173: “Best Of”: Asking Better Questions In Your Fitness Journey

Introduction 

You're listening to Biceps after Babies radio episode number 173.

Hello and welcome to Biceps after Babies radio. A podcast for ladies who know that fitness is about so much more than pounds lost or PRs. It's about feeling confident in your skin and empowered in your life. I'm your host, Amber Brueseke, a registered nurse, personal trainer, wife, and mom of four.  Each week, my guests and I will excite and motivate you to take action in your own personal fitness as we talk about nutrition, exercise mindset, personal development, and executing life with conscious intention. If your goal is to look, feel, and be strong and experience transformation from the inside out, you, my friend are in the right place. Thank you for tuning in, now let’s jump into today’s episode.

 

Questions  0:45  

Hey, Hey, Hey, welcome back to another episode of Biceps after Babies Radio. I'm your host, Amber Brueseke. And we are going to have a chat today about questions. And this is something that I do a lot in my coaching and help coach clients through, and so I thought it'd be something that would be fun too, and hopefully, informational and educational and helpful for your journey to bring on to the podcast today. 

 

Available replay of a free class on macro counting  1:11  

So a lot of you guys know that last Tuesday, I hosted a free class on macro counting and about how it is more effective and more sustainable than calorie counting when it comes to maximizing your fat loss. And a lot of you came and joined and I'm so glad that you did, if you didn't get a chance to go to view that the replay I think will be up just for maybe a day, I think the replay comes down tomorrow, actually, but if you go to bicepsafterbabies.com/replay, you can watch the replay of that free class. It's not going to be available for much longer. So definitely, if that's interesting to get you, go and watch it today. 

 

Open enrollment of Macros 101 program 1:53  

At the end of that class, I also opened enrollment into my program macros 101. Enrollment for that closes tomorrow, my friends. So if you are, if that's something that you want to learn more about, you're interested in maybe joining, you can go to bicepsafterbabies.com/join. And again, it will only be open until tomorrow at 9:00 PM Pacific Standard Time. So if you're listening to this episode a little bit later, and enrollment has closed, go get on the waitlist for the next time I open enrollment bicepsafterbabies.com/waitlist. We open a couple times a year. And then I close it up so that I can take the people who have signed up and really dive into coaching them and helping them through their journey and helping them get the results that they signed up for. So it's an awesome program. I love it, I love the people that I get to work with, I love the results that we're seeing in that community in that program. So until tomorrow night, you can come join us bicepsafterbabies.com/join.

 

Mindset work  2:49  

Now today, we're going to talk about a topic that maybe you wouldn't think that you would hear on a fitness podcast, one that talks about nutrition and weightlifting, and fitness journey. But what I want you to understand is that this type of work is the work that most people are missing, when they go into their fitness journey. They think that the way to transform their body is to change the way that they eat and or exercise. And that if they could just do that, then things are going to change. And what I found with coaching clients, and in my own journey as well is that the transformation that has to happen is often so much deeper than that. And the work often for most people that is the most challenging, is changing the way that you're thinking and changing the way that you see an experience, and changing the way that you view failure. And it's why I talk about a lot of mindset work on this podcast because it is so incredibly beneficial to you on your fitness journey. And it is what makes the difference. Right? It's what makes a difference for people who are actually able to see long-term results and long-term change. It comes down to a lot of the ways that they are speaking about themselves. A lot of the things that they believe are possible in their journey and how they view themselves and what they are able to do.

 

Asking better questions  4:11  

And so that's kind of where this topic comes in for me and for you in your fitness journey. This idea of asking better questions. So there's a quote out there and I tried to look up who originally who this quote originated with and I didn't come. I didn't get very far. It seems like Tony Robbins says a lot, my mentor James Wedmore says it a lot. There's quite a few people who use this quote, and I couldn't find an original source. But this quote is that “The quality of your life is dependent on the quality of the questions that you ask.” And when we dive into this statement a little bit more, it's a little deeper than what initially comes to mind. And that is this idea that our brain is always looking for answers for us. And so when we want something, we tend to ask a question, and then our brain gets to work. We ask a question, our brain gets to work trying to solve that question, and then it gives us an answer. And the problem is that when you ask a terrible question, your brain doesn't give you a great answer. It just gives you an answer to whatever that terrible question is. And so when we can elevate the questions that we're asking ourselves, we can allow our brain to go to work to be able to actually come up with better answers that are going to give us better results in the long run. So if we can ask better questions, we get better answers. And when we get better answers, we get better results. 

 

What can a coach help you in your journey  5:40  

And what I've learned with coaching a lot of clients over the years is that we tend to not ask great questions in our own journey. And so one of the values of using a coach or having a coach is that a coach is really good at helping you to zoom out. Sometimes, when we are looking at our own journey, when we're looking at our own results, it's almost as if the– we're looking at something and our nose is pressed right up against it, right? It's so close to us, that we just can't even see around this obstacle. We have this problem, we have this issue that we just can't even figure out an answer to this question because it's so close to us, right? And what a coach can often do is they can take that problem or that thing that you're struggling with, and all they do is they pull it away from your face, right? They just pull it out, like they zoom it out from you. And now you're able to understand that like, “Oh, you can see around this problem,” you can see ways to solve it, you can see ways to get around it because you've zoomed out a little bit, and you're not so close to the problem. And that's really one of the values that I see with a coach is about the ability to help you to zoom out on your journey, zoom out on the issues and the problems that you're experiencing, and help you to come up with better solutions. And one of the ways that I do that, as a coach, is I help clients to ask themselves better questions than they're currently asking themselves.

 

What do I mean by asking better questions 7:07  

Okay. And what do I mean by that? What do I mean by asking better questions? So I came up with some examples. And I want to kind of go through them because I think– and I hope that it will help you on your journey as you're trying to get the results that you want, right? I'm all about having you to hit the goals that you want. I'm not here to tell you what those goals should be, I'm not here to tell you, “You should lose weight,” or “You shouldn't lose weight,” you have your own goals. And that's awesome. I'm here to support you in achieving your goals. And I know that as you ask better questions, you're going to get better results, and that you're going to be able to hit the goals that you have. 

 

Turning questions into something that will help you 7:42  

So one question I hear people ask a lot, as an example, is, “Why can't I stick to this?” Alright, maybe you've asked yourself this question before you're like, “I start something and why can I stick to it? Why can't I like just, ‘I know what to do. Why don't I just do it” And I want you to consider that this isn't a really great question. So when you ask yourself this question, “Why can I stick to this?” What comes up for you? “Oh, it's hard. Oh, I'm not motivated. Oh, I suck.” Right? Those are the things that come up for us why– “Why can't I stick to this? Because I suck, because I'm not good enough because I'm never going to be successful because I'm not motivated.” All these things. Those are not great answers, right? How are any of those answers going to help propel you forward? How is the answer, “Because I suck.” Going to help you to actually hit your goals. It's not. So what can we turn this question of, “Why can't I stick to this?” How can we turn it into a better question that gets you a better answer and thus a better result? So something you can shift this to would be, “How did this experience serve me?” So if you're doing something and let's say you went to a party, and you said you weren't going to eat the cookies, and then there was your favorite cookie, and you ended up eating three of them, and you've ended the night and you're, “Why can I stick to this? Why can I do what I say I'm going to do? Why can't I like not eating cookies?” Right? So instead of that, how can you turn that question into something that will help you? “How did this experience serve me? How did it serve me to go to this event? How did it serve me to have this experience of eating these three cookies? What can I learn from this? And what can I take with me next time?” And when you ask yourself that better question, you notice how your brain starts thinking in a different way. Your brain starts thinking “Oh, okay. Oh, how is this a good thing? What did I learn from this? What can I use the next time I go to a party to make sure that I have a better experience?” And your brain gets to work, your mental computer gets to work, giving you a better answer, and when you get a better answer, well now you have answers that you can use the next time that you go to a party.

 

Changing questions directing to success rather than failure  9:55  

So let's do another one. What about this one? I hear this one a lot, “What if I fail?” That's a question that a lot of people ask themselves. And when I'm talking to people about joining Macros 101, or when I'm talking to people who get in sort of their fitness journey, this is a one that they bring up a lot, “What if I fail?” And this question almost comes in with the assumption that you're going to fail, right? Or that it's a possibility that failure is a possibility. And instead of asking ourselves, “What if I fail?” What if you change that question and change it to a slightly better question of, “How will I celebrate when I succeed?” How does that change what your brain focuses on; changes on this idea that you are going to be successful? You're going to do it. You're gonna get the result that you want. And now that you know that, “How am I going to celebrate?” What is that going to feel like? “What am I going to do when I succeed? What am I going to– What am I going to buy myself? Or what am I going to feel? Or what am I going to be when I succeed?” Those are much better questions that are going to yield better answers. 

 

Idea of presupposition  11:01  

Now notice these two examples that I gave you of asking yourself better questions. One of the biggest differences between a not-so-great-question, and a much-better-question is this idea of presupposition. So presupposition means an assumption that is going to help you move forward. So presupposition means that we have an understanding that something is a truth. For example, when you focus on, “What if I will fail?” You're supposing that failure is an option that it could happen that you might fail, right? That's kind of the basis, the foundational belief is that I could fail. So what happens if I fail? If you change that presupposition, that assumption that you're making, that your success is inevitable, that it's going to happen, that new presupposition creates a different foundation to ask a question from. If you know you're going to be successful, if you believe you're going to be successful, if you know that is inevitable, now we can ask the question, “How will I celebrate if I succeed?” Because your presupposition is that you're going to be successful. Same thing with the, “Why can I stick to this?” With that, you're presupposing that you're not going to stick to this or that it's harder and that it may not work for you. And if we come into this. It's the presupposition of, “Everything's happening for me. Things don't happen to me, they happen for me. There's lessons to be learned every single day. Failure is just feedback.” All of these beliefs and the presuppositions then change the questions we ask, rather than saying, “Why can I stick to this?” We can see it from this assumption that everything is working together for our good. So how can this experience serve me and push me forward into the results that I want? So I want you to think about that. I want you to think about some of the beliefs that you have that are laying the foundations for the questions you are asking. What are you presupposing? What are you assuming? And are those assumptions you're making it easier or harder to hit your goals? Because let me tell you if you truly believe that your success is inevitable and that, of course, you're going to be successful, do you think that makes it easier or harder for you to stick to something? For me, it makes it easier because if I have in the back of my mind that, “This may not work and I don't know if I could do this,” then I'm going to see evidence of that everywhere, right? Every time I step on the scale and something in that doesn't go down. That to me, that's evidence, “Oh, this is evidence that this is the end. This is it. I told you this might not work.” Right? So we see evidence, and we pull evidence from everywhere to be able to support the beliefs that we have. However, if I have this belief that my success is inevitable, and I do, personally, I run my life with the belief that my success is inevitable, I run the belief in my program that my client says success is inevitable. And when I have started with that foundation, then everything that I see is just more evidence to support this idea that I'm going to be successful. That my clients are going to be successful. And it changes the way that I show up for myself. It changes the way I show up for my clients, and it changes the results that I and my clients get. 

 

More examples of question shifting: Why am I not getting the results? 14:25  

So let's do a couple more questions shifting. So I can give you some more examples of ways that you can shift your own questions that you're asking yourself. So one that I hear a lot is, “Why am I not getting results?” Okay, and maybe you've thought this before. You step on the scale and you've done so good this last week and nothing's changed. “Why am I not getting results?” Like that's what we ask ourselves. And then the question gets us an answer of, “Oh, I'm not good enough or I didn't stick to it well enough, or I'm never going to be successful or this is just inevitable I'm gonna fail.” All those answers start to come up. So instead of asking our question– ourselves the question, “Why am I not getting results?” How can we change that question to this presupposition that everything is working together for our good, that we're right where we're supposed to be in our journey, and that our success is inevitable? And a question that I came up with is, “What results am I currently getting?” Because this is something I don't think a lot of people understand is that you're always getting results. They may not be the results that you want. But whatever is being manifested in your life currently is a result. And it's a result based on your choices and your actions previously, and so you are getting results each and every day. No, they may not align with the results that you want. But it's still a result. And it's still feedback. And it's still data. And we can take that data, and we can adjust and we can tweak and we can move forward so that we can get the results that we want. So when you change that question from, “Why am I not getting results,” to, “What results am I currently getting?” With this presupposition of, “Yeah, I'm already getting results. Everything's working together for my good. I need to learn the lesson here. What lesson can I learn?” You can move forward and continue to be able to go and hit the results that you want. 

 

More examples of question shifting: What do I do?16:04 

Okay, the last one we're going to do is this question of, “I don't know what to do.” And this happens a lot. I see this in. When I coach in the Facebook group, I see it in DMS, where people will ask, “What do I do in an X, Y, Z situation?” Right? This sometimes looks like, “I'm going out to a restaurant, what do I do? I'm going to a friend's house, what do I do? I am hosting a party, what do I do? I don't know if macros have this, what do I do?,” so, “I don't know what to do. I don't know how to  handle this situation. I don't know, handle this problem.” Okay. And they're– when you ask that it comes from this belief and this understanding that you don't have the answers, right? You have to– you're having to go externally and ask somebody else because you don't have the answers inside of you. And I come from this presupposition. I come from this foundational understanding that you have all the answers that you need inside of you. And my job as a coach is to help you to learn how to access them. And so we can change this question to, “I don't know what to do.” To a different question of, “If you did know, what could you do?” If you did have all the answers inside of you, which I believe that you do, what could you do? And notice how expansive that question is. It opens up ideas. It opens up your mind to try different solutions and to go to work to be able to solve this for you so that you can get a better answer and get better results. 

 

Asking better questions lead to powerful results  17:33  

So do you see what I'm saying, when I say that, “When you start to ask yourself these better questions?” These questions are found with a foundation of a presupposition of your success. A presupposition of the fact that things are happening for you, not to you, it changes everything. It changes how you view a situation and how you view a situation changes how you act in the situation and how you act in the situation changes the results that you are getting. I hope you're seeing how powerful this is and how powerful it can be in your own journey. 

 

Turning statements into questions  18:04

The last thing that I want to focus on is how we can sometimes turn statements into questions. Okay, so sometimes I will see and hear clients make statements. And I like to teach people how to turn those statements into questions. Because instead of making a statement, which is a belief. It's a, “Here's the way the world is.” Which is just a belief that you have believed so deeply that you believe that it's just a fact. But it still is just a belief. You say that this is the way the world is. And we can change it from, “This as the way the world is.” To ask yourself, it may be a question that makes you more open. Okay. So for example, let me I'm kind of get this kind of abstract, and let's bring it into something like a concrete example. For example, “I suck.” Have you ever told yourself, “I suck.” Or, “I'm not good enough.” Or, “I can't do this.”? Right? Those statements are very closed-off statements. Right? Like, I suck. It's the way things are. I'm just not good at it. And it just closes off options. It closes those options for your brain. It closes off options for what's next, “I suck.” How can we turn that statement into a question? Instead of saying, “I suck.” right? And this usually happens after, “Went to a party and I ate all the things.” Or, “I had my macros all calculated out and then I didn't hit them today. I suck.” Right? So we see this evidence in our life and we just label it like, “I suck.” Instead of having a statement, how can we turn that into a question that would make you more open to learning the lesson that you need to learn? And the question that I came up with was, “What lesson can I learn?” So instead of saying, “I went to the party, and I ate all the things. I suck.” How can we turn that to, “I went to the party. I ate all of the things. What lesson can I learn from that?” Notice how that question makes you more open. It makes your brain start to think, “Okay, well, what lessons can I take away from that experience?” And when you learn those lessons, guess what? You're not apt to repeat them. One of the biggest things I see in people in their fitness journey is making mistakes, and or failing and, or whatever you want to call it, and not learning the lesson. And then wondering why they're not getting the result that they want. If you're not getting the result that you want, there is always always always a lesson you have yet to learn. So the faster you can learn that lesson, the faster you're going to be able to get the result. If you find yourself feeling like you're hitting your head against the wall, and you're just having the same experience, yo yo dieting, binge eating, doing really well on the weekdays, and then shoveling in food on the weekends. If you are like this cycle and repeating patterns, there is a lesson there that you have yet to learn. And so when we can go away from the statement of, “I suck,” Or, “I can't do this.” Or, “This is hard.” And we can turn it into a question, “What lesson can I learn from this?” It changes everything. 

 

Choosing what’s more important  20:24 

Here's another one that I hear a lot. And maybe not so much from people who count macros, but from people who follow other ways of eating. “I can't have that.” Right? That's a statement that people make. “I can't have that.” “Oh, here, do you want this cookie? Oh, no, I can't have that.” “I'm not eating sugar.” Or, “Do you want that– do you want to go to this restaurant? No, no, I can't have that.” Again, it's a closed-off statement. It's a “This is the way the world is. This is how it is. I just can't have that.” How can we turn that statement into a question that makes you more open to receive better answers? And what I came up with was, “What is the most important thing for me right now?” So instead of saying, if someone offers you a cookie, and your answer being, “I can't have that.” What if you ask yourself the question, “What is the most important thing for me right now? Because I'll tell you, in certain circumstances, maybe your friend baked these cookies, and she dropped them off for you, and she was thinking of you. And she came by to give you this cookie, and it doesn't fit into your macros. It's not like something you planned for it was out of the blue. Instead of coming up with this, “I can't have that.” And then feeling resistance and feeling guilty and feeling like “Oh, my friends gonna be mad or-” Having all these emotions surrounding it, “I can't have that.” When we turn it into, “What is the most important thing for right now?” It puts you in this position of power, right? I get to choose what's most important to me right now. And sometimes that may mean eating the cookie alongside your friend. Maybe that's the most important thing right now. Maintaining that relationship. Having that point of connection with this person is super important to me right now. And I get to make that choice of what's most important to me. Sometimes that may mean, “You know what, I have this goal, and I have my eyes set on it. I am dead focused on it. That is the most important thing to me right now. And so I'm going to choose to say no right now.” But again, it comes from this place of like you're in control. You get to choose what's the most important thing for you right now. And that question of, “What is the most important thing to me right now?” Puts you in that position of power. Puts you in that position to make a choice, and makes you more open to various ways that you could solve this problem. 

 

It starts with what you get in your fitness journey and you apply it outside  23:15

So are you picking up what I'm putting down? Are you seeing how powerful asking better questions can be in your fitness journey? And here's the secret to and maybe we're 40 something episodes in. Maybe you figured this out by now that what I teach starts with fitness. And I talk about weight loss, and I talk about lifting weights, and I talk about nutrition. It starts with weight loss. It starts with fitness. It starts with this fitness journey. But it is about so much more. The things that I'm teaching you. The things that you learn in your fitness journey. What is magical, and what keeps me doing what I do is when I see you get it. You get it in your fitness journey and then you get how it can be applied outside of your fitness journey. Right? What would happen if you started asking better questions in all areas of your life? Not just your fitness journey. In when you're trying to be productive, or when you're trying to be a better parent, or whether you're trying to go to school, or whatever it is. What would happen if you asked better questions? You would get better answers and you would change your life. And that is the power in learning how to ask better questions. Now, this isn't something that's going to happen overnight. Okay.  It's not something and for a lot of people it's is challenging again to see it because you are so close to the questions you're asking yourself, which is why it can be so valuable to have that coach really pull you out and be able to help you ask better questions is what I do a lot of when I coach clients, when I have hot seats, we have coaching calls. And we coach in the Facebook group. A lot of what I'm doing is helping clients to ask better questions to tap into the answers that are already inside of their brain, but that they're just so zoomed in that they just can't see. And as I help teach them how to ask better questions, they start to ask themselves better questions. And that's when the magic really happens when it comes to coaching and coaching people inside Macros 101. 

 

Let me know your takeaways  25:10

So I hope you had some takeaways from this. I would love to hear what you thought. I would love to hear how you're shifting your own thinking and how you're shifting the questions that you're asking yourself in your life. So I would love it if you would tag me on Instagram posts about this episode. Let me know what your takeaways were from the episode and share this. If this would be something that would benefit someone in your life, please, please please will you share it? And a last reminder doors for Macros 101 close tomorrow if you like this style of coaching and you think it could be beneficial in your journey, you think it could be beneficial to learn how to ask better questions to have that model to you to be able to learn how you can apply this to your specific individual journey, then come join us inside Macros 101 bicepsafterbabies.com/join remember doors close tomorrow at 9:00PM pacific time and will not be reopening for quite a while so if you are wanting to get in, now is your chance. That wraps up this episode of biceps after babies radio. I'm Amber, now go out and be strong because remember my friend, you can do anything.

 

Outro

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