EPISODE 1

Questions, Questions, Questions!

TRANSCRIPT 

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Hey guys, welcome to A Lifelong Habit of Exercise. I'm coach Kendra, and this is episode one. Today, we are going to talk about questions. What are questions and how do they serve us? First of all, I know one of the questions that you guys are probably wondering is “who am I?” So, I will answer some of that, but to begin with, I actually want to turn that to you. And I want you to think about who am I? Why are you here and what is it that you were wanting to get out of this podcast? So take a moment and just really think about those questions for a minute. Alright, so I am coach Kendra, like I said, and I am a certified life coach, a certified mental performance coach, and I am a college basketball coach. I have been coaching for 10 years and I truly, truly love it.

 

I have put all three of my coachings together and I have created a process to establish a lifelong habit of exercise. So, I work with athletes every single day, and now I really, really want that habit of exercise to be able to carry over to everybody. So that's why I'm doing that, and that's why I specialize in this. So, today we're going to talk about questions. Again over the next, however many podcasts as we are here, we are going to really get to know each other, or at least you will for sure get to know me and my habit of exercise and what I do with different things, but also just me as a person.  I will be coming to you guys weekly for a short amount of time every week. And you guys over the time will get to know me a little bit better. So, let's get started.

 

Why a habit of exercise? First of all, you guys, so many people, we get stuck in a cycle of inconsistency and we have heard from other people and we have learned over time - whether it be from listening to people, whether it be from seeing ourselves, whether it be from hearing from different people, such as doctors, or just understanding that exercise is good for us. And we try at some point, most of us have already tried before to do something consistently, as far as exercising goes, and we try what happens is, we get stuck in the cycle of inconsistency. And what I mean by that, you’ll hear me say that often. But what I mean by that is we get started and we do enough to get started because like I said, we hear it. Or we, hear that we need to do it, or we know that it's good for us, or we've done a little bit before where we feel better. And we know that what happens far as the benefits from exercising are so great. And we want to get there, either we want to lose weight, we want to look better, we want to feel better. There's a bunch of different reasons we could want to exercise, but we get started. And when we get started, we get started for maybe a while. It may depend on how long we get started for, but what happens is then it's easy for us to reschedule ourselves. So something else may come up and when something else comes up, what happens is we look at the two options of, do I exercise, or do I do this other thing that's coming up? And that other thing could be, maybe you have to take a kid to soccer practice, to sports practice, to a class, to music recital, to different things. 

 

There could be so many different things and or maybe you have an appointment that you have to schedule and there's one slot left and it's that time that you had something scheduled, maybe you have to make dinner. Maybe you were just tired from the day. For some reason, there's just something that comes up. And at the time that you're supposed to be exercising or that you've planned to exercise, you are looking at your calendar and you're trying to figure out which one do I do because now there's a, what we consider to be a more pressing thing at that time. So what happens is we kind of, it's easier for us to reschedule ourselves because we don't inconvenience anybody else outside of us. And so what we do is we tend to put ourselves on the back burner and then we tend to not inconvenience somebody else. And that's how we begin that cycle of inconsistency because we get started, something more pressing comes up, we decide to put ourselves on the back burner and do the more pressing thing, whatever that may be.

 

And we kind of are in our minds where like, it's only going to be this once it's only going to be this. Once we promise ourselves, it's just going to be this once. And what happens is, is that starts another inconsistency. Whether something else comes up, whether we just don't feel like it, whether it be because we worked out one time and we're sore and it's hard to go back, whether it just be, because we, like I said, we have dinner to prepare. We have something else that comes up and that continues to happen, and we continue to put ourselves on the back burner. And then all of a sudden, before we know it we've stopped or become really inconsistent. Okay? So then the cycle continues. And what happens once we stop exercising is that, then we kind of start beating ourselves up to try to get us to exercise again.

 

We start beating ourselves up and try to like, “why don't you just go work out?” “Why can't you do that?” We ask ourselves these questions that are more nagging questions. And they're kind of attacking us. Like our questions that we ask ourselves in those moments are, “why can't you just do it.” “You've done it before. Just start doing it again.” “Why can't you just start doing it again?” And those are the questions that then perpetuate this cycle because we try to beat ourselves up into starting again. And sometimes it works. We start again and then something we're pressing comes up and then we slowly stop again. And then we start again and then we are in the cycle. Okay? We're in the cycle of inconsistency. So like when we're talking about a habit of exercise, the process that I've created really disrupts and interrupts this cycle that a lot of us get stuck in.

 

And that is something that finally, like for me, when I started doing this, I finally said, enough is enough. Enough is enough. I'm done. I want to start exercising consistently, forever. I don't ever want to stop again. So what I did is like, Hey, I'm a life coach. I'm a mental performance coach. And I've been a college basketball coach for 10 years. I want something that I will never stop again. And that's what I created. So I am so excited to share that with you. Today, again, we're going to talk about questions and I am going to explain to you how some questions can be extremely helpful and how right now we can utilize them better for us to help serve us better. So one of the first things is, is that I really want to encourage you guys to get a notebook. I, as a college basketball player, I had a coach that was all about making sure that we were students of the game.

 

So we had to have a notebook all the time. Like when I first started coaching because I started coaching under him. So I played for him all four years, and then I started coaching under him. And when I started coaching for him, we would be recruiting and we'd be on the road. If we stop to go to the gas station or stop to go to the bathroom or something. When I got back in the car, I was expected to have my notebook. And if I sat down and I'm just adjusting or whatever, he'd look over and be like, “where's your notebook?” So I want you guys to get in the habit of having a notebook. One of the reasons is, is because when you ask yourself questions and when you come up with different things, I want you to really be aware of what's going on.

 

And when you can be aware of what's going on, I want you to write it all down and you don't have to necessarily carry this notebook all the time. But I have a thing that's three daily questions and we'll get into those in the next few days of podcast, three daily questions to ask yourself. And especially during those three daily questions, I want you to have a notebook so that you can write down everything, everything that your mind comes up with when you're asking yourself these questions. So get a notebook, write them down. A lot of times, I'll tell you too, but there's a lot of times you're going to want to not filter, especially during those three questions. I'll get into that tomorrow, but write them down. And when we write things down, what happens is we get to see them on paper.

 

We get to see our thoughts on paper. And again, I will get into like thoughts and everything else, but our thoughts are the sentences going through our brain. So when we ask our questions, the reason we ask questions is so that we can get answers and we want to get answers because we want to find out something, right? So we want answers to find out something. The reason questions are amazing is because we can ask questions and we can find out all kinds of stuff that we may not have ever known previously. So, one of the things is, is that we like to ask questions to other people. And when we ask questions to other people they're not bad, and that's not a bad thing. When I was young, I used to ask a ton of questions, like a ton of questions. And I know people talk about how little kids just ask questions, little kids, “why? why? why?” Right? But I used to just ask, I felt like I asked questions enough for everybody. And enough for every little kid in the world, I probably asked enough questions so much so that my big sister was like, “I'm limiting your questions per day. You only get so many questions per day.” And when you go over, because honestly her telling me that she was limiting questions, wasn't going to stop me from asking questions. So then she said, “when you go over, you're going over for the next day and the next day and the next day into the next month, into the next month after that.” So I think the furthest I'd gotten was probably like three months from then. And I just love questions because I like to find out things like, if I don't know them, I want to know, right? So we tend to ask other people a lot of questions.

 

What a lot of times we don't do. And now that I'm older, what I tend to do is start asking questions of myself. And I start asking a lot of questions myself. And I think one of the things that we do or don't do, I guess is we don't give ourselves enough credit. And, I didn't realize this until I started asking myself questions. And when I asked myself questions, I tend to find out things that I didn't know I knew, or I didn't know that I knew where to look to truly get the answer, but we are so capable. We have so much at our fingertips. We have so much knowledge that we don't even know that we have until we start asking ourselves questions. So the questions that we like to ask, there's definitely things that, one of the reasons we are able to find out answers to questions are when we ask ourselves questions and we really attempt not to answer with “I don't know”. Our go to immediate response.

I'm not sure why it is, but one of our go-to immediate responses is to say, “I don't know”. And what that happens is when we say, I don't know, our brain stops looking for the answer. So whether this be someone, someone else's asking a question, or we're asking ourselves the question. I want you guys for the next week until we have our next podcast. I want you guys to really, really try hard. Any question that's asked, whether you ask it yourself or others, somebody else asks it. I want you to not say, “I don't know”. I want us to get out of that habit of just being like, I don't know, right away. And instead I want you, if you really truly are not sure of the response or the answer, cause I'm not saying that all of a sudden you have all the answers.

 

So you just don't say, I don't know, because you know everything, that's not necessarily the truth either. So, if you don't know the answer right now, or if you're not sure, what, if you start saying, “I'm figuring it out”? What happens then, is your brain starts looking for answers? I love this, my two year old daughter. I'm not even sure where she got this from. Maybe she listens to a ton of stuff that I say, but I started asking her questions recently. She goes, and she puts her hand on her chin and she goes, “I don't know yet”. And I'm like, she's too Yeah. Like the most amazing thing ever I wanted to do flips when I heard her say it, I don't know yet. And although that sounds like, I don't know that yet. That small three letter word of “yet” helps her brain continue to look for things, continue to search for answers, continue to figure out where she's going to find that answer. Hmm. I don't know yet. Absolutely loved it. 

 

So over the next week, no, just, I don't know. I'm figuring it out. I can find out. I know where to look. There are so many things that will help our brain to continue to look for the answers. One of my absolute favourite things is to do that. It is hard as can be, to not say, I don't know, but I have faith. My two year old daughter can do it. I can do it. You can do it. We all can do it. Okay. So when you guys get that notebook and when you guys are writing things down, when you ask yourself a question and you are writing things down, I really want you to be able to then see what's going on paper and be able to be curious, be able to be curious.

 

Maybe you've never known that you had that in there. Whatever is going on in your brain, whatever that answer to whatever question it may be. One question, let's do this. I want you to try not to say, “I don't know” to any answer, but I want you to ask yourself also, and I want you to write all these answers down, just so that it's a way to be curious and see what's going on. Why do you think your response to questions is, I don't know, write down everything that comes up in your brain. When you do this, you don't have to do this right now, but when you do this, write down everything that comes up, the good, the bad, the ugly. You'll hear me say that so much, “the good, the bad, the ugly”, all of it. And then notice if you have a hesitation to write something down, because maybe you're thinking that you shouldn't be thinking that thought, or that's not a great thought. Write it down. Those are the ones that you really need to write down and just get curious about them. Don't beat yourself up about them. One thing you'll learn is that your thoughts are not you. And that's why I like to write them down. So write them down to curious about the things that you're writing down.

Now, how do questions in a habit of exercise coincide, how do they go together? Like I said, they show us things. The cycle of inconsistency is something that questions are awesome because questions, what they do in general, are they start getting our brain to think in a different manner. If we don't ask ourselves questions, our brain just kind of continues in one in the same direction. Right? All of a sudden we ask ourself a question and our brain has to kind of stop what it's doing and look around and kind of see what's going on.

 

So it doesn't just continue in this consistent habit. So what happens is when you ask yourself questions, it breaks it up a little bit. And that's why I like questions with the habit of exercise. Because when you're stuck in this inconsistent cycle, that means that in order to get out of the inconsistent cycle, there needs to be a disruption. Now, those questions by themselves might not be the big enough disruption on a habit of inconsistency or an inconsistency cycle. But it's definitely something that will begin to get your brain a little bit off that main track of inconsistency that we've been talking about. So, I love questions. Did I mention that? When it comes to a habit of exercise, we will like a lot of what we do will be a lot of questions. One of the other things that I like, that is a good story I laugh about because one of when I first started coaching, I had players that would look at me and be like, “Coach, can you ever answer a question?”

 

“Like you never answer questions. You always answer questions with questions.” And it's funny because it comes so natural to me to ask questions. It comes so natural to me. When somebody asks me a question to then instead I may have the answer for them. But to me, it's so much more meaningful to give them another question, to have them start thinking about it themselves. And I do this with everybody. I just naturally do it. And until they pointed it out, I didn't even realize I did it. I am very much a question person. And I think it's great because I think we learn from questions. And I think we learned even more from questions when we ask them ourselves to ourselves. So we're going to get so many questions and I love it because brain starts thinking, our brain starts thinking about different things that we may not have ever thought about before. 

 

So everybody hears, like, there's what the saying of, “there are no dumb questions”, right? So what about good questions? And when I was younger, I always used to because it's a shock factor for people. And as you'll get to know me, you'll know that I'm in for a shock factor sometimes. And people, sometimes I say things just because it's not what people expect me to say. So people used to be like, there's no dumb questions, right? There's no dumb questions. And I used to say, yeah, there's no dumb questions. Just dumb people.

 

And it makes me laugh. But what makes me laugh even more is I know that there's no dumb people. Again I just did it because everybody will, Oh my goodness. She just said that I was dumb. And I'm like, no, I didn't say you were dumb. I just said, there's dumb people. There are no dumb questions. You guys, and there's no dumb people either, but dumb questions. It's interesting that we always, what we do is our brain goes to, there must be a dumb question. And I think things like actually really, when I think about, what kind of questions people would call dumb questions. I think those are the questions, that people really can have an answer for themselves. And I think as you guys continue to spend more time with me as we continue to spend more time on this podcast, you guys will really start asking yourselves a lot of questions.

 

I try, when I ask a question to somebody, I really try to at least have an idea of what the answer is going to be. So another exercise I'll have you guys do eventually is probably go into every single time you ask a question, go into it with a guess of what that person, if you already ask yourself this question, right? Cause we're going to try, like, I want you to go into your other question, any question that you ask somebody with an idea of what they might possibly say. And could you be absolutely wrong? Absolutely. You could be so wrong that it's like, you could be so off, but that's okay. Give yourself permission to guess, like, don't say, I don't know. Like, I don't know, remember we're cutting that, but what if you could guess at what they would say, what do you think they would say before you any questions yourself, permission to just guess at what they would say. And then what I like to do is when I do that, then I'm like, “Oh, I wasn't that far off” or, “Oh, I was really off”. But give yourself permission to guess. Before you ask somebody else a question, ask yourself what you think they will say. And that is so powerful. I absolutely love doing one of my favorite things. As you can tell. 

 

So questions that serve us a lot of times a question that serves us and you may be asking, well, what does that mean? Serve us. What is the absolute result that you want in your life? Like, what is it that you want to come out of the day? What is it that you want to come out of what you are doing currently at that moment? Whether it maybe you're baking a cake, what is it that you want to come out of that cake?

 

Right? You want the cake to come out? That is the result, right? Maybe it's going for a walk. What is the result that you want to come? You want your walk to be done. Now, if you're asking yourself questions that don't give you or relate directly to the cake being baked or the walk happening, are those questions serving you? So if they are helping you bake the cake, if it is a question that is helping you bake the cake, then that may be a question that's serving you. If it is a question that is helping you take the walk so that you can be done with the walk. It is a question that is probably serving you. If you're asking yourself, “why can't I just get started on this walk?” That question, “why can't I?” is going to come up with all the reasons you can't get started.

 

So if those are coming up with the reasons you can't get started, is that serving you because your result is that you want to be done with the walk, right? You want to have that walk under your belt. You want to already be completed with that. So if you're asking, “why can't I?”, the reasons you can't do it are not going to help you do that walk, right? So I want you guys to be careful when you guys are asking questions, be cautious that the questions you were asking are serving you. So that means they are helping you get to your result. They are serving you towards your results. That is extremely, extremely important. So, no dumb questions, but the good questions are the ones that are going to serve you and help you get to your results. How can I make this walk enjoyable? How can this walk be the most amazing thing I've done today? How can I really make the most of this walk? How is this walk going to be the absolute best thing I could have done today for myself? Those types of questions, those are questions that are going to serve you to get the result that want. How can I make this cake, the best cake ever? How can I make this cake extremely beautiful? Those are questions that serve you. 

 

You guys questions, like I said are absolutely amazing. I love them. I think there's so much fun. I think it's fun to play with questions. I think it's fun to come up with questions that serve me, especially when I notice that like, Oh, that didn't quite like, that didn't sound like that could serve me at all. And I try to flip it and do the complete opposite.

 

If it didn't serve me, why can't I do this? How can I make this the best thing that I could do? And just completely flip it. I've had so much fun today. Talking about questions over the next three episodes. We are going to talk about the three daily questions that you guys can ask yourself to really start building this lifelong habit of exercise. Daily questions. What I want for you guys to do until the next podcast though, is work on: Not saying, “I don't know” and come up with something better. What is something better that you can come up with rather than saying? I don't know. And then every time you ask somebody else a question I want you to give yourself permission to guess at what they are going to say first, I would love to hear about all of these things. I would love to hear about what you guys are doing.

 

So you guys make sure to reach out to me, let me know how things are going. This is going to be such an awesome journey, and I can't wait to spend it with you guys. Until next time - I'll see you guys soon. 

 

If you guys love this podcast, you guys will love my Check Your TEMP program. It is a one month program to NEVER STOP EXERCISING AGAIN. I take you through an in depth dive into everything we will be talking about in this podcast. And it is so individualized and personalized that we go through your journey, and we get you to a place where you will never stop working out again. I'm Coach Kendra until next time.