You Can Do Hard Things (When You Start Disgustingly Easy)

Bec Cameron: Hey guys, and welcome back to Disgustingly Easy, the podcast for the long game. And welcome back is right. It has been a minute, a few minutes actually. We took a little break and by took a little break, I mean the hyper focus that powered me through twice weekly episodes finally tapped me on the shoulder and was like, we can't keep doing this. So here we are with season two, new rhythm, ⁓ pod every two weeks. That's the plan. And okay, I say plan in air quotes because if you've been here a while, you'll know there is absolutely going to be a week where I'll be talking to the long game members and a thought will fly into my head that I'll have to record an emergency bonus episode because if I don't, I will explode. That's just the deal we have. But the structure I'm building, disgustingly easy on this season, is fortnightly every two weeks because that's what's sustainable for me now, which weirdly is going to be a bit on theme for today's episode. And in case you're wondering, yes, I missed you. Inside the long game for the past few months, we've been implementing a new structure where we're running monthly themes to provide an anchor or a focus. And it has been such a beautiful thing. Each month we dial in to one big idea and we build everything around it. The calls, the coaching, the workshops, the forum conversations, all of it. And this month's theme is I can do hard things. And tell you what, it's already creating a ripple effect through the team as women are dropping in to let us know where they pushed a little bit harder, overcame an internal objection, actually stepped into their potential and we're barely even halfway into the month. And I know, I know what you're thinking, Bec, this podcast is called Disgustingly Easy. Your whole brand is built off the don't push, don't grind, don't white knuckle. And now you're telling me the theme of the month is I can do hard things. Stay with me. This is the thing I want you to walk away with today. You cannot do hard things if you don't start disgustingly easy. That's it. That's the whole sentence. Let me say it again. You cannot do hard things if you don't start disgustingly easy. Because here's what I see happen. All of the time a woman will come into my world usually a neurodivergent millennial mum 30s or 40s late diagnosed because thank you very much patriarchy, usually tired in a way that goes bone deep. And she says some version of Bec, I'm so done starting and stopping. This time I just want to do it properly. I can do hard things. I'm ready. And the energy is gorgeous. mean, ⁓ chef's kiss. The intention is there, heavily backed by some ADHD, dopamine driving behaviors, and sometimes a desperate need to be away from where she currently is in her relationship with her body. But if I let her run with that energy, I know exactly what happens based off experience. She designs a week that would humble most Olympic athletes because when neurodivergent babes try their hardest, they do it in the most literal sense. She lasts six, maybe nine days, and then there's a sick kid, a bad night's sleep. PMS, sensory overload, husband traveling, one thing tips and the whole stack collapses because the identity she's trying to create is built on an all or nothing approach. and an all-or-nothing approach with too much built in. And then she lands somewhere worse than where she was when she started because now she has more evidence that she is the problem. That's not hard things. That's the restart cycle in a trench coat flashing you from the bushes pretending to be hard things. Hard things is the version of you who's still doing this in November. Hard things is the woman who's been training twice a week for six months and is present to the fact that she might want to go harder right now, but her lifestyle or her energy levels don't allow. Hard things isn't day one. Babe, hard things is week 30. And the only way you're going to get to week 30 is by starting in a way that you can survive week one. Okay, so let me give you the framework piece. This is what I teach inside the long game and it's the thing I lean on every time I have a new member join us. Because discussing the easy isn't just a slogan, it's like a sequencing principle. It's a philosophy. It says habits first, then confidence, then capacity, and then intensity. In that order and always in that order. Mainstream fitness gets you to chase intensity. On day one, they sell you the 12 week shred, the 75 HARD the new program with the cool name and the aesthetic PDF or a nice app. And the reason it doesn't work for most women and definitely not for neurodivergent nervous systems is because they're trying to give you intensity before you've built any capacity and capacity before you've built any confidence. And all of that to a woman who's usually operating in a deficit. and has left things until she's burnt out, tapped out, and too overwhelmed to really commit to that level of work. It's backwards. You cannot lift heavy if you've never lifted light. You cannot train four times a week if you can't get yourself to go to the gym once. You cannot do hard things if you haven't done easy things consistently enough to know that you are someone who actually follows through. That last one's a kicker. Most of the women I work with don't have a discipline problem. They have a self-trust problem. They have a system problem. Years of starting and not finishing has taught their brain, well, we don't do what we say we're going to do. And that's the loop. And no amount of pushing harder can fix that. You actually have to do the small thing you said you were going to do and then do it again and then do it again until your brain goes, ⁓ wait, we do follow through. Look at that. That's what Disgustingly Easy is for. Disgustingly Easy is like a self-trust factory. And if you know me and you know my background and my geeking out over human behaviors, here's something that your fitfluencer with a BBL selling booty bands won't be able to articulate. For a neurodivergent brain and especially a mum running on broken sleep, sensory overwhelm, the cognitive load of remembering whose library book is due or when the excursions are, their reward system is wired differently. Dopamine doesn't release in the same ways and the future you will be so proud of you for doing this, That doesn't pull as hard for us. We need the win. We need it to be immediate. We need the feedback to be close to the action. We need to feel the dopamine of it now, not eight weeks from now when the photos look different and hello, we need more than just an ascetic goal to drag our asses into our best lives. When you design a plan that is too big, the reward is too far away. The cost ⁓ is right now. energy, time, executive functioning, asking your family to shift and change their priorities, the sheer demand of doing the thing. And the payoff is in three months, you'll see results. Your nervous system does that math and goes, yeah, nah. That's not laziness. That's your nervous system protecting you from overspending when you're already in debt. This is the equation I want you to remember. Perceived discomfort versus perceived reward. If the discomfort is higher than the reward, You will quit every time. It doesn't matter how aesthetic the planner is or how inspiring the coach is or how much you want it. If the cost the perceived reward, a lot of the time you will abandon the plan. But when the plan is disgustingly easy, the math flips. The cost is tiny. The action is over so fast you almost didn't have time to dread it. And then the reward, the little, ⁓ it. I did it. That hit comes within minutes. And that's the loop I want you to reinforce. Tiny cost, immediate reward, repeat. This is how you build momentum and motivation in a neurodivergent system, not through willpower, through engineered wins. And this matters double for neurodivergent moms, because most of you are not starting from zero. Like I said, you're starting from a deficit, from burnout, from a postpartum body that's probably not gotten enough love, care, support that hasn't been held. in the ways it should be by a culture that disregards women's labor, you don't get to skip that. You can't pretend that deficit isn't there. You have to start where you actually are. And where you actually are needs the bar set low. Not because you're weak, you are so far from it, but because you're depleted and depleted bodies need to be re-resourced before they can be pushed to their limits. If it helps, let's layer a little bit of NLP on top of that because I love a little bit of NLP. In NLP, we talk about evidence procedures. So your brain is gathering evidence about you are. Am I someone who follows through? Am I someone who quits? Am I consistent? Am I flaky? And it uses recent behaviors ⁓ to decide what you believe about yourself. The problem is most of us are walking around with a giant pile of evidence stacked high that says, I'm a big fat quitter. And every abandoned program, every uncompleted challenge, every gym membership that quietly became a direct debit of shame, it's all in the file. To change that identity, you have to change the evidence. And you can't change the evidence by doing something huge once. Your brain writes that off as a fluke, a spike, a once off. You change the evidence by doing something small. repeatedly until the file starts filling up with a new story. I'm someone who goes for a walk after dinner. I'm someone who does three sets even on her bad days. I'm someone who shows up. That's where we get identity level change. It's quiet. It's not as rah rah or drama. It doesn't look like a before and after and it's the kind of change that lasts. And it only happens for neurodivergent women when you build it on a foundation of disgustingly easy because if the action is too big, You can't do it consistently. And if you can't do it consistently, your brain doesn't get the evidence. And without the new evidence, the identity doesn't shift. And without the identity shift, you're back in the restart cycle by Tuesday. Disgustingly easy is the access point. It's the on-ramp to every hard thing you actually want to do. Okay. So how do you know if something is genuinely disgustingly easy? This is a really good question, especially for those in the black and white camp of thinking. This is where most people get it wrong. So, so wrong. and I talk about to everyone who comes into the long game, because it often leads to false starts, which can further reinforce that negative evidence loop. Moderately easy and disgustingly easy are the same thing. Your capability does not factor in here. What you could do if you push yourself is irrelevant. What you want to do in order to convince yourself that you're finally going to become the person who achieves the thing and looks like blah, blah, blah, because you're so uncomfortable with the current version of yourself that you're trying to escape it is not what we're doing here. And there is an element the hard in rejecting all the things you think you need to do in order to build up the tolerance for all the things you want to do. Disgustingly easy is the goal. I'll just do three workouts instead of four is not disgustingly easy. That's still negotiating. That's still pushing. That's still you trying to sneak in the version of the plan that your nervous system has already been trying to tell you that it can't sustain yet. Here are my actual tests as to whether or not something is disgustingly easy. This might be a good one to write down. Test one. It should be so easy. You don't want to tell anyone about it. Like you'd be embarrassed for your sister-in-law who's a posh Pilates princess to know how small you're starting. If you've got that little flicker of, my God, that's so pathetic, congratulations, you're in the right zone. Test two, when you're thinking about doing it, you scoff, you roll your eyes a little, like that's it, that's the plan, yeah babe, that's the plan. Test three, the idea of not completing it is kind of laughable, like it would be almost more effort to skip it than it would be, that's the bar. you're planning to walk for 30 minutes after dinner and your brain goes, ⁓ I don't really want to do that. That's not disgustingly easy. That's still too big. Disgustingly easy is ⁓ going to walk around the block one night this week and then I'm going to tick it off. Disgustingly easy is I'm going to go to the gym and just go on the treadmill for five minutes instead of even doing a workout. Disgustingly easy is ⁓ set of exercises instead of the three prescribed sets. I am being serious. That is how small, that is how easy I want you to start. And here's the magic. Once you've been doing the laughably small thing for a few days, for a few weeks, something happens. You start chomping at the bit. You start wanting more. You start adding more in without me having to make you. That's when you expand from a place that genuinely wants expansion, not a place that's forcing you because it thinks it will make you whole. You do not expand because the calendar says it's week three. You expand because your nervous system is asking for it from overflow, not from pressure. That's the whole game. All right. steps because. I know you, you want to walk away with something to actually do. This week, I want you to one, pick the one area you're going to focus on for the next four weeks. One, not three, food, sleep, water, morning routine. Pick one. Two, decide what the disgustingly easy version of that looks like. If you need to run through the criteria of disgustingly easy, rewind this pod, listen to it again. Are you embarrassed with me how small it is? Do you scoff? is not doing it laughable, tick, tick, tick, good. That's the one. Three, do it. do it again. Then do it again. Don't add anything. Don't optimize. Don't get clever. Forget the hacks. Just keep doing the tiny thing, but make sure that you find a way to tick it off and acknowledge what you've done. Because four, we're going to notice the evidence accumulating. Notice what your brain starts saying about you. Notice the wanting more energy when it shows up. And five, Only then, only when it's coming from overflow, do you expand. That's the strategy. That's how we do things for the long game. And this is how you do hard things. Okay. Last thing before I let you go. And this is the bit I really want you to listen to because there's a window here and I don't want you to miss it. If you're listening along and your brain is going tick, tick, tick, and this all makes so much sense to you. I would love to actually sit down and plot this out. and create all of this live on a call together. I'm running a free workshop. It's called Easy On Purpose, how neurodivergent moms show up for their health without white-knuckling it. It's 60 minutes. It's free. It's live. There will be a replay and it's happening 7 p.m. on Thursday, the 28th of May, Melbourne time. It is for you if you have started five different fitness plans this year and each one died in the ass around week two. It's for you if you've started thinking that the problem is you. your discipline, your willpower, your motivation. It's for you if you're ready to stop trying to bend your delicate nervous system into a model or a system that was never built for it. In this workshop, we're going to walk through the three patterns that keep neurodivergent women stuck. The ones I've seen replay over and over and over, having more than 60 women now through the long game. We're going to start plotting out your four week focus plan and I'm going to show you the frameworks I use with every client inside the long game. including the disgustingly easy piece that we just talked about, but I'll expand into how you actually design your week around it. To register for the workshop, jump across to Insta and DM me the word easy, just E-A-S-Y. I couldn't make it any easier than that. ⁓ And I will send you the registration link. I am only this workshop once this year. So if you've spent this entire episode nodding, this is your sign. Send the DM, grab your spot. And remember, you can do hard things. You just have to start disgustingly easy. It's the on-ramp, it's the segue. nervous system strategy that you need. I hope you loved this. I'm so happy to be back. Don't forget to share your favorite snips to socials. Tag me at Beckhamrincoach _ AU. Like, comment, subscribe, wherever you like to listen from. And remember, when nothing is certain, anything is possible. You've got this and I've got you.