Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. Oh, dear. It is the last vlog of 2024. Not only that, but this year, Christmas falls on a Wednesday, and so this vlog is coming out on Christmas Day, and you may or may not celebrate Christmas. For most people that will receive this vlog, December 25th feels not like any other day. Maybe not for everybody. I know there's people in our community who don't follow the Gregorian calendar, so this isn't actually even the end of the year for them. And there are plenty of people who will be celebrating Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Solstice, any number of other things. There are a lot of traditions though, around this time of year, and a lot of opportunity for reflection. The majority of the world's population, not all of it, obviously, but the majority lives in the Northern Hemisphere where it gets darker this time of year, and there's a feeling of hibernation and reflection for a lot of us. I live in a place where it snows, and it gets really quite dark this time of year.
And January 1st is coming up, which is for a lot of people a time when they start to think about losing weight, turning over a new leaf, getting their act together again, finally, and certainly people who are attracted to a Bright Line Eating? vlog would be more likely than average to be in that camp. And so, I've been thinking about a couple things to talk about in this vlog. One is the reality that we do have a really fun, educational, informative, community building event planned that's starting really soon. We gave it a really wonderful cheesy name. It's called, "Come Alive, Lose the Weight and Thrive in 2025." It's going to consist of is four live workshops. These are going to be live Masterclasses, and it's the same one. It's just repeated four times. So, hopefully one of those dates and times will work for you so you can be there live, and what we're going to talk about is Come Alive, Lose the Weight and Thrive in 2025, which has different components. "Come alive," which is what I'm going to talk about in this vlog, actually "lose the weight." How do we do that? And what is "thriving" from a scientific perspective? What leads to thriving? How do we thrive? What are the habits that lead to thriving? And how can you make 2025 your year?
I'm going to mention, and I guess I'll mention now, there's a link below this vlog if you want to see if you can register for one of those live workshops. My team hustled, thank you, Bright Line Eating Team, and got the registration page ready for when this vlog gets released. You can register. So, click and see if one of those live workshop times works for you. There's some before the new year, some after the new year, but they're all kind of huddled right around the January 1st. New year. I hope you'll join me. They're going to be fun, and each one will be done entirely fresh, entirely live, and I'll be doing live q and a for each one. It'll be a time to spend some time together and reflect on the end of one year and the start of a new year.
For this vlog about that theme "Come Alive." Come alive. I was thinking about that. I value aliveness hugely, hugely. As a matter of fact, when I look back on my life, I can see that I've done a lot of things that maybe wouldn't have made sense to other people, maybe would've seemed like dumb ideas or a lot to sacrifice for something like, why would you do that or, yeah, just because it made me feel alive. I noticed a long time ago that I mostly don't feel alive. I mostly feel like I'm sleepwalking through life. I'm mostly in a fuzzy fugue state of somewhere in the realm of automaticity and daydream and non-conscious is what it actually feels like to be alive most of the time. And so, things that make me come alive are rare, valuable, wonderful, and interesting in that why aren't I online and alive most of the time? Why am I sleeping through this amazing experience of life? I got a lot of thoughts about it.
First of all, it strikes me in my experience that aliveness happens at either end of a continuum. The continuum might be something like habits, automaticity, excitement, danger, and on one end of the continuum, when things are scary, novel, new, outlandish out there, I feel more alive. So, if I'm jumping out of an airplane, I feel alive. If I'm riding a motorcycle at 120 miles an hour, I feel alive. If I'm traveling in a different country, a place that I am completely unfamiliar with, I have way more moments where I feel really alive than average. If someone I just care about hugely just died, I feel more alive. If my heart's been broken, I feel more alive. If I'm falling in love, I feel more alive. If things are really hard, I feel more alive. If I'm watching a beautiful sunset, I feel more alive. On the other end of the continuum are these moments of stillness and absolute nondescript emptiness. Maybe I'm meditating, maybe it's just a regular Tuesday afternoon and I'm getting in the car and driving to get groceries. If I'm peaceful and centered, an aliveness can be born in that moment that is soft and rounded, empty and full all at the same time. If my life is a series of days of habit stacks and routine and automaticity, I can find that I have a lot of those moments. There's a bursting of gratitude in that feeling of aliveness, and it's really a presenced awareness. That's a phrase that my friend Linden coined, she's my Mastermind Maven, Linden, "presenced awareness."
I find it really interesting that aliveness can exist in these two completely polar opposite states, right, of wild chaos and utter stillness. I want to tell you a little story about aliveness. It has to do with a guy named Marshall Goldsmith, who I know I've mentioned on the vlog, but it's probably been a long time. You might not know who he is. He's a super famous dude, but probably not that famous to the average person who watches the Bright Line Eating vlog, more famous to young bucks going out and getting their MBA. Marshall Goldsmith is the sort of paragon exemplar of a successful CEO coach. He's written a bunch of bestselling books. I think one of the early seminole ones was "What Got You Here Won't Get You There." He gives keynote talks at Fortune 50 companies, and he is the coach to CEOs of big Fortune 10, Fortune 50, Fortune 500 companies, most celebrated CEO coach in the world. One of his more recent books was actually on habits, and it's called "Triggers, "good book, New York Times bestselling book. Anyway, I didn't have any connection to Marshall Goldsmith, but someone on my publishing team of the first book, "Bright Line Eating," knew Marshall Goldsmith quite well. And as we were talking about who to ask for endorsements for the back jacket of the book, "Bright Line Eating," his name came up and I said, I don't think I could get Marshall Goldsmith. And they said, well, I know him really well. Let me see if I could ask him. I said, oh, thank you. That's amazing. They sent him my book and he loved it. He loved it. He said, oh, if anyone's got a food issue, this is the book they should be reading. This is exactly the type of system that creates pure behavior change, like sustained effective behavior change. He said, absolutely. I'll write an endorsement for this book. I love this system. This is great. And as part of that, it was hugely flattering, of course. And as part of that, I got to talk with him on the phone for an hour, hour and a half, one day I just called him up to say thank you.
We got to talking, and he's a very down to earth guy, and he just wanted to talk about habits and behavior change and human growth and potential and tell me he loved my book. And then we talked about habits, and he told me his system, so it might've changed since then. But at the time, his system, this was gosh, 2016, probably eight years ago, his system was that he always made sure that he was tracking a certain number of variables that mattered to him that he wanted to improve in, and maybe as few as four, maybe as many as 10. But he said, the sweet spot is around 6, 5, 6, 7 variables that you want to improve in that will change your life immeasurably for the better if you can optimize your execution and your performance on these variables. What he did is he made sure that he made it numerical, like he gave himself a score maybe out of one to 10 or one to a hundred, a percentage, something like that, so that every day he tracked how he did on each of those variables, and he gave himself a score, and then he paid someone, he paid someone to call him at a certain time the next morning to hear his scores from the day before. He was always accountable for how he was doing. And the one he wanted to talk to me about was he said the most important one for him, the one that most lit him up, the one that he cared most about. It was quite simply, how much of the time during that day was he alive? Was he actually there paying attention online for what was happening? He said that he measured it as a percentage. What percentage of the day was he present? Then he told me something I will never forget till the day I die. He said, I usually get about 3%, once I got 10%. It's the best I've ever done. But usually it's like 3%. On a good day, I get 5%. My brain just exploded. I guess it was something about the humility that he had to admit that. I guess also the humility and what else? Just I guess what it takes to be so lit up by pursuing something that you're failing at so miserably to still be excited about pursuing excellence in a variable that you can't even get better than five to 10% at. I think that that just floored me. It floored me. Also, because the minute he said it, I knew it was true, it confirmed something that I've always known, which is that I'm mostly not here. I'm mostly sleepwalking through this life. The way he was able to just normalize that there was so little, like no judgment or self-recrimination or shame to him, that was just kind of obvious.
We all know that we're not really here. We all notice that. So, when I say, "Come Alive," come alive, it's I guess an acknowledgement that aliveness is a very precious commodity. We don't get very much of it in our life, and anything we can do to optimize it, maximize it, improve it, is worth pursuing. What I know for me as a recovering food addict, as someone who lives Bright these days, I don't have a prayer of being truly alive. If I'm in the sugar and flour, not a prayer, because I'm just obsessed with when I'm going to get more. I'm filled with shame about what I ate. I'm numb from the food that I just ate, and it's all the soupy, morass, foggy bog of what I've eaten or not eaten, whether I'm on my plan or off my plan. What am I going to do to get back on track? Not only am I not alive, but I'm plagued by gremlins of non-presence disease. It's terrible. So, if you want to Come Alive and Lose the Weight and Thrive in 2025, click below. Check out if there are any times and days that we figured out for our calendar of four live events that work for you. Again, it's the same live event held four times, and I invite you into 2025 thinking about what it would mean to really optimize this experience of being alive. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
