Your natural style and rhythm is not a set routine but rather, a fluid response to your day.

Today’s Wisdom Bite about your natural style and rhythm, suggests that what’s natural for you already lives inside of you and is always trying to emerge in response to your day. It’s based on the uniqueness of your mind and body, and married with the reward system of your brain. It’s how you navigate the ever-changing variables of your life that affect your moment-to-moment choices. It’s best described as how you feel your way (vs. think or control your way) through those choices and as such, has a degree of trust and a sense of ease to it.

Your natural style and rhythm is not something you dictate, it’s something you discover…

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Here’s what you need to know

Your natural style and rhythm is not something you dictate, it’s something you discover and you discover it through exploration and experimentation. You can’t just adopt wholesale someone else’s eating style or their approach to movement. While that might work beautifully for them, you’re going to be white-knuckling it as you attempt to think or control your way to those same outcomes.

You’ll need to try many different solutions, break some rules and adapt (vs. adopt) only those pieces that work for you (e.g. do you love fruit and yogurt smoothies but hate spinach-induced green sludge? toss the spinach!) What will surface from all this is your natural style and rhythm – what you naturally look forward to and develop the desire to repeat.

Keep in mind too, there is no such thing as failure during the discovery process. There is only: stumbling as you discover what doesn’t work for you; stopping before you discover what does work for you; or defaulting to old patterns when your anxiety or stress levels exceed your capacity. Expect all of these as part of your growth process rather than labelling them as failures.

  • Don’t confuse what you have normalized with what’s truly natural for you. You may have normalized going long hours without a proper meal, eating to a point of physical discomfort or pushing a workout to a point of exhaustion but these are not natural behaviours. Force or extremes are indicative of those who are overriding their natural style and rhythm. Anytime you’re trying to do too much, too fast, too soon, you’re likely straying from what’s natural for you.
  • Be careful not to lock yourself into a routine. When trying to lose weight, do you zero in on what works for you and then get regimented and mechanical about it? Remember, you’re a human not a robot. The argument may be “I don’t have to think about it” but what you’re left with is an uninspiring list of to-do items lacking any real discovery or pleasure. When things are only getting checked off to negotiate some weight loss, you’ll end up seeking novelty or indulgences elsewhere.
  • Your natural style and rhythm evolves with you. As you learn to better manage your energy levels, what you believe to be true for your health will transform over the years. Your natural style and rhythm will deepen and expand to reflect this so stay open to all possibilities (e.g. that spinach might just make its way into your smoothies after all). Your natural style and rhythm also becomes fluid enough to handle day-to-day fluctuations or seasonal changes, and has enough momentum to withstand the occasional disappointment or even injury (both of which can bring unexpected setbacks that might otherwise derail you).

Your natural style and rhythm applies to your sleep, hydration, eating, movement, stress management – anything you want to make a part of your natural expression of health. Which means it’s also a natural expression of who you are at any given point in time. Learning how to let things unfold is a big part of this. Let your uniqueness navigate your own way and let your capacity determine your own pace.

Here’s what you can practice

What’s natural for you always begins with your current capacity. It emerges from Soul but never with the perfection and precision that Ego wants. You might like to be drinking 8 glasses of water a day but you can only manage 3-4 glasses. You might expect yourself to be exercising 60 minutes at a time but you can only fit in 20-30 minutes. Look for the sweet spot of Soul, the choice that has you doing just enough to stretch or satisfy yourself. When you feel excited to do these things rather than obligated, your capacity will naturally increase over time.

Scheduling things into your day (e.g. morning exercise) is great for getting some initial traction but be sure to open things up occasionally (e.g. change up the day, time or activity) to keep the behaviours fresh and to keep yourself present to them. The mind delights in variety and you’ll be pleasantly surprised to see pockets of time and energy open up for these behaviours that you didn’t anticipate.

Your natural style and rhythm relies on giving yourself full choice and pausing to check in with the ‘want’. It’s a liberating moment the first time you give your body the chance to consider that treat in front of you and it actually says “Nope, I’m good thanks.” It’s even more liberating when you’re able to do this in different situations and you begin to understand the ‘want’ is evolving in a positive way.

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How did it go for you?

Did you find that when you let go of your ‘musts’, ‘shoulds’ and ‘have tos’ in favour of “I wonder what would happen if…”, that your natural style and rhythm was able to emerge? It can only surface through choice, not control. Letting go of control opens you up to your discovery process.

Pick one of your liberating experiences and share it in the Members-Only Comments section below.

Tell us if this was a first for you, how you felt about it and the message it sends to yourself.

Be sure to check back in too, to let us know how it’s going!




Conscious Weight Loss®

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6 Comments

  1. Michelle Williamson

    As I read this Wisdom bite my inner voice kept saying “but I like checklist and checking things off – it gives me a feeling of accomplishment which I take pride in. Is this resistence? My strong GOLD coming through? Or perhaps regimes can work for me? Clearly some more Soul searching to do.

    Reply
    • Coach Kath

      Yes, Golds love their lists! We can all feel a sense of accomplishment checking things off. Nothing wrong with that. It’s only when checking something off becomes the main impetus for the behaviour – getting the gold star so to speak – that we can lose touch with feeling our way through our choices.

      Reply
  2. Bonnie Hillman

    “What’s natural for you already lives inside of you and is always trying to emerge in response to your day.” I feel like I am very in touch with what my soul and body want in the morning. As the day progresses, though, that connected feeling starts to ebb. I notice I start to push myself to do things, rather than feeling the urge from within. I realized I frequently judge myself for how I change through the day or even how I’ve changed through the years. There is a fear in giving myself full choice because what if I just keep choosing the “sit on the sofa” option? I love the idea that my natural style and rhythm evolve with me. That takes any judgment out of the changes that happen. Change/evolution is SUPPOSED to happen. It’s GOOD and something to be nurtured.

    Reply
    • Coach Kath

      That’s because we tend to grant ourselves a fresh start in the mornings! We lose that connected feeling by hanging on too tightly to our expectations of how things ‘must’, ‘should’ or ‘have to’ unfold during the day. Pushing yourself to do things to then match those expectations you carry is trying to control your way to an outcome, where you judge any deviation from that outcome unkindly. Kindness and choice are not license to “sit on the sofa”; they’re just an invitation to engage without the mental clutter.

      Reply
  3. Tara

    This one resonated so deeply with me it brought tears to my eyes. Until this point in my coaching journey with Kathy and my life path, although I had a soul inkling, I was not truly aware of how much my natural style and rhythm had been subverted, in favour of shoulds and musts and have to. I now realize that script was adopted over time from my childhood forward due to parental influences, societal dictates, internal methods of coping etc.
    I’m excited to know that finding my natural style and rhythm is the path to freedom through choice and expression that is grounded in self trust, self-love and ease. So excited to lean into soul and start the exciting discovery process of grounding myself in my natural style and rhythm. And I love the words ‘my natural style and rhythm’ – it’s really just an expression of who I am – such simple truths but yet so powerful. Once again thank you Kathy you magical unicorn.

    Reply
    • Coach Kath

      Those are Soul tears, Tara. That’s how you know you’re heading in the right direction with your learning and evolution.

      Reply

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