Personal Growth From the Bottom Up – BroderickDurisseau.com
A Blog Dedicated to Personal Growth, Success and Goal Achievement

I’ve been trying to lose weight for a long time. I started gaining excess weight about 15 years ago and ever since I’ve been trying to reach the ideal weight for my age and height. I’ve tried lots of diets. Tried purely exercising it off. Thought about surgery. Stopped trying to lose weight all together. Started trying again. Lost weight. Gained it back.

I stayed on this cycle until my counselor said something that totally shifted my life in a new direction.

Advice from a Counselor

When I came off the semester with straight F’s, I went to see a college counselor for depression and she told me something that would impact me for the rest of my life.

She asked me what I thought was causing my depression. I told her it was all the extra weight. I went on and on about different weight loss programs and diets that I had tried and told her that nothing I did was working.

After I was done rambling on and on about weight loss, she gave me some advice. She said, “How bout we take the focus off of weight loss and focus more on being healthy”.

As soon as she said that it really got me thinking.

Shifting Focus

This was such a simple sentence but I can see now it was absolutely necessary. Living a truly healthy lifestyle would take a lot more work in the beginning than just trying to lose weight, but it would be a long-term solution. A focus on health and wellness would take into account my environment, thoughts, emotions, eating habits, exercise habits, sleeping habits, energy level, stress level, awareness level, etc. It would force me to take time and truly evaluate what’s healthy and what’s not. It would be a change to who I am on the inside and shifting focus might even force me to address the reasons why I started gaining excess weight in the first place and why it’s been so difficult to get off this weight loss roller coaster.

Where “Weight Loss” Can Take You

If you’re trying to lose weight focusing on weight loss alone can take you to many different places you might not want to go – especially if you watch television. When I watched TV, I noticed that there were tons of commercials and ads trying to cash in on weight loss. Seemed like every news station, commercial, or sitcom had something to say about weight loss. I didn’t really see that much on holistic health (maybe because I wasn’t really looking for it). “Lose that 20 pounds you’ve been trying to lose for years!” or “We’ll guarantee weight loss!” with this pill, that new diet, this new program, that surgery.

I am not saying that those won’t help you lose weight. I lost weight on the Atkins Diet. I’ve heard of several other different diets and people having weight loss success while on them. I lost weight in Weight Watchers. I lost 40 pounds by just walking 2 or 3 hours a day and eating whatever I wanted and I’ve learned a lot from all those attempts. However, when I got clear and detailed about what I really wanted, it didn’t end at weight loss. I wanted to be more energetic. I wanted to be a more positive and productive person. I wanted to not have to worry and feel guilty over what I was eating, but I still wanted the food to taste good. I wanted to decrease my stress level as much as possible. I wanted to be muscular. I wanted weight loss to happen naturally as a result of living a healthy lifestyle. I wanted change that would work for the long run.

A Focus on Health

Focusing on health has already led me down a different path. It’s crazy to think how that one sentence changed the whole direction of my life. When I was focused on weight loss I found the Atkins Diet (and other diets), tried purely exercising all the calories off I ate, Weight Watchers, different doctors, possible surgeries. When I was focused on good health I found books that got to the heart of issues and I found articles on blogs with practical advice. I found the truth about processed carbs, refined sugar, and fast food. I joined a gym and hired a personal trainer. I found out that there are people that actually eat 100% raw foods. I bought books on productivity, cash flow, spirituality, achievement and success. I found authors like Deepak Chopra, Stephen Covey, Tony Robbins, Eckhart Tolle – all authors who paint holistic pictures of life in their work. It’s like a whole new world has opened up.

If you think about it, it makes sense. If you’re overweight and you want different results you would have to take different actions. Many people already know that so there next move is to “go on a diet”. But when you “go on a diet” that’s a signal for a temporary change. After I lost the 40 pounds I gained it right back when my environment changed because I had not changed on the inside. That’s why there wasn’t any long-term success. You could say I didn’t lay the foundation so whenever I built something on top if it I might have some success, but eventually things came crashing down every time. This could be a possible reason people go up and down with weight. They change something about the way they eat or their exercise habits but can’t sustain it because it wasn’t meant to be a permanent change in the first place, so they go back to their comfort zone and lose all the progress they made OR they spend a lot of time and stress trying to “keep the weight off”.

Health and The Law of Attraction

It also makes sense if you’re using the Law of Attraction. When using the Law of Attraction, the first step is to ask for what you want and to be clear and precise about it and focus on that. If you constantly focusing on weight loss, “weight” is constantly being run over and over again in your mind and you will attract it. You attract more of what you don’t want because your thoughts are on weight.

If you’ve been trying to lose weight and you’re frustrated with the weight loss see-saw, I would encourage you to take your focus off of losing weight or weight loss and focus on being healthy. It doesn’t seem like that much of a change, but the results can be tremendous.

Let’s just say I’ve watched a lot of videos lol. Here’s a list of the ones I felt needed to be seen. I’ll be updating this as I see more videos I like.

Health

Paul Chek’s Channel

Underground Wellness Channel

Daphne Miller discusses her book, “The Jungle Effect” 51:54

Gary Null: Change Your Life 59:58

Deepak Chopra Interview Part 1 11:51

Deepak Chopra Interview Part 2 10:33

Super Size Me (Movie) 1:39:20

Success and Business

Stephen Covey: Choosing Success 3:00

Bob Proctor: Belief Systems 6:59

Brian Tracy: Wealth, Happiness and Doing What you Love 2:10

Brian Tracy: Personal Development and Attracting Success 3:09

Brian Tracy Explains His Journey From Rags to Riches 2:24

Brian Tracy: Persistence, Entrepreneurs and Millionaires 2:39

Jack Canfield: Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for What You Want 0:57

Jack Canfield: Personal Power 1:19

Jack Canfield: The Success Principles 5:06

Jack Canfield: How To Get Rich 1:07

Jack Canfield: Finding A Mentor 1:24

Earvin “Magic” Johnson discusses his book, “32 Ways to Be a Champion in Business” 1:02:16

Time Management

David Allen: Getting Things Done 45:52

Randy Pausch Lecture: Time Management 1:16:22

Freedomain Radio: Procrastination 30:47

Inspirational

Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address 15:04

Oprah Winfrey’s 2008 Stanford Commencement Address 29:54

Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams 1:16:27

Humor

Christian Lander discusses his book, “Stuff White People Like” 48:24

A very important lesson I’ve learned on this path of personal growth is that the different areas of life are connected and that they support each other. Segmenting one area out like your health or your finances and working on it alone is difficult if the other areas aren’t there for support.

A Personal Story

When I first decided to jump into this field of personal growth, I asked myself “where do I start?” I decided to start with my health seeing as that was the area that I felt could use the most improvement and it was completely dragging everything else down. It would probably be a lot easier for me to do anything else if I weren’t carrying all this extra weight around everywhere.

I joined a nearby gym and hired a personal trainer for six sessions for an hour each session. Everything went great. The gym had lots of people helping, it was walking distance from my apartment, I had a great trainer with a very positive attitude and I learned a lot from him. The gym had all the equipment I needed and was a nice hang out spot too. I felt good both physically and emotionally. I felt like I was on the right path. I finished the sessions and went to the gym consistently for another month before everything came crashing down.

During this time, I really wanted to eating more empowering foods, so I started preparing my own stuff. This is where things started getting out of whack. I wanted to eat healthier but I didn’t exactly know what “healthier” was so I would mainly eat fish and salads. Needless to say, I eventually I got bored with that. The biggest problem was that I plain ran out of left over student loan money so there was no more personal trainer, no more gym membership and no apartment, so I moved back in with parents.

Lessons Learned

What did that teach me? That I need food variety. That when you want to disconnect from something you don’t want (unhealthy foods) you should connect with something you do want (healthy alternatives) and use that as a replacement.

Of course, the most important lesson I learned was that cash flow is critical. Somehow I had made myself think that I could keep up that lifestyle with no consistent income coming in. Lesson learned.

The Truth, Love, and Power Model

You can see this pretty clearly if you’re consciously aligning yourself with Truth, Love, and Power. You’ll see that you can’t isolate one of these three parts and hope the other two will follow along or magically be where you want. For instance, it might Courage (subset of Power) to connect with something you want (Love).

Life as a Rope

You could view life as a rope. That rope is as strong as the intertwined spiral of smaller fibers that it is made of. Each fiber on the rope represents a different area of life. When all the fibers are in harmony it creates a strong spiral (the rope) which you can climb up. However, if any part of that rope is weak or just isn’t there, it affects the whole rope. The whole rope is weaker therefore making it less stable. It might just break altogether while you’re trying to climb up, leaving you falling to the ground.

What you eat affects your productivity. Your productivity affects your cash flow. Your cash flow affects your lifestyle. Your lifestyle affects your stress level. Your stress level affects your productivity. We could go on for days like this.

Is there an area of your life you want to change? Is there another part of your life that’s keeping you from improving it or hindering you in some way?

I want to adjust the way I blog. Although I feel everything I’ve said thus far has been true, I find myself getting stuck writing articles from a top-down, teacher-student way. I want to write articles that are in-depth, true, and that are helpful to anyone who reads them. I also want the articles to be based on my own experiences which is why I’m getting stuck. I’ve only had a limited amount of experience in the field of personal growth myself. Though I think we’ve all experienced some type of growth, I decided to consciously pursue personal growth only about 6 months ago, so I’m by no means a “guru” and I don’t want to be a “guru” anyway. Also, when I started on this path I felt like I was starting at the bottom.

The Problogger Way

There are so many things I want to write about, but I haven’t written about them because they’re not articles that would fit into the top-down, teacher-student flow of the blog as it is now. The question that kept repeating in my mind was “how can I create valuable content even though I have limited experience in what I’m blogging about?” As I’m reading the book Problogger by Darren Rowse and Chris Garret, I notice they address this topic specifically by stating that

a better approach for someone just starting out in a niche with little experience would be to start up a blog on the topic that is open about that they do and don’t know, and that will document their own learning experience on the topic rather than claiming to know it all and be able to teach others.

This was exactly what I needed, and I want to take that approach with this blog. It also helped me shift my mindset. Maybe being a beginner can be an advantage? If I’m actually experiencing a problem, I know it can be helpful to readers if I’m writing about it while in the midst of it and ultimately when it’s solved. It’s great to know that I don’t have to wait until I know more about a subject to write articles about it or abandon blogging about growth altogether. Either way I wouldn’t abandon the field itself. I absolutely love personal growth and development and I can see myself consciously pursuing personal growth for the rest of my life, even if I wasn’t blogging about it.