Episode Transcript:

Polly Mertens: 0:29

Hey superstars, welcome back Polly here and Sam and we are here today at Everyday Awesome Project to talk about. Emotional fitness Emotional fitness, literally probably, no, not probably For sure. My favorite thing, our favorite thing, oh my god, dude, it’s so good, it’s so good.

Samantha Pruitt: 0:50

Yeah, we had to do this soon in the recording because it was like we have a lot to say about this and as we prepared for this, we realized we have too much to say in one episode. So stay tuned, I’m sure there’ll be more. Oh yes, but today we’re going to at least cover the basics.

Polly Mertens: 1:05

Yeah, yeah, you and I have written whole coaching programs and week-long things around this subject matter. Let’s tell the audience what it is, and even you and I have different ideas about this based on our personal experience, which is also so frickin’ fabulous. It makes me really happy to have that complimentary mindset.

Samantha Pruitt: 1:26

And I love that we come about it from a slightly different direction, which can just be so dynamic for people. So this conversation I think you guys are in store for some good yummies here and I hope you stay till the end. We’ve got some ideas on how to build this, so we’ll tell you about what it is and where we’re going with this and then how to get stronger at it. So tell me, I want to start with your definition, because I really think when you told me how you came up with it and where it’s built for, you is so organic, mine is more, you know, a study and stuff.

Samantha Pruitt: 2:00

So what is?

Samantha Pruitt: 2:01

emotional fitness. How did you come to establish that? How do you see it? How would you define it?

Polly Mertens: 2:06

I guess, yeah, for me it was definitely a personal study and a personal evolution of experiencing my own life and a multitude of suffering, so physical suffering and mental, emotional suffering. So in my own path and journey to wellness, healing body and brain, I discovered some pretty key elements that I was lacking, didn’t have skill set around, didn’t have a lot of the attributes to being successful in these areas. So as I went on my own personal journey, I decided to use that moving forward into in my own coaching world. So how I perceive emotional fitness for myself and for people that work with me is that it’s basically three pillars of an entire human’s life. So there is an element of strength, an element of flexibility and an element of endurance.

Polly Mertens: 3:04

Now when people hear those three things strength, flexibility and endurance they generally think of athletics, of sports, and of course I am an athlete and that is a huge component. But I am speaking about the mental, emotional strength, flexibility and endurance of a human as well as the physical strength, physical flexibility and physical endurance of the human. So those three pieces are physical and mental to me, and so how I started to develop in my own personal life was I had to feel heal, a lot of physical issues, but completely intertwined and not separate in any way, even remotely possible, was my mental and emotional state in those places that I was suffering. So I developed a program that would build a person as in me, a person’s strength, a person’s flexibility and a person’s endurance in all of those aspects. So when you started.

Samantha Pruitt: 4:04

So what you haven’t inserted here and I’ll just insert it is I know you, because I know your story and anybody who hasn’t heard it. You should definitely go back and listen and learn about this beautiful human that I have the opportunity to work with, and that is. There were some breakdowns. Yes, there was a few breakdowns happening, so physical and mental and so did you know when you were having these breakdowns like oh I know the recipe for this.

Polly Mertens: 4:29

I just knew how to suffer. I was really good at it. I mean I’ve got, like you know, a grades in that. Yeah.

Samantha Pruitt: 4:38

And so was it like baby steps that helped you, or were you bumping around, learning emotional fitness? Or did you just get like to this enough point and you’re like I need to get my body in shape and wherever, and that was the start, or was it? Oh, I know my emotions. I’m not good at this. I’m overreactive or whatever. I’m frustrated all the time, or something.

Polly Mertens: 4:59

What was this?

Polly Mertens: 5:00

No my journey definitely started on the physical side of the spectrum because my body literally broke down and I was experiencing illness. So when that started for me it was predominantly physical dysfunction and suffering. And as I started to rebuild my physical body, my mind and emotions got in the way. So, even though I physically started to make some baby steps towards healing and rebuilding this broken body, my brain and my emotions were not having it because they were so invested in that state of misery and dysfunction. So I realized then I needed to work on all of these aspects of me, the whole person, samantha. Otherwise, if I just get healthy and fit, you know what is that going to do for me? If, ultimately, my mental and emotional state are still broken? It’s not going to work. So that’s how it went down. Yeah, it was a long journey lady.

Samantha Pruitt: 6:01

No doubt, and we’ll. I’m hoping we’ll have some opportunity to share some more of their stories, and what I want to add to this is just one little fine point to add here. People have often said, or you see on the web emotional intelligence, emotional mastery, emotional fitness. Let’s just take a moment to share what that is for us.

Polly Mertens: 6:22

And so.

Samantha Pruitt: 6:22

I have a quick little one liner. You know what is emotional intelligence versus emotional fitness? Let’s say, emotional intelligence is knowing what to do. Emotional fitness is putting it into practice. Action, right. It’s like you can know that you need to go to the gym, you can know that you need to lose 10 pounds, you can know that you want to run a marathon, but like the action of it, right. So like you don’t get fit by thinking about doing pushups, you do pushups, yeah. And I think you and I would both agree that how we’ve both transformed our body, mind, emotional, all of that is through the action of it, doing the work.

Polly Mertens: 6:56

I’ve read a lot about those things too, and so have you Totally. But it didn’t through osmosis, just transform our bodies and brains. Yeah, it was the sweat. Yeah.

Samantha Pruitt: 7:06

So I would say where we are with this and why we wanted to share this with people is, if you know, just don’t listen to this. Like like, oh, I’m just taking notes and getting tips and stuff, but it’s like, please, please, please, take some of the action steps that we share with you or find your own, but do not let this just be something you listen to and then go back to your life, because nothing will change. You know the definition of insanity If we keep doing the same things over and over again.

Polly Mertens: 7:34

How did you find this? What was your path? I know it was quite different than mine.

Samantha Pruitt: 7:38

Yeah, well, I would say it wasn’t as linear Like I think yours was linear. So, as I just right now I’m thinking about this, one of my personal breakdowns was 20 years with an eating disorder, right, and so, if I sum that up, you know, to just try and be brief, there’s a lot of dysfunction, whether you call it the physical dysfunction of you know what I was doing to my body with food, the emotional dysfunction of the shame and the guilt and the stories I was telling myself, things like that. So a lot of things were off course, right, I. One of my paths out of that was attending a personal development workshop called the Landmark Forum. I’m a huge fan of it.

Samantha Pruitt: 8:21

There’s a lot of different work out there that you can do. It changed and transformed my life. That sent me on a journey to learn more about this. I was like whoa what you know I learned about personal development from a friend attended. That, let’s say, cleaned up my act after that, in 10 weeks of, you know, pursuing accountability with people and sharing authentically and learning about myself, learning more about what I was doing, what was causing the shame, things like that. The journey has since then been 15 years of deep personal development work. So yeah, like you said, there’s a lot more.

Samantha Pruitt: 8:58

I would say the thing that I learned the most, or the person I learned the most from about emotional fitness is Tony Robbins, you know, and there’s a lot of teachers out there and other people that have great work on emotional fitness or ways of going about this but his he calls it the triad is so clean and simple. For me it just clicked right into place. He has a great way of making big concepts very simple, and so I’ll just say the way he looks at the triad is it’s like a triangle, like three sides of a triangle that make up our emotional state. So if our emotional state is in the center of this triangle, one side is what we focus on, or where our attention is. Like, if I’m focusing on this, you know, rude driver, that’s, you know in the car next to me, you know, right, yeah, if I’m focusing on that, I’m not going to notice the beautiful trees outside my car, I’m not going to, I’m not going to notice the gift of my heartbeat or the wind in my hair or something like that. Where my focus goes, that’s going to send me in an emotional state.

Samantha Pruitt: 10:01

The other angle is the of that triangle is our story. So what’s the story I tell myself. I can tell myself that that guy’s an asshole. Or I can tell myself, like that guy’s having a bad day right, like I can feel empathy for him or sympathy for him, and if I do, then I’ll feel differently inside.

Samantha Pruitt: 10:18

And then the third angle of that is physiology, and there’s a lot to that, but it’s basically all of the things physiologically. So where our eyes are, are they going up, are they going down? Are we breathing short? Are we breathing fast? Are we moving our body? Are we sitting still, you know? So those three things create the emotional state. So that alone helped me and helped me a lot with the coaching clients that I was working with, who were coming with a lot of disturbing patterns and behaviors that they weren’t happy with. So and just started strengthening for myself, putting that into practice in my life, like noticing when I was triggered, you know, from the outside world, something that I was focused on, that I didn’t focus on, or something I was telling myself that well, let me ask you a question about that.

Polly Mertens: 11:05

So I love that. That’s beautifully stated and relatively simple to sort of manage, if you will. How does that feed into the physical aspect of the body? So the emotional experience said human is having good, bad or indifferent, and how is it attributing to their physical makeup, if you will, their physical experience or body’s having?

Samantha Pruitt: 11:33

Without going too much into it but trying to help people get an idea. So I think this I used to coach my clients one-on-one and this was something I would help them understand. I think you can get it quickly is if I said to you, sitting in the next room, behind a closed door, you can’t see this person, but just imagine for a moment somebody that’s deeply depressed. I said, what would that person look like to you? Would they be standing up, tall, jumping up and down, or would they be sort of slouched over and kind of hunched on the couch or on a chair or something? Would they be breathing deep or shallow, right Would they? Would their eyes be up, like uplifting, or would they be sort of down, focused, avoiding glance? And what do you think they’d be thinking, right, like what would their focus be if they’re depressed?

Samantha Pruitt: 12:19

Now, if I said that, say you know, I go, okay, aside from that person, what if we looked behind another door and another room? In this example is somebody who’s just won the lottery, you know, or they just, yeah, they’re excited beyond me, you know, like you can just see the difference in their body, Right? So if we look at it from those three sides of that triangle, it just naturally you can start to see the differences right. So how does that parlay to the human physical? Well, one of the things Tony says and I’ve seen it in my life is we actually do emotions, we don’t just have them, we do them, we execute them through our body. So somebody who falls into depression, you know, has a pattern of, you know, talking poorly to themselves, lack of confidence. They’ll slouch their shoulders, they’ll go inward, they won’t talk very loudly, they’ll take shallow breaths instead of loud breaths. You can put yourself into emotional states and you can then get yourself out of it, and that’s some of the things that I’ve personally taught myself and teach my.

Samantha Pruitt: 13:20

You know clients and so you can do your emotions and one of the things I’ll just throw is a quick tip here that comes from Tony’s work and that is the fastest way to change an emotion is the leg of the triangle called your physiology. So like interrupting with a physical pattern, and I think you would say that like, oh, do something on the daily, like you’re actually sometimes on the hourly.

Samantha Pruitt: 13:43

Well, and I think one of the things I see from you the most is you walk into a gym and you tell me this story all the time, like you walk into a gym and you’ll feel the energy low or running group or any kind of fitness. Something hails you, and what do you feel compelled to do?

Polly Mertens: 13:57

Well, besides, immediately make human contact. People are all trying to look away from me. I get fired up because I’m there to express myself physically, but also emotionally, in community. You change your state and you go into 1000% and I want to deliver that to the room, whether those people are ready or not.

Samantha Pruitt: 14:23

So that is a choice, like so good, yeah, and that’s, that’s what we want people to understand.

Polly Mertens: 14:28

Hey, to be clear though, sometimes I don’t want to go to the freaking gym, I don’t want to run, I don’t want to do these things. So it’s not like I, you know, wake up, all you know rainbow, sunshine and sparkles, and like on fire for all the things. I am human also, and so sometimes I can barely get myself there and it ain’t pretty at all, and I walk in and I have the funk. But I know from all these years now that I better do something about it and I empower myself to make that shift.

Samantha Pruitt: 15:00

I just want to touch upon that because it’s so beautiful what you’re bringing up. One of the things that you and I have talked about in the past is like where do people get stuck?

Samantha Pruitt: 15:08

Like what stops people from there’s a lot of stuckness, right, that’s goopy. So you’re, you’re admitting, and I admit like, yeah, it’s not all rainbows shooting out of our eyeballs every day. I mean, yeah, we create these states. Yeah, like, we design who we want to be and how we want to step into the world, and where do you think that that comes from? Or what? What do you see as stuckness and how do you either avoid it or how have you changed it in your life? So where do you, where do you see people getting stuck? What does it look like?

Polly Mertens: 15:36

I see a lot of self limiting beliefs in the humans that I work with and I hang out with, and I have had those myself, so I know that that is a big component. I see a lot of unworthiness. So people that have somehow determined the value of themselves or somebody has told them, but they have taken this on as a belief for themselves, that they are not worthy of a great physical athletic body or a great mind or just feeling good, just feeling good and actually being in love with their life. Yeah, a lot of people are having those. Those are the two primaries that I see they’re addicted to feeling bad instead of choosing to feel good like

Samantha Pruitt: 16:22

with purpose or passion, or just like feeling good as they want to. How do you feel to see people getting stuck, you know, and what you just mentioned, as I talked about that triangle earlier, that’s the story, right? And so a belief is just a thought you keep thinking, right? So, whether you hear it, and unfortunately, in the work you’ve done I’m sure the work that I’ve done we see people come with patterns, with beliefs, as you call them, and they, some of them, aren’t even aware of them. Some of them, no, they come in and go I have low self confidence, or I have low self esteem, or I can’t get myself motivated, or I’m a procrastinator, or whatever. The pattern is that they feel like they’re running. That’s in the subconscious mind, right? So those patterns, those grooves in the neuro plasticity of their mind, is just something they’ve been running as a story for a long enough time. Unfortunately, for a lot of us, those stories get established as young kids.

Polly Mertens: 17:14

Yes, and we don’t realize it.

Samantha Pruitt: 17:16

Yes, and so people are walking around, like you said, with these beliefs and they’re wondering you know, why doesn’t my life get better, why doesn’t whatever? And first step is awareness, Like they have to be aware, like, oh, that belief, that story that I tell myself, that little and oftentimes the story, I think some people think that it’s true and it’s them.

Polly Mertens: 17:36

Let me just double down on something. A limiting belief is a story. Yeah, you tell yourself over and over until you believe it until you believe it and you act upon it.

Samantha Pruitt: 17:48

Yeah, and you keep it. And so what happens? It’s an old program, well, and so what happens and this is just the way that the mind works is you go out into life, you experience something, you act from a belief or a story. I’m not good enough. You go into a room. The behavior we just talked about, like how?

Polly Mertens: 18:04

you bring it with you.

Samantha Pruitt: 18:05

You bring it with you and then nobody wants to talk to you.

Polly Mertens: 18:09

Like what if you?

Samantha Pruitt: 18:10

had the limiting belief. Oh, you totally vibe it. So you have a belief. I go into a room and I like that place on fire.

Samantha Pruitt: 18:16

Or yeah you know, or you know I’m here to be of service. Yes, exactly, and so that is what you carry with you as a belief. You’ve established it. I don’t think you came out of the womb jumping up and down. You know for other humans like hey. But you know. But you do now because it makes you feel good in your body and it makes you feel good to see the reaction. But, if so, part of how you’ve established that you, you know when you started your breakdown journey yeah, I wouldn’t say that you walked into the gym every morning right after that like dude and no, you have videos of me in baggy sweats, the hoodie, the whole thing.

Polly Mertens: 18:54

Ymca embarrassed to even walk in and be there. I’m not worthy, I shouldn’t be here. What the hell am I doing here? The amount of emotional abuse I gave myself it was insane, but it didn’t stop me, but it was pretty brutal and I think people who I hope are listening to this don’t expect you know you.

Samantha Pruitt: 19:19

And I would never say like, oh, wherever you are in your journey, you should just be able to run a marathon all the time. No, you should. You know, it should be no problem for you Because we’ve both lived. I mean, I came out of the doldrums, 20 years, 20 years of an addictive shame all of that stuff and rebuilt since then just as you did, and so it is.

Polly Mertens: 19:38

I didn’t transform till almost 30. So that’s 27, 28 years I really had 29 was kind of the break open to do it differently, so a trainwreck. I mean I’m just going to be honest about that. I got a lot of stories. We’ll have an episode on that at one time.

Samantha Pruitt: 19:56

Let’s just talk about trainwrecks. Yeah, totally Well, we’re going to have a story about comebacks, and those are usually from oh, what are my other favorite subjects?

Polly Mertens: 20:04

So how do people get unstuck?

Samantha Pruitt: 20:06

Yeah. So you know, I think there’s a lot of strategy. So one of the things that, like I said, I want people to begin to understand is how they’re causing it right. So you’ve talked about beliefs, patterns we’ve talked about, we’ve touched upon that a little bit.

Samantha Pruitt: 20:22

So I would say one of my biggest like aha moments from a teacher that I’ve studied with that I just absolutely love, says you know, like let’s take doubt as a limiting belief or a stuckness right, like I don’t, I doubt that things are going to work out for me, or I doubt that I can do that or whatever. And she was asked you know, how do you, how do you get rid of doubt? And that’s hilarious. She says you get rid of it by not having it before you have it. And so I would say what that looks like is, if you plan to run a marathon, you go and you train like you don’t just show up to your races like fresh from the start, like I’m gonna run this marathon, yep, you have time alone. Like what they say is what is it champions do in public or, sorry, they do in private what it takes to be a champion in public.

Samantha Pruitt: 21:15

And that’s what emotional fitness is as you do the work at home on your own time, that inner journey, those those little mental push ups, those little times with yourself, whether it’s self talk in the mirror or just catching things. And I love the triad because it’s so simple for me to use. You know, if I just pause, like one of the things is, if I pause and notice, like first step is, oh shoot, I’m triggered, I’m not feeling good in my body, and I think a lot of people don’t recognize it early enough. They just for me, not feeling good is kind of like I have a body ache, I’m getting some whoa, I need some body work. What’s going on here? What’s out of whack? Awareness and that it’s not okay, like, not like.

Samantha Pruitt: 22:00

I know a lot of sorry man, but men that don’t go to the doctors early enough and things get worse, or their joints, or they get breakdowns physically. I think the same thing is true for us mentally. We just talked about beliefs are created by thinking, thinking, thinking, the same thought. So it’s when I find a not good feeling thought, when I find myself in a state that I’m like what am I doing? Where’s my focus? What am I? What’s the story I’m telling myself Can I do something physically Like? That’s how I, in the moment, begin to address that. That’s when it’s shown up in my life Like I’ve bumped into something that’s triggered me, if you will.

Polly Mertens: 22:37

So there’s two things there is not feeling good physically in this one body that you get, which is part emotional as well, and then not feeling good mentally, emotionally.

Polly Mertens: 22:48

We need to explain to people how these two things are integrated. They are not separate. You are not a separate person who is either thinking or feeling going on about life, but the physical body is detached from that experience, and vice versa. Right, let’s break that down for just a minute for people, because my emotional fitness program and my philosophy is that these things are all integrated and you need to develop these three pillars. It’s not unlike what Robbins is about here.

Polly Mertens: 23:22

But but I really am invested in that physical experience being 50% of the journey, because if and I know this from personal experience and so do you if our physical bodies don’t feel good and a majority of the population currently is not feeling good in their physical body, and so we are seeing a mental health crisis, unprecedented mental health crisis let’s talk a little bit about that integration and how people need to recognize that they’re one in the same. They’re one human, so if they’re suffering in one area, it’s also everywhere else.

Samantha Pruitt: 24:02

Yeah, and I would add to it because you know how much part of spiritual journey my life is. You’re my woo friend.

Polly Mertens: 24:12

Yeah. So I would say you know, we have.

Samantha Pruitt: 24:13

I think we have more bodies than just the physical. So I would say, we have my philosophy is we have an mental body, an emotional body, a physical body and a spiritual body, and the physical body is the one that we’re most in tune with, where we most see. But those other bodies are a part of us. You know, if you do any research and studies on auras and you know the outer energy field, you know you, you can walk up to somebody and you can feel them three feet before you touch them, right.

Polly Mertens: 24:46

That’s part of that emotional, spiritual, physical body that I’m talking about Everybody’s walked into a room and been like what’s going on?

Samantha Pruitt: 24:53

here. That’s energy, yeah, so I think just being a little bit aware of that as well, I just wanted to kind of put that in there. So how is it interrelated? It’s, there’s a lot there to unpack. So I think what’s important for us to help people with is tools, strategies, ideas on how they can be managing in the moment. Like we talked about, you get a triggering moment like the car cuts you off the, you get bad news at work, you get an email that’s scathing you whatever. You have a bad moment with your spouse or something like that. So those are those triggering moments. The outer environment is influencing us and then, like we talked about, like what, what are the champions doing? What are the champions of emotional fitness doing besides those moments? Like how do you prepare for that? How do you get to that starting line of running an emotionally fit race?

Polly Mertens: 25:49

on your own.

Samantha Pruitt: 25:50

So what would you say? Some of your um?

Polly Mertens: 25:53

I want to dig into that Because I’m all about those things and I want to again kind of double click on the concept in case people didn’t hear me the first time that their body and their brain, mind, emotions are attached. I do see a lot these days with the influence of online living, life, et cetera, versus the real world, that a lot of people have detached these two things. So I just want to drive home the point that an integration of sorts and unpacking how you might have disjointed yourself Maybe you’re treating yourself for mental health but you’re not doing anything for your physical health or vice versa needs to be examined. So I’m seeing a lot of that. So how I would suggest that said humans or I just have done myself and the hundreds of people that I’ve coached, I’ve worked with. I break it down into kind of a simple training methodology, because I know that a lot of people can relate to that, especially if you have any kind of athletic background or if you’re interested in getting healthy and fit, and a lot of people find me because they’re interested in getting healthy and fit. Little do they know we are going to do a deep dive into their mental, emotional health in every other aspect of their life. Hence life coaching. Right, it’s all the things.

Polly Mertens: 27:15

But I break it down into, like I said, these three pillars, if you will, of strength, flexibility and endurance, and I have them unpack these areas. Where are the pain points? Right? So most people will very easily say, well, my body is fine, my health is fine, but I really am having a hard time in my professional career or in my relationship space or in whatever some other area of their life. But because these things are integrated, we do have to have a little bit more of an open mind there.

Polly Mertens: 27:48

So hopefully that’s a conversation that you have with them, right, to kind of explore, and you might discover some new things about yourself. But how do you ultimately build strength, how do you build flexibility and how do you build endurance? They’re very individual and so generically, I could say that one would obviously build strength in arenas of their life, whether it be physical, mental or emotional, by doing challenging things, by building the muscles of their emotional state, building up strength to be able to handle stressful situations. Life is stressful. Relationships, interpersonal relationships, the economy so many things create stress in your life, right, most people are worn down there, and they’re worn down because they’re not in there and I’m like, oh, I love what you’re saying there, because how I went about it was a little bit differently, but it was absolutely with what you’re talking about.

Samantha Pruitt: 28:48

I used to call them. So a lot of my coaching is in success and habits creating and breaking habits and one of the things that I’ve seen for myself and for my clients is I call them small wins. So especially and I’ll just play off my background in eating disorders and addiction it’s years, it’s decades, like in my case, of losing trust with yourself.

Polly Mertens: 29:15

Oh wow, breaking promises to yourself, exactly.

Samantha Pruitt: 29:19

So I just wanted to share. I’ll try to unpack this briefly, but basically, if you can picture and I’m trying to be too graphic here, but picture someone with an eating disorder mine was bulimia, which is you eat and then you throw up what you eat and whatnot. So not a great graphic, but bear with me. So imagine you have. So what that might look like for me was stressful day and a lot of people with addiction whether it’s drinking, smoking, smoking, pot, food, whatever she usually is something like there’s disturbance in the body. They don’t know how to cope with that. So oftentimes these are the things that they reach for to change their emotional state. They reach for around can something external.

Samantha Pruitt: 30:00

So I would reach for food.

Samantha Pruitt: 30:02

I would get wrapped up, distracted in the food. Alcoholics get wrapped up, distracted and become inebriated to not feel what they were feeling before because we don’t have the tools. So you have this evening of distraction. Let’s call it changing your state. However, you end the night, wake up the next morning, go I’m never doing that again, shame, guilt.

Samantha Pruitt: 30:25

And then, eight hours later, you’ve walked through a life of the usual stresses of life Same pattern of behavior, things are showing up in life and lack of emotional fitness to deal with those things. So what you get is just that more and more breakdown of just the wariness of life. I don’t know how to handle this life. I’m not strong enough. I don’t know how to change my emotional state. So what do you do that next night? Pick up the can, pick up the pipe, pick up the food, and you do it again. And so if you do that enough times, I can remember waking up in the morning decades into this and going, why bother, I just don’t even trust you anymore. You can say, oh, yeah, sure, I couldn’t tell you how many times I said this is the last time.

Samantha Pruitt: 31:16

I mean I say that in jest, but I know people out there that have been there.

Polly Mertens: 31:20

Yeah, can relate to.

Samantha Pruitt: 31:22

It’s a tough road. When you try and you’re like willpower, willpower, that’s not willpower, right, and there’s a long reason for that. So what happens is you come you know, whether you’re doing it for a year or 20 years, like I was, you don’t have that relationship with yourself that you believe yourself right.

Polly Mertens: 31:40

This is so interesting because what I am thinking while you’re telling the story so beautifully is the opposite side of that, from my experience, or from some of the especially, I’ve worked with a lot of troubled youth. Yeah, they come with a lack of muscles. I came with a lack of muscles around showing up to do the hard thing which was, by the way, the hard thing wasn’t the running or the workout or the fitness element. The hard thing was me giving a shit about myself and showing up to do whatever was about to happen. So do I trust myself because I’ve said I’m going to do it and I’m going to show up and I’m going to make these things happen, dedicated to whatever that path is towards my goals? And then, same thing, I wouldn’t show up or I wouldn’t do the work.

Polly Mertens: 32:30

And so what I experienced from my own journey becoming an athlete and working with troubled youth in particular to develop them as athletes from zero was just showing up alone, was building the muscle, and then the rest was the easy part. So many people are not showing up for their own lives right now in a multitude of ways, but if you think about it from an athletic standpoint and talk about it from a training. Like you know, if you don’t show up and do the workouts, you won’t make it to the start line of whatever that goal is. And you definitely won’t make it to the finish line but over the course of day after day, showing up and showing up for yourself. That is the magic, that’s one way to become unstuck.

Samantha Pruitt: 33:19

Show up and that’s where you talk about your, I think part of your leg, of your foundation, about endurance, right, so it’s having that endurance to do what’s hard, you know, do the things that you don’t feel like doing all the time, or saying yes or saying no when you mean no right, and you know. So what I was saying about the small wins, as you were saying, you know, like, how do we build these little habits and reinforce this is we build them with small things and I often encourage because habits can have lots of old history is build that muscle almost in other areas.

Polly Mertens: 33:56

Like yours.

Samantha Pruitt: 33:58

I get it’s very direct.

Polly Mertens: 33:59

you know it’s very focused on the fitness, like go and do the workout or whatever, but it was required of me to build all the businesses I have built, to be contributing on these high performance teams in a professional way. Same thing, yeah, show up, be present, bring the goods. And sometimes I didn’t think I was worthy of being at those tables, of being in those opportunities, right. So I had to overcome those hurdles. Showing up was half the battle, right, and then understanding that I was worthy and I had something to contribute.

Samantha Pruitt: 34:34

Yeah, huge, and that was a mindset shift for you. Absolutely, I know it. I mean, you can’t go from getting yourself to do those things from you know a week before not getting yourself to do those things without a mindset shift. Yeah right, the story you started telling yourself is it’s worth it without a lot of sucking? Yeah, it’s worth it, I’m worth it. Something like the way you started talking to yourself change. In that enough moment and we’ve talked about those where you have those breakdowns you’re like I’m not going to live like this anymore. Oh yeah, so you know we’re talking about this from. You know some addiction, some.

Samantha Pruitt: 35:08

You know big turnarounds and stuff, but I think there’s also some let’s call it some smaller things and some other ways that I wanted to show you Daily actions. Yeah, so one of the things that I think we both agree, because I think my number one value is health and vitality. I think yours just seeing you in life is probably that with no it or not, and so I think that’s a perfect foundation and with when people don’t have a foundation of their health and their vitality and they put health as a secondary to other people, their job, whatever responsibility.

Polly Mertens: 35:44

It’s a losing proposition.

Samantha Pruitt: 35:45

Yeah, we’ve seen it over and over, we’ve done it and we’ve also seen it, yeah, so first, and foremost, I think you know, and you see this in little ways, we would call it the hangry moments that women, you know, like the hangries and stuff. It’s like if you’re not taking care of, you know, decent and healthful food, exercise, self-care, all of life is going to feel harder, right, and so it’s prioritizing yourself, putting yourself care in a place where you’re at the center of your little mini universe and you matter. And those are those little small wins you know. So, like we talked about, if you wanted to get in shape for a triathlon or a race or something, you’ve got to be in the gym lifting different body parts. You’ve got to get on the trail, you’ve got to get whatever. Get on the bike, do those little things. And the same thing is true with your self-care.

Samantha Pruitt: 36:30

Right so if you want the foundation of how you feel, because life is way harder. I think you’ve seen it with arc lines and you’ve seen it with the breakdown in your life of trying to manage and be emotionally fit in a life where you don’t feel good Impossible. Life is infinitely more challenging.

Polly Mertens: 36:50

Yeah, you get swallowed whole, yeah, yeah, and then you wonder why you’ve disappeared.

Samantha Pruitt: 36:54

So reprioritizing yourself, I think, is one of them. Another thing, and this goes to the work that I’ve studied with you know, understanding the mind and how our brains work and subconscious is actually choosing the environments we put ourselves in, and by environments I mean the people and the places that we physically put ourselves in. What do we put in our ears? What are we listening to? What are we watching on television? What are we reading? Who are we surrounding ourselves with? What does our environment look like? Feel like you know? Are we?

Polly Mertens: 37:26

Is it beating us down Right, or is it building us?

Samantha Pruitt: 37:29

up, yeah, and it’s choosing those. So finding people and places to either insert ourselves, remove ourselves or readjust who’s in our life and who we’re giving time to. And, yes, you can say no to those people that aren’t you know lighting you up. Like no, can’t talk to you now, Can’t see you right now, whatever.

Polly Mertens: 37:48

Yeah, and we’ve spoken a lot about I call it the A-Team analogy, right? But like building a team of people, when you decide you’re going to want to do something pretty epic and change your life which, by the way, you should all be deciding that right now you know, yes, build an A-Team of people. It can be a coach, it can be friends, it can be whatever that’s going to look like for you. One person, 10 people, whatever it is. You need to help facilitate that as well.

Samantha Pruitt: 38:10

Your everyday awesome team, right?

Polly Mertens: 38:13

Yes, we’re on it. You can call us. Let’s have a convo.

Samantha Pruitt: 38:18

I would say also something that I had a coach years ago help me with. So I look at life as energy and we can talk a lot about that, but we are naturally designed to be light beings and energy just flowing through us right. And then we walk out into the world and there’s a lot of friction and resistance and things that we pick up along the trail, and so one of the things I had a coach help me with was noticing, in small and big ways, the things that I was tolerating in my life, the little resistances that were creating friction in my energy field, and what that looked like very specifically was she said I want you to go home and write a list of 100 things in your home that you’re tolerating 100 things. I was like, yeah, I mean pick 20, whatever.

Samantha Pruitt: 39:03

This is why I want to live in a tiny house with some things, 100 things so I walked around room from room, little tiny chips of paint or the tile or the carpet had a stain on it or whatever. I didn’t like the faucet and the sink, whatever. And she’s like tackle the first 10. I knocked out 10. My energy went. I don’t know how to even explain this.

Polly Mertens: 39:23

Like I can’t.

Samantha Pruitt: 39:23

It’s fascinating. It went through the roof. I was so uplifted because I stopped looking at things that like just you know those irritants if you will.

Polly Mertens: 39:33

You know, what I love about this example that you’re giving is anybody could do this right now. Oh my gosh, just one of the 10 pain points. Yes, okay, because people, you know, have a lot of those. Let’s focus on 10, right, and so maybe we can eliminate one this week or even this month.

Samantha Pruitt: 39:52

Yeah, and you know that can even look like for me I’ve done this over and over again is we all have a drawer or a closet or a space in our car or something or a purse that is just filled with stuff we don’t need or is just out of balance, out of organization, overflowing, overwhelmed, something. So I love cleaning up drawers. It’s very indicative. I don’t know how it works.

Polly Mertens: 40:17

I love cleaning up lives.

Samantha Pruitt: 40:19

I’m thinking of the people, but this is people empowering themselves.

Polly Mertens: 40:22

Or the places. Yes, that’s true.

Samantha Pruitt: 40:24

So it’s like just find a drawer in your house, Find a closet and just like, take it, you know a drawer isn’t so overwhelming. I’m not saying like, rearrange your whole freaking house, Like a drawer you can tackle usually within an hour or two, right, and just pick that and see how you feel after just noticing, and you might find some things in there that I don’t know sparks some creativity, sparks some something else in your life. It’s paying attention to those areas of resistance.

Polly Mertens: 40:53

I hear a lot about people not being motivated, so I just want to drive home that point before we start to close here that people always say to me I’m just not motivated right.

Polly Mertens: 41:03

And they generally are coming from an athletic fitness perspective. So if there is a stuckness of the story, you’re telling yourself I am not motivated, right, you’re continuing to feed that cycle and taking that out into the world, but very, very simply unpacking that and doing away with that old frame of mind with some very simple daily things as well. Right, like so, maybe you can’t make a massive shift in your nutritional plan right now, or your exercise plan or your career path or the relationship that you’re in family dynamics, but, like you took this process, I’ll break it down to 10 things, right, but there’s one out of 10 things that you can absolutely change today.

Samantha Pruitt: 41:53

And another one I just want to throw in there because I can’t help myself and I won’t go into the studies that they have done on this, but just stop saying out loud the things that are frustrating you.

Samantha Pruitt: 42:03

Purely. You can have the thought, you can be frustrated with the thing, you can be upset, whatever, just don’t speak it. And there’s a lot of evidence and a lot of research as to how your subconscious mind hears what you say and speaks it into reality and speaks it into reality, believes it, it perpetuates it, etc. So if you do nothing else, just shut your mouth.

Polly Mertens: 42:22

You know what. Everybody knows. It’s because they have that friend that does that and you’re like I just can’t listen to that friend anymore, Don’t be the listening for somebody else’s.

Samantha Pruitt: 42:29

Don’t be that person. Yes, stop that, stop that, but stop it for yourself, like that is something it’s take. This is a muscle. Yes, this is a muscle. This is a muscle you can start to know. Stop speaking into your own ears things that you don’t like about yourself, whether people, the way the world is, whatever. Just stop it. Stop it. It’s okay if it lives inside of you. I had this go on recently where I said with my mom she was complaining a lot and I said why don’t you use your inside voice for those Inside your head?

Polly Mertens: 43:02

Not now. I hear my 80-year-old mother.

Samantha Pruitt: 43:04

Mom, could you please use your inside voice, Use your inside voice and tell yourself those things so I don’t have to hear them. It’s one thing right, and it’s a gift to the people around you when you stop repeating or reminding people of the things that are irritating you, it will you know.

Polly Mertens: 43:19

And then can you please call us so we can unpack that and have you eliminate that. Okay, we’re gonna wrap. So much more, so much more, so much more. What are some closing?

Samantha Pruitt: 43:25

thoughts.

Samantha Pruitt: 43:25

Well, I just want to say, if you remember, only one thing from this segment we didn’t say this, but I want to drive it home very succinctly, because all of this comes down to emotional state. Yes, right, so you deserve to feel good. So I would say you and I have a belief that your life is meant to feel good, and so just start practicing that, believing that Feeling good 99% of the time is a choice. So if you don’t feel good, adjust something Like Samantha’s talked about. Look at your strength, your endurance, your flexibility. As I’ve said, your state, your story or your you know, I’m sorry your story, your focus or your body. You can change those. So that’s.

Polly Mertens: 44:07

You deserve to feel good. You deserve to feel good. Well, remember, beautiful humans, how your life feels is way more important than how it looks, and again, you can choose to find your awesome in every day.

Samantha Pruitt: 44:21

Let’s do it.

Polly Mertens: 44:22

Thanks, lady.