EPISODE 10
TRANSCRIPT
Hi guys, welcome to A Lifelong Habit of Exercise. I'm Coach Kendra, and this is episode 10.
Today, we're going to change it up a little bit, and I want to take the day to talk to you guys a little bit more about myself. For the last nine weeks, now we are on week 10, you all have had a chance to see some glimpses into me and who I am as a coach and as a person. So today, I want to just talk to you a little bit more about who I am and how I got to where I'm at. So I wanted to first start by saying that one of the best things that I've realized about who I am, is that I've learned that I'm ever changing. And for the longest time, I think that I have had the notion that at some point we reach who we are, or who we have been trying to become, and the changing stops and we're able to be more of a constant and do that live happily ever after thing. So now I find joy in the thought of being ever changing - that, who I was yesterday isn't going to be who I am tomorrow. And so quickly, things can change and we have that choice daily, hourly, every minute, every second of what we want to hold on to, and what we want to let go and learn from. We've learned things about ourselves, about our capabilities, and we grow and we transform into a version of ourselves that we like for the time being. And so this is so fascinating for me. And that's also one of the reasons why I enjoy coaching, because coaching is about creating a space for others to change in a way that only they can. Whether I'm coaching basketball or doing life coaching or mental performance coaching, when it comes to coaching, the person being coached has to have the growth and transformation for themselves. It's never something that I can just do for them. I'm able to give them all the tools that they need, and I can guide them and I can help show them different tricks and tips and how to perfect using those tools for them personally. But ultimately, their outcomes become limitless and can far surpass any outcome that I've personally ever even been able to do myself. So that's why I enjoy it. I enjoy watching other people have this platform have this opportunity have the space where they get to just grow. And that is in basketball coaching, that's in mental performance coaching that's in life coaching. In every single aspect, I get to watch people grow in a way that only they can. And so part of my background, I've spoken a little bit briefly about this in a previous episode, but when I first started coaching college basketball 10 years ago, I wasn't sure it was really what I truly wanted to do. Going into college, I wanted to be a pediatrician, and I quickly within my first year, really within my first semester probably decided and realized that that wasn't the route that I wanted to take. I decided to major in math, and I didn't really have a true career plan. Simply getting a degree in math, I figured it would leave my options open. I was always good in math, I had this notion I had this idea in my head that I never wanted to not take a math class because I didn't ever want to get behind if I ever needed to take a math class again. And so with that thinking I just decided to major in math. And I know a lot of people think I'm crazy when I tell them that. And it's actually really interesting to hear myself even say it out loud a lot of times. But I decided to major in math, and as graduation approached, I still didn't really have a solid plan for a career. But at the time, there was a graduate assistant position that was going to be opening for the following year. So I was going to be finishing my playing career and then the following fall, there was going to be a graduate assistant position open. So that's what I decided to do. And I figured I would just try out the coaching thing, and I would try it to see if it was something that I enjoyed doing.
And that summer, that summer, like directly after I finished playing. Our full time assistant decided to take a position as a head coach at a different institution and not left our full time assistant position open and I had the opportunity to become that assistant immediately rather than a graduate assistant. I've now coached at three different institutions. I've been coaching for 10 years, three different institutions and the current school that I'm at, I'm entering into my fifth season. So about a year and a half ago, I became a mental performance coach, and a little bit over a year ago, I became a life coach. And the way that I actually got into mental performance coaching was that I knew I wanted to be a life coach at that time. For a long time, I actually didn't even know what a life coach was, but at that time, I did want to become a life coach. And I was really interested into the mental performance aspect of things, because I had started reading books, as far as things that had to do with the mental and the basketball, and the competitiveness. And that's where the mental performance had come in. And so my life coaching was a little ways away before I had done that. And so I decided to do the mental performance coaching, and get certified in that first, and I'm really glad that I did, because it really did tie things in. And that's what I had thought it would do was tie in kind of all my expertise. And that was really what it did for me, so I became a life coach. First of all, I was scrolling on the internet and I saw somebody said they were a life coach. And I was like, "Wait, what is that? I want to know more." And I did my research. And I got certified through the Life Coach School, and it is absolutely one of the best things I've ever done.
So, I now have a certification in mental performance. I have a certification in life coaching, and I've been a college basketball coach for 10 years. So with all the coaching experience that I've gained, why would I really want to focus on helping people establish A Lifelong Habit of Exercise. And this is something that it took me a while to really figure out how I can help with all of the coaching experience that I have. And establishing A Lifelong Habit of Exercise, I really hope that was a question that you have, because I think that's something that a lot of us want to know even for ourselves on how we use our experiences, our expertise to do what we're currently doing. And for me, what I decided to do was I personally was stuck in what we talked about often is that cycle of inconsistency. And we all either know someone, or have personally fallen into and gotten stuck into that cycle. And if you've never heard me talk about the cycle of inconsistency, it is where we start to work out - either we've heard that it's good for us, or we just know that we want to do it, or whatever it may be we we start to work out. And then along the way, things come up what you would say, like life happens, things come up, you have to do different things, either a time doesn't work out for you, you don't find the right workout to do there's different things that come up. And what we end up doing is we put ourselves on the back burner, and we do the more pressing thing at the moment. And we tell ourselves that it's going to just be this once and then it becomes inconsistent, our workouts become inconsistent. And we eventually stop, and then eventually we start beating ourselves up. And we tell ourselves like why aren't we working out, it's so easy, we should be doing this, we should just be able to do it. We've done it before we ask ourselves all kinds of questions that are more accusations, or that are more should or shouldn't, or telling ourselves different things. And then what happens is a lot of times, we get kick started back into starting again. And that perpetuates the cycle, because we beat ourselves up a little bit and it perpetuates us into starting again. And then what happens is we're really not into it, because that's not sustainable. We're really not into the exercises, we get sore or body aches a little bit or again, things come up kids have to go to soccer practice violin recitals, or different things like that they all come up, and what we end up doing is it's easier to inconvenience ourselves than inconvenience others. So what we do is we give into all those other things. And then we just have that cycle, the cycle of inconsistency just continues.
So that was me like I was all in that cycle of inconsistency. And a lot of times we think that people that are have been in athletics have done it for so long have worked out for so long, but they were required to or they needed to for their teams or the groups that they're a part of. And so they've done it for years and years and years, and so it seems like it would be easy when we stopped doing those teams or stop being a part of the athletics but in reality, that's what I found out was that's not the truth. And what I found out was that just because I've been in athletics my entire life doesn't make me any less human. I still have a human brain and all of us that get stuck in the cycle of inconsistency, it's because we have a human brain. We think that it's because there's something wrong with us, or because we haven't found the right workout or because we haven't found the right time of day, or we haven't found the right trainer, whatever it may be, we think that it's because of that. But in reality, it's just because we have a human brain. And there's nothing wrong with us, we just need the right tools to help us manage it. That's why I specialize in establishing a lifelong habit of exercise, because there's so many of us that get stuck and don't realize we don't have to keep perpetuating that cycle of inconsistency. We think that we just need to find, like I said, the perfect workout or the perfect time, or the perfect accountability partner, or the perfect trainer, or the perfect gym, or whatever it may be the perfect exercise or the perfect activity. And even if or when we find the perfect, you name it, fill in the blank, whatever it is that you're looking for that perfect thing, we will still be searching for more, we'll still think our brain will still take over and say like, "Well, no, because you don't have this and you don't have this." And it's our brain that is keeping us in that cycle of inconsistency. So when we change our brain, we can interrupt that cycle. And we can interrupt that cycle permanently. So that's great news.
So when is enough enough? When do you just say enough with the cycle of inconsistency? For me enough was enough, when I realized that there wasn't anything wrong with me. When I realized that it didn't matter what workout I did. When I realized it was more than just having willpower to get up and go. Because a lot of us with athletics, we think that it's just a willpower, like, you just have to do it, you just do it, you just make up your mind and you just do it. And that's trying to use your willpower to do it. But when I realized that it was more than that, when I realized that I had the tools to create a program that not only I can benefit from and did benefit from, but now I get a chance to help others. And I decided to take care of myself and interrupt that cycle of inconsistency once and for all. That's when I had enough.
For many of us, we allow ourselves to be put on the backburner, and sometimes we are the ones that put ourselves there. We take care of others and their needs first, and sometimes we don't even notice that we're doing it. We're so good at taking care of others, right? But do we even know how to put ourselves first. And my Check Your TEMP program, I designed it. To help us specifically with that, through establishing a lifelong habit of exercise, you get to learn how to put yourself first, make yourself a priority. You learn how to have your own back always, no matter what you decide, you have your back, and you discover, and you get to learn how to be your perfect accountability partner - all while working towards the overall lifelong mental, physical and emotional health. One of the things that I love about exercising is that when I have some built up unprocessed emotions, I'm able to release them through exercise. And one of the things that we also learn in my program that I teach you guys, and I really help you guys work through it is how to actually process emotion. So I know this is something that many people love, learning about, like through my program when I teach them this, because a lot of us don't even realize there's a way or there's a difference in how to process emotions versus how to just release them. And I think this is especially in athletics, but I think in life you hear it often I hear it a lot, like I said in athletics, but I've also heard it just in life is that people talk about how to channel your emotional energy into something. Like in order to release that emotional energy, you have to channel it into something maybe that's art, maybe that's a physical exercise, maybe that's a sport, maybe that's different things. What are you channeling your emotional energy into, and you guys have probably heard that before. But that's a way to release it. The unprocessed emotion. But the great news is, is that we can actually process our emotions and we don't have to do an act of something like physical or painting or music or it doesn't have to be channeled. Like that helps absolutely to release unprocessed emotion. We have a way and I have tools that can help you to actually process them.
And even though like Like I said in athletics, but the more I think about it, it's everything. We have different ways, like I said, art, music, athletics. I'm just really familiar with the athletics but no matter what if you don't do any of those, we can process them. So that's the great news because we're all humans, and we all have emotions. And emotions are not a bad thing that just always need to be released. They are something that although sometimes it is helpful to be able to have those ways of releasing unprocessed emotions, like we just mentioned, but we can also not have them be bad things and we can learn how to process them. As the holidays come, and the end of the year so that's upon us quickly. I would really love for you guys to all join me for the one month life changing experience of my Check Your TEMP program. Enough is enough. Let's put ourselves first and experience firsthand what it means to truly have our own back always. Until next time.
If you guys love this podcast, you will love my Check Your TEMP program. It is a personalized program that we dig deep into everything we discuss on this podcast. Work with me for one month and never stop exercising again. Head over to CoachKendra.com/WorkWithMe to set up a FREE Mini session.