The Rebellion Program: Week 8

So the very first lesson, what we want to do is talk about accountability.

Just like activity got split into a division of exercise activity and non exercise activity (and typically when the common standards talk about activity, they always focus on the exercise activity and they miss the bigger, more important component than non exercise activity). With accountability, there’s a division there as well.

There’s internal accountability, and there’s external accountability.

Normally, when people think about support and accountability, they only think about it in terms of the external support and accountability. But I want to give you the tools so you have both. Because in reality, just like how non exercise activity is probably more impactful on your health than exercise activity is, even though exercise gets all of the spotlight, I think internal accountability is a little bit more important than external accountability for long term lifelong healthy habits.

And I know, I know, this is weird as a coach whose profession, whose occupation, whose paycheck relies on external accountability, but I want to teach you the difference today.

Internal and external accountability; that’s going to be accountability, internal to yourself, or accountability externally to something outside of yourself.

Now, usually, when we think about accountability, especially as it relates to coaching, getting in partnership with a coach, that’s accountability to your coach. That’s accountable to something outside of you, right? That’s external accountability. That’s what we most often think of as accountability.

I want to talk first about internal accountability, and you’ve been doing it, you’ve been doing it during this entire program. You might remember, in the very first part of this program we talked about power promises, and we had you list your power promise, right? Your power promise was a promise that you made to yourself, it was accountability, you put into yourself, you became accountable to that power promise to yourself. You became accountable to yourself with that power promise.

Another way that we can build accountability for ourselves is by constantly repeating our goals through goal repetition. We become more accountable to that goal if we remind ourselves of out goal throughout the week. If your goal is to try to score 30 points on nutrition, and we repeat that, we become more accountable to that score. If our goal is to try to get 40 points on the nutrition system, and we repeat, “I’m looking for 40 points this week, I’m looking for 40 points this week…” you’re being accountable to yourself, repeating your goal, whatever it might be.

It might be your true goals from week two, it might be an eventual goal, it might be a habit or behavior goal.

Week to week or month to month, whatever your goal is, repeating it to yourself, builds accountability to that goal to yourself. And one way that we can track your accountability (and you’ve been doing this) is the habit tracker. Habit Tracking is an internal practice, right? It’s something that you write down, and you’re keeping a log for yourself, you’re looking back, you’re being accountable to yourself by putting down that data. That habit tracker is practicing internal accountability. And it’s not the only tracker we use. We also use the workout tracker from the fitness app, right? You can look back on previous workouts, and you can be accountable to yourself and say, “Hey, I’ve done this many workouts.”

So internal accountability: the power promise, your goal repetition, habit trackers and workout trackers, these are ways that you can build accountability to yourself building internal accountability.

What about external?

Well, you know, every week we do the coaching calls, that becomes an accountability to the group, to the coach, and to the program. That becomes accountability to something beyond yourself, right? When we get together as a community, and we discuss a fitness topic, and we have the weekly discussions, we build accountability to the group. Oftentimes in those calls, we make plans of actions or tweaks or small little promises to the community that makes accountability outside of yourself.

Then there’s also the community, though, right in the band app. We have that client community with the posts every day and with the conversations in the comment sections. That engagement with the community builds a support network that you become more accountable to. It becomes that external accountability as well. And then finally, your check ins with your coach, whether it’s the checking of the habit tracker, the daily check ins in the messages or the the monthly calls checking in with your coach. Oftentimes we modify or create a new game plan, right? We create a promise or an action plan. And then you become accountable to that plan, and you have to report back to your coach.

It puts on a little bit more tension, a little bit more impetus, when you’re doing these healthy habits. You’re not only doing it for yourself, you’re doing it to a promise you made to something outside of yourself. So external accountability, stuff you should be already doing, is the coaching calls, the community engagement and the coach check ins.

Those two two branches are really what accountability is. There’s internal accountability, and there’s external accountability.

In this lesson, what I want to talk about is the benefit of the community engagement. The benefits of participating in the group and building that support and engaging with that support network. Let’s be honest, you’re eight weeks into this program. Are you as excited as you were day one?

Let’s be completely honest, excitement wanes. Motivation wanes. Energy just kind wanes down sometimes.

Our excitement is gonna get a little bit lower. And you’ll remember from the REBEL oath, that I said that excitement about your potential is probably the only secret there is. In my entire career of coaching people, those that are excited, get the best results.

But human nature means excitement just has to wane. The community engagement is a way to re-energize and reconsider your fitness experience. It’s a way to recharge your batteries. With the community engagements, it’s a way to pick up that excitement when naturally it would fall off. It’s a way to refill your bucket.

Take advantage of it!

Use that community group when you’re feeling low! Use that group to pick yourself up. Participate– get excited about fitness. If you need, you can comment and post anytime in that community group.

The second big benefit is, you’ve probably heard this before, the best way to learn something is to teach it. The best way to get help for yourself is to give help, right? The way that the human mind works, the way the human spirit works, is that when we give to others, we gain so much more than we give.

Your participation in the group (1) helps other people. It definitely helps contribute ideas and to brainstorm new thoughts. But (2) it really solidifies this process for yourself as well. The more you help another person, the more consistent and the more rigid and the more stable your fitness habits are going to be.

In the group, when you help other people, “a rising tide lifts all boats” including yours.

The best way to learn is to teach, to participate, and to engage with the community. It solidifies your healthy habits so you can maintain these for a lifetime.

And then finally, the biggest benefits of community engagement is no “me” is as smart as “we.” No single person is going to be as smart as the collective. Napoleon Hill in his seminal works always wrote about the “mastermind” or the infinite intelligence that when people collaborate together, they come up with new ideas that are stronger than anyone could create on their own. When you participate in the community engagement, you give birth to new ideas and new thoughts. To new processes as well. You create a better experience for not only yourself but everyone around.

So there are some massive benefits to the community engagement as part of support and accountability with external accountability. We want to participate in the community posts especially the Mondays and the Saturdays. But if you can participate elsewhere, you can build your excitement, you can maintain your excitement, you can learn and solidify, and you can create and foster new ideas for other REBELs.

Support and Accountability. One of the greatest things it does for us is it creates a safety net.

Now, throughout this program, I have been promising that if you can do this program, you will get healthy habits you can maintain for the rest of your life. And I have to pull back a little bit. I have to be honest…

I don’t know if I’ve ever had a client that maintain these healthy habits 52 weeks a year. I don’t know if even I maintain healthy habits 52 weeks a year.

In the last lesson, we talked about how eight weeks into the program, motivation, excitement, and energy just kind of wane a little bit naturally, right? Life is gonna have highs and lows. It’s gonna have lows. Having support and accountability, having this larger support network, it creates safety nets for you so that when things slow down, there’s someone that notices, there’s someone that catches and we’re there for you like, “you know, I haven’t heard you very much in the group what’s going on?” Or your coach will reach out and be like, “hey, hey, it looks like the nutrition score hasn’t been updated recently. What’s going on?”

Or maybe it’s workouts have been missed, and we need to make some adaptations. Something is going to come up, something always comes up. It happens to me, too. Having a support network allows you to get back on the horse way faster, infinitely faster than before. What often happens when people don’t have support and accountability is one missed workout turns into a missed week which turns into a missed month. And by the time people notice it’s been nine, eight, or 10 months later.

And they don’t even know what happened!

They don’t know where the time went. They don’t know how they lost track of this.

With support and accountability, being connected in the community, being connected with your coach, there’s someone there as a safety net that if you start to slow down, if you start to fall off, there’s someone to nudge you and just ask you what’s going on to get you back on track.

It’s not going to be shameful to fall off the wagon once or twice. It’s going to happen and it happens to everyone. But when you have someone watching out for you, when you fall off the wagon, they lift you right back on so you don’t miss any time.

Support and Accountability. I think the greatest benefit is that safety net. It keeps you going in the direction you want to go regardless of the forces that life pushes on you

We’re about eight weeks through the 12 week program. We’re most of the way through the program.

Today in this lesson, what I want to talk about are the benefits of ongoing coaching.

Now, there’s a chance that you’ve already signed up for some maintenance package to go beyond the 12 week program, and that’s great. This video will help you stay excited about that decision. And if you’re just signed up for 12 weeks, this lesson will give you some points to consider.

I want to talk about the benefits of the continuing coaching, the ongoing coaching. One of the big benefits is you get a regular adjustment to your workout plan. You’ll have your coach redesign that workout plan in a timely fashion every month. We’ll be able to adjust that which will give you new stimuli and new messaging to the body for new challenges to overcome. As you adapt to new challenges, you’ll always be in a progressive state, you’ll always be advancing somehow.

You’ll also get ongoing external accountability. We talked about the internal versus external accountability. And I really think that internal accountability is very important, but the external accountability is easier to maintain. It’s easier to make promises to someone else, right? We’ve all done it, we readily give to other people before we give to ourselves. Having that ongoing external accountability can help motivate you a little bit more.

Ongoing coaching also gives you a 3000 foot view. You’ll have someone outside of your individual circumstances, being able to look over your program and see where there might be some holes that you might not be able to identify for yourself. It taskes some of the biases out of your lived experience and we can talk about where some shortcomings might be. That is a useful tool to have in your back pocket.

Also, with the ongoing coaching, you have on demand adjustments. Life throws us curveballs. Sometimes we have an unexpected trip. Maybe your goals change and your workout program need to be radically altered. There might be something that life throws at you that requires some on demand adjustments.

And speaking of life, Life likes to throw you curveballs. The online coaching is like having a coach in your pocket. You get that cooperative strategizing to overcome obstacles and surprises.

We gave you a lot of tools and strengths in this program. And we’ll continue on in the next couple of weeks to give you more tools, more resources amd the skills to overcome obstacles, but sometimes something’s new (or it seems new) and we have to figure out how to apply the old lessons to the new challenges. With the ongoing coaching, you’ll always have someone that can cooperate with you to overcome those stresses and those challenges. Someone to help strategize the right steps forward.

Finally, most my clients continue on, for the simple fact that it’s just more enjoyable with someone.

It’s more enjoyable to be connected in the community. It’s more enjoyable to banter and tell jokes with the coach. It’s more enjoyable to have someone else working with you, rather than struggling on your own.

Hopefully at the end of this program, healthy habits shouldn’t feel like a struggle. But some circumstances or some challenges come up and it sometimes feels like we’re struggling alone. Having the coach on your side makes this whole process way more enjoyable.

Those are some of the benefits to ongoing coaching.

Now. We’re not done with the program. We’re only two thirds of the way through so you don’t have to worry about this yet. But if you haven’t yet signed up for any ongoing coaching and that’s something that you want to consider, definitely communicate with your coach. Ask us questions and see if it’s the right fit for you to continue on beyond the program.

We have covered the entire holistic wheel!

Now, we’ve in fact covered the most important things to know about each component of the holistic wheel. We’ll still have a lot more to discuss.

There’s always more to discuss as it relates to healthy habits along the holistic wheel (trust me! I have a health science degree and over a decade of continue learning! It never stops!).

But at this point, with the knowledge that you have, we should have a strong foundation to radically reconsider what healthy is, and have a REBEL approach to healthy habits. In the next coming weeks, there are going to be new lessons, there are still more things that I need to share with you.

But moving forward, the last third of this course is going to be a lot more reviews and a lot more reminders to really reinforce and make these healthy habits permanent. That’s what we want to go for. It’s not enough to learn this stuff, we need to reinforce it and make it permanent so we can help have those healthy habits that lasts a lifetime.

We’re going to be doing a lot more reviews, we’re going to be doing a lot more reminders, you’re going to be getting some old material again to review and reconsider and we’ll be building on it and expanding. We’ll be doing a lot more reviews than new stuff.

There will still be new stuff! (I think most of next week is actually new material off the top of my head ?). But we’re really going to be focusing now on reinforcing the holistic wheel that we taught you.

There may be fewer lessons each week.

The lessons are going to be a little bit more focused on action versus the overall theory. Remember in the early weeks, we talked about how the purpose of activity is messaging to the body, and that activity is split into non exercise activity and exercise activity. That’s more theory information. We’re going to be giving you a lot more action steps in the last couple of weeks.

I wanted to give you a heads up that the program was about to shift gears. We built that foundation with a complete awareness and a lot of theory. Now it’s time to put on the pretty facade, it’s time to put the stained glass windows into the walls. We built the foundation. Now it’s time to make it pretty