowledge into action and improve business performance. This book identifies and addresses the disconnect between knowledge and action in the business world. But business is not the only place. SPEAKER A Where this is your lifestyle as medicine. A production of 3ABN Australia television. SPEAKER B But struggle to do it. Stay tuned as we look at how to bridge the gap between lifestyle knowledge and action. I'm so glad you're with us on this programme, we explore ways that you can shape your lifestyle as medicine. Today, we're going to dive into a very vital area of lifestyle medicine, how to make lifestyle changes. This is where the rubber meets the road, where knowledge is applied so that you can actually reap the benefits of healthy habits. Joining us is Lorenzo Berry, a lifestyle coach with a graduate diploma in lifestyle medicine. Lorenzo, welcome and so glad you can be with us today. SPEAKER C Hi, Kaysie. Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here. SPEAKER B That's great. Now, Lorenzo, you've done quite a bit with lifestyle coaching with people over the years. Can you tell us a little bit about your experience with that? SPEAKER C Yeah, sure, Kaysie. I think it's something I really fell into, incidentally, in the early days, and that was simply sharing my own health journey and the transition that I had taken. And that was inspiring to others. And I began to see that information alone wasn't sufficient to make the change. It was looking at what motivates us and how to link that motivation with information in order to make tangible results. So from those early days, I then transitioned into primarily, I guess, helping people with their smoking addiction. And so it was a very focused lifestyle change as we worked through. And that's a journey that's probably 20 something years now that I've been working with people at different times, helping them quit smoking, and then I have maybe a dozen years across the fitness industry that, you know, you can see many people who would even turn up to a gym, say, and not get the results they're looking for because of a number of factors that were holding them back, that sat behind, really, their exercise and their motivation and commitment to exercise. So, yeah, it's a field I've been involved with for some time and then chose over the last, I don't know, probably six years to do formal training and qualifications in that space that have certainly enhanced my, I guess, hands on experience. SPEAKER B Yeah. And so what would you say makes you most passionate about this kind of thing, helping people on this change process? SPEAKER C Yeah, I guess it's really that satisfaction. I'm sure many people can relate to the AHA moments that we have when we've been working away at something, whether it's a jigsaw puzzle and you've got the final piece in, or you found the last word and a crossword. That, or just that moment when the light bulb gets turned on in our lives and we see that there's a new piece of life, whether it's information or whether it's an experience that gives us a greater sense of fulfilment and meaning and purpose. And so those aha moments is really what takes place when we go from having a lot of information but not a lot of action to then allowing someone to take action that's meaningful for them. SPEAKER B Yeah. Yeah. So this is really something that's transforming people, isn't it? Helping them through the process. And you mentioned before, you've had sort of your own journey of lifestyle change and having to grow through that, and that would also feed into your experience and passion as well. So tell us a bit more about this whole change process, because obviously, I think most people who are thinking about making lifestyle changes can be faced with all sorts of obstacles and fears, and it can be a very daunting thing to just think about, you know, how am I going to achieve this, or how can I get where I want to be when it just seems like it's a minefield of challenges? Where would you take someone to start with in this journey? SPEAKER C Yeah, sure. And not too long ago, Kaysie, really, the starting point would have been a goal setting process. You're probably familiar with, you know, smart goals. You know, they've got to be specific, they've got to be measurable, they've got to be achievable, realistic, you know, time based, all those sorts of things. Now, they're good, but it's not the whole story. So for anyone who's viewing this today, and they've been setting smart goals and still getting frustrated that they're not getting the traction that they're desiring and some would say even deserving. SPEAKER B Yeah. SPEAKER C It's because smart goals really only address a small part of the problem when we talk about desired change, and it's identifies the what, it doesn't really give us much traction into how. And so maybe if we just take a look at the first slide, I find it kind of humorous, but I guess that depends on your perspective, you know, whether you identify more as the mouse or more as the cat. But what I want us to take from this picture is this sense of hopes. You can well imagine the cats looking at the mouse hoping that this is going to be its dinner. SPEAKER B Yeah. Yeah. SPEAKER C We can take it from the perspective of the mouse and say, I hope I'm not the cat's next dinner. So we need to start tuning into. And this can take some time, and I mean, you know, set aside some quiet time where you're uninterrupted and have the opportunity to even write down, but think through what are your biggest hopes and what are your biggest fears? SPEAKER B And is that in relation to the change you're wanting to make or is that in terms of just your overall life? SPEAKER C Just life generally. Okay, so once we can identify what our hopes and fears are in life generally, then we're on a pathway that we can do something with it, because whether we're aware of it or not, it's those hopes and those fears that are our enablers or our obstacles in order to make change stick. SPEAKER B Wow. Yeah. So that's going pretty deep, isn't it? Because that's like the heart of who you are that would play out in all different levels of your life, those kind of things that you experience. The hopes, the fears. Yeah. SPEAKER C Oh, absolutely. And again, if we're in a coaching session, we'll take significant time just working on hopes and fears. SPEAKER B Wow. SPEAKER C So again, don't try and rush this. Don't think, oh, well, I've got a spare five minutes. No, that's not going to work. You need a bit more time investment than that to truly get into your hopes and your fears and it'll be even worthwhile bouncing them off your significant other. You know, if you're in a relationship or someone else that you can trust and just sort of say, well, this is what I'm seeing, this is what I'm feeling, is my hopes and dreams. But obviously you need to have a significant level of confidence that they'll keep that confidential because it's very soul bearing when we start talking about your deepest hopes and fears. SPEAKER B Yeah. So this would be something that you really need to have quite clear in your mind. So take whatever time you need to really, really identify and recognise what it is for you, these things. I guess this is what you're saying, right. We need to just cut out that space to really understand what is going on inside us in this respect. SPEAKER C Yeah, that's right. And I guess for some people, if maybe we'll just put up the next slide, there's another tool that we have and this is called a life wheel. Some of the viewers may have seen it before and this isn't hard and fast, but this is just a way of dividing the domains, our interests, what's important to us, how we have a sense of fulfilment or the time commitments that we have. And looking at our life, I'm not saying that we're differentiated or segmented, but, you know, to be able to look at them individually but see how they're part of the whole and that's why they're in a wheel or a circle. Like we need all of these things and, you know, we get to say which ones are important to us. So sometimes when we look at the life wheel, it enables us to dig a little bit deeper into what those hopes and fears are when we start identifying intentionally those different aspects to our lives that hold meaning and value to us, right? SPEAKER B So as we're going around the life wheel, are we, I guess, identifying, like, does this part of the wheel exist in my life? Or how much is this taking a chunk up? Like what are we evaluating here with that wheel? SPEAKER C Well, with that will and mate? That's a great question and I've got another slide for that. So this is a little one I've prepared. So we begin to evaluate. Again, this is all self reflection. We begin to evaluate how we see ourselves at this point in time in each of those domains that we've identified as meaningful and valuable to us. And so these are just random generated factors. You know, if you want to imagine a scale of zero to ten with ten being on the outermost circumference of the circle, you know, we can put a relative weighting on each of these areas. So as you can see there, you may be travelling fairly comfortably with your financial goals and the financial aspect of your life. You may be okay with academic career, you may. When you're honest with yourself, you may have a sense that maybe I've sacrificed some intimacy, maybe I've sacrificed some of my friendships in order to be more successful. If I use that word in academia or in career or in finances and maybe some of those areas where I'm experiencing greater success, I may need to pull back on a little bit. But when we can reflect and evaluate how we are travelling in each of these important domains, and again, I'll stress that these are our self identified. We know they're all important to us, but when we can reflect and sort of say, oh, well, I'm travelling better in this domain than another. And we start asking the why question. Why am I travelling better in that domain than another? And it's this process that helps us discover what our biggest hopes and what our biggest fears are, because it's those hopes and fears that are even subconsciously driving our behaviour and why some areas are more developed than others. SPEAKER B That's so interesting. And that's, I guess it's really demanding, a very honest look at oneself, because sometimes you can have, I don't know, perceptions of yourself that might not align properly with reality and you've got to come to terms with that. What is actually going on here? To be able to, I guess, yeah, you have to have an honest look at yourself in order to be able to have any constructive learning from it and gaining knowledge to move forward from it. SPEAKER C Yeah, you're absolutely right. And it's, you know, sometimes we don't always like what we see in the mirror. SPEAKER B Yes. SPEAKER C So we have a choice then. We can either say the mirror's wrong and go away and not even attempt to make change, or we say, well, actually, the mirror's right. As uncomfortable as I might be seeing what I see in the mirror, it's going to guide me into what I need to address in order to thrive, in order to flourish and to have a meaningful life. SPEAKER B Yeah. Yeah. So really, with that wheel, we are looking for quite a balanced spread across all of the aspects, I'm guessing, in order to have a lifestyle that is, I guess, flourishing, you would say, you know, you've got all the right pieces of the puzzle together in the one place to make the picture. So, yeah, the parts that we identify as small would be, I guess, highlighting areas that we're wanting to target for change. Would that be about right? SPEAKER C Well, again, there's many reasons why we look at a life wheel, and certainly they're one of those things that would prompt us what we need to address to keep life in balance. And indeed that's a goal. I deliberately showed an unbalanced life wheel one because it's very common. SPEAKER B Yes. SPEAKER C You know, it takes a lot of intentionality to build a balanced life. I think for many of us, we just assume that life is balanced because of what we've learned, typically from our families of origin. And so we just assume that that's a fulfilled life moving forward. It's only when we're posed with new experiences, new challenges, that perhaps we were able to evaluate and say, well, actually, that's part of my life where I'd like to spend more time, I want to spend more effort investing in that part of my life because, you know, it's important to me and I haven't realised just how undeveloped it is. So it's certainly a useful tool in helping us to identify those areas where we perhaps more comfortably want to grow in. Because again, these are all important areas of our life that we've identified. SPEAKER B Yeah, absolutely. And so obviously now, this whole process, we've thought about our hopes and fears, we've gone through this life wheel and that has also highlighted maybe some more hopes and fears we didn't realise until we looked at those different areas of our lives. How do we bring those two self evaluative processes together to then, I guess, move forward in understanding where is the best point for us to make a change from here? SPEAKER C Yeah, great question, Kaysie. So, as we've identified our hopes and fears and we're evaluating how we're succeeding already and where we need more development, then, and again, depending on your personality, this is going to be easier for some people than others, is to keep a record of your daily schedule. SPEAKER B Oh, okay. Yeah. SPEAKER C So, and we've got a sample, one that we can put on the screen, but, and again, this isn't going to be true for everyone. But just an example of what happens in your day. And we want to do this on a couple of days during the week. We want to choose a day on the weekend and look at how we are living life. What are those elements that are in our life? So just for brevity, you can see on the example that I've skipped time at work. We've got a bit of a morning routine. What time we wake up, what's our morning pattern? In this example, there was a morning devotion. We get out of bed, we have a shower, we dress, prepare breakfast, eat breakfast, watch the morning news, drive to work, listening to a podcast, few examples of what may be in a typical day. Then we have a drive home rather than listen to a podcast, we might be talking to friends on the phone, building a little bit of connection. Then we're eating dinner with the family, and then what happens at the end of the day after that. So there's elements in the work life, elements in the personal life that we just want to acknowledge that take place day in, day out. Now, these are important as we understand our schedule and our daily habits, because our hopes and our fears have a direct interface with our daily habits. So it's those hopes and fears that we've now identified and brought to the surface. They've always been there, but we've just brought them to a surface, and now we're consciously aware of them. And as we now take a look at our daily habits, we begin to see how the way we live is an expression of those hopes or fears. SPEAKER B Wow, that's interesting how deep that goes all the way into things that we would take for granted. Oh, that's just normal. That's just life. But it actually comes right back to the heart of those inner beliefs and things. SPEAKER C It is. And so when we talk about our daily habits, and again, I'll take an example from coaching someone who wants to quit smoking cigarettes, we look at that daily routine, and we'd be looking for, say, when they reach for their first cigarette, and we want to have a conversation about why they're reaching for their cigarette at that time of the day. And there's a pattern. There's a pattern of how they live and why they reach for that cigarette is embedded into their hopes and fears. Okay, so it's not an unrelated habit. There's always a reason behind it. SPEAKER B Yeah. So I guess. SPEAKER C Oh, sorry, go ahead. SPEAKER B Sorry. I guess then, say with the smoking example they have, I don't know, let's say they have a smoke in a break after, I don't know, in the mid morning or something, and the hopes and fears that might be interrelated with that. Can you give us just some examples just to sort of see this connection a bit more? SPEAKER C Yeah. Well, see, there really, there's a physiological addiction to nicotine. I'm not discounting that. One of the interesting things with nicotine is that it's referred to as a biphasic drug, which means that it will make you think that you are relaxing if that's what you want it to do, or it will make you think that you're getting excited, you're getting prepared for something desirable to take place, if that's what you want it to do. So it's a really challenging drug of addiction in that sense, because whatever mood you're in, whatever you're looking for, nicotine will give it, trick your brain into thinking that's what you're experiencing, where physiologically it's having exactly the same effect on your body, but mentally, it's telling you whatever you wanted to tell you. So there could be just a sense of withdrawal. While they might reach for it at mid morning break, it can equally be an example that, oh, I've had an exhausting first part of my work shift and I need to relax or it's like, oh, I've been feeling pretty flat. I need to have a smoke and get prepared for the next phase of the shift. SPEAKER B So I guess then what you're hoping for in that break, nicotine is going to give it to you, if you will. SPEAKER C Absolutely. SPEAKER B And so I guess in terms of other aspects of our routine, you know, we probably don't often think about how much our hopes are feeding into what we are doing in that particular time. SPEAKER C No, no. Yeah. And again, a lot of this happens subconsciously. SPEAKER B Yeah. SPEAKER C We go through a process of raising that. We now become more aware of what is driving us and why we have the daily pattern or the daily habits that we do. And that's a strength, because when we identify what our daily habits are and how they reinforce our current mode of thinking, our current fears or current hopes, or are gonna work towards enabling us to make the desired change, it comes down to our daily habits. SPEAKER B Okay, so that's really interesting. And I guess if we think about all we've talked about so far, you know, we've talked about, first of all, thinking about our hopes and fears and then the lifestyle as a whole, using the wheel, and then we've looked at our daily schedule and how all of this interplays together. Is there anything else that we ought to consider or that's helpful to look at that can help bring us together with this picture of where we are at the moment and understanding that so that we know how we can move forward? SPEAKER C Yeah. Thanks, Kaysie. And maybe we'll just put a picture up at this time. I think the easiest way for most people to get traction in making the change they want. And perhaps none of us are aspiring to be Elon Musk, but I put Elon there for a reason. This guy has a super refined schedule. Every five minutes, his day is scheduled to every five minutes. So it's not just, I'm going to cheque emails for half an hour, I'll cheque emails for 35 minutes. It's very precise. The power in understanding our daily habits and having a schedule and looking where we spend our time isn't only about how much time we have available, but understanding those patterns of behaviours that are either bringing us towards or taking us away from our goal. And so, again, Elon Musk, because of his super refined schedule and the fact he doesn't sleep a whole lot, so he's not the model for everything, but he demonstrates what can be achieved in working towards a goal, because of the way he structured his day. Now, some of us are uncomfortable with the word structure again, because of our personality. But it's understanding the rhyme and the rhythm to our day. And by finding someone who's already doing what we'd like to do and understanding how they've managed that time in their day enables us to follow that to a degree and put it in place. So if we go back to our example earlier about having what we do first thing in the morning, I suggested we wake up and there was devotion. Someone like Dwayne Johnson, the rock, you know, he gets up at 430 in the morning and he has a two hour gym session. So if you wanted to build a physique like Dwayne Johnson, you know that you're going to have to invest a lot of time in the gym over many years in order to get it. There's just some things that you need to do. So that's what I mean by finding someone who's already doing what you would like to achieve and understanding what they've included in their day to make it happen. SPEAKER B So this is giving you both the inspiration as well as perhaps some insights as to some practical strategies to get towards the place that you want to be as well. SPEAKER C Absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, we're more and more, I guess, visual people. We process information and a lot of it's coming at us visually. But to find someone, whether it's a celebrity or whether it's your neighbour, maybe it's a relative who's already made that journey and is focusing on an area of your life that you have now gone, hey, I want to give more attention to this aspect of my life, whether it is your career, whether it is finances, whether it is relationships, and saying, well, what is it about how I'm doing my day now that's going to facilitate me making a lasting change moving forward? SPEAKER B Thank you, that's really awesome, those tips and advice, and I'm looking forward to taking this subject further in the next session with you. It feels like we've just scratched the surface, but thank you so much for joining us today and look forward to next time. We've been talking with lifestyle coach Lorenzo Berry about how to make lifestyle changes and this is an essential part of how you can make your lifestyle as medicine. In the next programme, we will take this topic further and unpack in more detail what's involved in a successful change process. So please join us then. If you have comments or questions about this programme, or if there's a topic you'd like us to discuss, contact us on healthy abnaustralia.org dot au thank you so much for joining us. And remember to shape your lifestyle as medicine. SPEAKER A You've been listening to Your Lifestyle as Medicine, a production of 3ABN Australia television.