Tag Archive for: new beginnings

Do you ever want a do-over?

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Ah, sweet September. It’s hard to believe school buses are back in action, Labor Day has passed, and summer is a memory already.

Can I ask, did you rock your summer as hard as I did? You did? Awesome.

And now are you as wiped-out and off-kilter as I am? You are? I’m glad I’m not alone. Perhaps we can find our way back to our best selves together.

As many of you know, I’m a proud Minnesotan – born and raised in this beautiful state – and if there’s one thing Minnesotans know how to do it’s how to play hard and soak up every minute of our precious summers. June, July, and August were spent enjoying some seriously awesome trips to the cabin, concerts that left me hoarse, the gluttonous Minnesota State Fair (twice!), vineyard/winery visits, long hours lost in my gardens, patio dinners with friends, mushroom foraging in the deep woods, kayaking, and on and on and on.

And of course much of this fun was accompanied by JUNK FOOD, alcohol, late nights, short nights, and little sense of routine many weeks. There was no holding back for this girl. Confession: BOTH of my state fair outings included cheese curds. After those babies I had a beer (or maybe two). Talk about walking on the wild side.

I sure hope you played as hard as me this summer, and if you did it’s probably safe to assume you’re just a bit more BLOATED, heavy, and TIRED than your best self right about now, just like me. If so, you may want to check out the cleanse I’m co-facilitating with my friend Suzy from Defining You Pilates and Fitness in October. Click on this link to explore the 30-Day Fall Cleanse: The Whole Life 360 Experience.)

I love summer, but its brevity often pushes us to go gangbusters and overdo it. If your overdo has left you needing a “do-over,” read on. Autumn is ripe with possibilities for renewal, reflection, and fresh starts, so let’s kickstart some self-love again and get back to the disciplines that help us be our best.

My Top 3 Tips for a Fresh Start

  1. Decide on a single small step missing from your routine and begin with that single small step.

Identify ONE thing you’ve let go of in your life/routine that makes you feel strong and robust, and bring it back. I’m the biggest believer ever that small tweaks are the ticket to long-lasting positive change. I sincerely wish I had a dollar for every time someone tried explaining to me in all earnestness, “But Claudine! I’m an all-or-nothing person! I can’t just change one thing!”

Yes, I know. We all want to wave a magic wand and have four dozen changes stick at once. Who doesn’t? But life, and your mind, and others around you don’t work that way.

Pick. One. Thing.

Do you need to get back to the gym and start moving your body again? Back-to-school means back-to-the-gym for a lot of us.

Are you eating a protein-rich breakfast within an hour of waking up? Routines tend to slip away in summer. It can be surprising to realize that something that was once automatic has vanished.

Are you going to bed later than your body likes? We might be able to scrape by on fewer hours of sleep and rely on solar power during the long days of summer, but it will catch up with us. Allow your body to rest.

So what is the fresh start your body/mind/spirit needs/misses right now? Trust your gut’s answer. No step is too small. Tiny changes will build confidence and energy and will yield surprising results if done consistently.

2. Change something in your environment. It sounds bizarre, but studies show that changes in one’s environment can promote fresh starts or new habits by up to 36%. Isn’t that astonishing?

I believe changing our environment is effective because it’s a pattern interrupt. It helps knock us out of auto-pilot and into a mind-space of being more intentional. Whether you decide to clean out the pantry, rearrange your office, declutter a closet, or display a new piece of art that lights you up, changing our environment clears out old energy and opens our eyes to possibility again.

I have a great story of how this worked for me.

For over a year I had the simple goal of meditating for 10 minutes each morning, which doesn’t seem like it should be that hard, but I just could not get into a rhythm with it. I was finally successful when I cleared a corner of the bedroom and designated that particular space for my sitting meditation. It sounds so simple it’s almost embarrassing to share, but I know I’m not alone. Simple solutions are often staring us in the face.

3. Remember Now is Now.

Humans are a complex breed. We love to believe past experiences and patterns or old beliefs of ourselves are the truth, when the truth is really that we are changing in every moment – as is everything around us.

It can be tempting to fall back into nasty old beliefs that we are perpetual failures and nothing is ever going to change for us every time we eat some sugar or skip the gym. We also like to think we can predict our future based on the chocolate croissant and two cups of coffee we just had. Heck, we could defeat ourselves by 7am each day if we’re not careful.

Every moment is a new moment. Now is now, and you are recreating yourself all the time. Become aware of the stories and beliefs that surface that tell you who you are or aren’t. Acknowledge these stories and beliefs, but don’t give them any power. Just say hello to them, then let them pass through you, like a cool breeze on its way to the next town. They are likely very old voices that got stuck and don’t know a doggone thing about what you are up to these days.

Learning to recognize these voices, like an old friend who’s not actually a very good friend anymore, will be an important step in building new habits. Now is now. Not the past. Not the future.

Let me end by saying that – without a doubt – filling our lives with things that bring us joy may quite possibly be the best thing we can do for our health – cheese curds, beer, short nights, and all – but there usually comes a time when we’ve overdone it and we need to turn over a new leaf. Autumn is that time. Keep me posted on how you find your way back home.

Love, Claudine

Is my face too huge on my new website?

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Man oh man, am I ever excited about my new website! After YEARS with a static web presence showing a dated, decade-old picture of me, I finally have a new dynamic site I’m excited to show off. It’s pretty, but more importantly, it’s functional and it’s going to help me run Wellness with Claudine MUCH more efficiently. I’m crazy-excited.

I love my new site, but I also have my insecurities about it too, like whether or not my face is too huge on the home page. If you would be kind enough to share your feedback, I’d be grateful. And please be honest.

Creating this site was an interesting and stressful process for me, and get this, I’m not even the one who built it! For crying out loud, I hired someone who did 90% of the work, which makes it a little hard to explain exactly why I found the process stressful. But I guess anyone who knows me knows that nutrition is my thing – technology isn’t. I love devouring nitty gritty details about digestion or hormones, but ask me to make decisions about my website or learn how to run its back office and I immediately feel blurry, overwhelmed, and irritated. It’s like a bad blood sugar crash, except I’m not crashing.

One day when I was feeling frustrated and tempted to abandon a pain-in-the-butt task I needed to do to get the thing launched, I had a profound realization that the frustration and irritation I was feeling was likely akin to how many of my clients might feel when they’re embarking on (or continuing) the journey to improve their health. They can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel – no matter how hard they try.

It was an important space for me to step into again because it put me squarely in the shoes of my clients. See, even though I find shopping and preparing healthy food for myself and others fun, many of my clients don’t (yet). The same could be said about exercise; I think it’s enjoyable, but I’m sure some of my clients would like to strangle me when I suggest that they, too, could learn to like it. The truth is that following through with new, foreign tasks that I knew were necessary but didn’t want to do took some healthy doses of positive self-talk and discipline.

So I wanted to offer some tips for staying on track for success when you really don’t want to. Don’t get me wrong, these tips aren’t about making something easy – they’re about getting ourselves to follow through when we don’t want to:

  • For crying out loud, hire a professional who knows what he/she is doing. I think my new site is pretty doggone cool, and I never, never, never could have built a site like this myself. And nobody would expect me to because technology is NOT my thing. I’ll admit that in the past I have “put up” websites myself using templates in order to save money, and you know what? They sucked. They didn’t look good and they didn’t generate website traffic, which added up to a whole lot of wasted time and energy. This time I was serious about making a positive change happen and hired a professional who could help me achieve my goals. I hope with all my heart that this is the role I play for my clients. This is what I strive to be every single day – your partner-in-crime in achieving the goals you have for your health.
  • Get clear about why the task/project at hand is important. What’s the ultimate result you’re going for? Clarity and purpose go hand-in-hand. In my case, this new website will ultimately mean my business will run more efficiently and make it possible for me to spend LESS time on tasks I don’t enjoy instead of thinking about them and having them sit on my to-do list in perpetuity. When trying to improve your health, I’d say most people are trying to avoid bigger health concerns down the road and improve their quality of life now. That’s super motivating provided we stay in touch with that greater vision and purpose.
  • I had to remind myself that almost everything takes longer than you anticipate when you’re learning. This reminder was then followed by a deep breath and some self-encouragement, “It’s okay, Claudine. It’ll get done, and you’re not stupid for not ‘getting it’ right away.” Just like when we’re learning to cook and care for ourselves in a new way, showing ourselves some compassion and patience during the growth process is critical. When we’re faced with a learning curve, why do we so often think we should already know how to do something?
  • Break tasks down into small steps to decrease overwhelm. This is super important. No step is too small, and any step taken in the direction you want to go is better than nothing.
  • Identify preconceived judgments you have about the situation or task at hand and ask yourself if they’re really true. It’s embarrassing to admit, but there were times when I’d already decided that a task on my to-do list was going to bite just because it was website related, and then it turned out to be no big deal. How often do we do this to ourselves?! I thought revising the content for my site was going to take me FOREVER, but it didn’t. Human beings have a knack for making things harder than necessary. Learn to check yourself.

I became an Integrative Nutrition Coach because I love to support and nurture people on their health journeys, not because I was super stoked to deal with technology and website stuff. But it’s a necessary “evil” of being an entrepreneur.

No matter how much we wish it weren’t so, sometimes we just have to buckle down and do the work we’ve been avoiding. It’s great spiritual practice. If there’s something you’ve been avoiding because you think it’s too hard or because you’re positively sure you won’t enjoy it, I hope a little piece of you feels more capable and inspired to tackle it now. Inch by inch, life’s a cinch. Just take the first step.

Now tell me, what do you think of my new site and my big face?

Love, Claudine