110. How to Start Changing Your Life in 30 Days (Without Burning Out)

Holly Toscanini: going to ask you a question and I want you to answer honestly even if the answer is a little embarrassing. How many times have you decided to change something about your life, felt genuinely motivated about it for maybe four to ten days, and then quietly let it dissolve kind of back into your normal routine? Not because you're lazy and not because you didn't care, but because the version of change that you signed up for was enormous and enormous is exhausting and exhausting leads to a very reasonable decision to stop. Now, most of us have been taught that real change requires a total commitment, a new identity, a complete overhaul, the whole new year, new you energy that demands you transform everything at once and sustain it indefinitely, or it just doesn't count. Now that model doesn't work for most people, and it especially doesn't work for midlife women who were already carrying a full life and just don't have a lot of spare energy to throw at dramatic reinvention. So today we're trying something different. We're designing a 30-day experiment, not a resolution and not a transformation, a test, low pressure, specific and built around your actual life. Welcome back to How to Lose the Weight. I'm Holly Toscanini and this is the show all about all the ways we've been taught to put our own lives on hold and what it actually looks like to stop doing that. Now today's episode is another practical one. We are going to build something together, a 30 day unweighting experiment that you can actually finish without burning out, without losing momentum on day six and without feeling like you failed if it doesn't go perfectly. So here's what we're covering today. why 30-day experiments work better than open-ended resolutions, how to choose the one focus area that matters most to you right now, the three types of actions to mix together so the experiment feels sustainable instead of punishing, and how to track what's happening in a way that builds self-trust rather than feeding your inner critic. And at the end, I'll point you towards the Unwaiting Quickstart, a short mini course I created to help you pick your focus and your first couple of actions. before you begin. Now think of it as the pre-work that sets the whole experiment up. Now the word resolution has a particular "wait to it. When you make one, you're implicitly making a permanent declaration about who you're going to be from that moment on. And that permanence is exactly what makes resolution so hard to keep. the moment you slip, even just a little bit, it doesn't have to feel like a bad day. It feels like you failed the whole thing. And experiment Well, it's different because an experiment has a built-in end date, a specific question you're testing, and permission to learn from what just doesn't work. You're not declaring a new identity, you're running a trial. And trials like this don't fail, they just generate information. And 30 days is long enough to actually notice something is changing. But it's short enough that your nervous system doesn't panic at the commitment. It's also contained enough that when life gets messy, because it will, you can get back to it without feeling like you've ruined everything. Now, there's something else about the 30-day frame that I think matters specifically for the women listening to this show, because a lot of you have a complicated relationship with commitment, particularly with commitments you make to yourself. You've set goals before and not followed through, and that history is sitting in the background, quietly telling you, don't even bother. A 30 day experiment lowers the stakes just enough to make starting possible again. It's not, I'm gonna change my life. It's, I'm gonna try something for 30 days and see what I learn. That's a promise you can keep. And keeping it even imperfectly is how you start to repair the self trust that got eroded somewhere along the way. Now, one more thing. This experiment isn't about doing It's about doing one thing differently with attention and intention for 30 days. If anything, it might mean doing less in some areas. So you have room to do this one thing with more consistency. Now we're not adding to an already full plate. We're just making a small clearing on that plate. The most common mistake people make when designing any kind of personal experiment is choosing too many variables. they want to work with their health and their relationships and their career and their creative life all at once, and then wonder why nothing really changes. For this experiment, you get one focus, just one. I know that feels a little limiting, but it's actually the thing that makes this work. So I'm going to give five suggested focus areas to choose from, and I want you to notice which one creates a little tension when you hear it. Not the one you think you should choose, but Maybe the one that feels slightly urgent, slightly overdue, and maybe even a little uncomfortable. The first is voice. This is for you if you've been holding back in conversations, in your work, in relationships, in how you present yourself to the world. The unweighting experiment in this area is about practicing speaking up, taking up space, being a little more honest, a little more Consistently, not dramatically, just incrementally more than you have been. The second is body. And I'm not talking about "wait, not appearance, body, as in your relationship with the physical experience of being alive. This means rest or movement that you actually enjoy doing, eating in a way that feels respectful rather than punishing, or slowing down enough to notice what your body is actually trying to tell you. If you have been overwriting your body signals for years, 30 days of paying attention is genuinely radical. The third is creativity. Now this is for you if there's something you've been wanting to make, to build, to write or express, and you keep filing it under someday. The experiment here isn't about producing something massive and impressive. It's about showing up to the creative impulse regularly, even briefly, and seeing what happens when you stop waiting for the right conditions to present themselves. Now the fourth area is relationships. This might mean investing more in a connection that matters and has been a little neglected. It might mean having a conversation you've been avoiding. It might mean pulling back from a dynamic that costs you more than it's giving you. The thread through all of these is honesty with yourself about what you actually want from your relationships and gradually with the people in them. Now the fifth area is work. not productivity in the grinding sense, but work as in the thing you do with your time and talent and attention. Are you in the right work? Are you showing up to your work the way you really want to? Maybe there's a version of your work you keep not letting yourself pursue. Take a moment with all five of these areas and ask yourself which one feels the most alive right now? Which one? If you made real movement in that area over the next 30 days would change something that actually matters to you. That's your focus. Once you have your focus, you need to decide what you're actually gonna do. And this is where a lot of experiments can go really wrong. They become all effort and no replenishment. All brave moves and no rest. all output and no pleasure. And that's how you burn out by day 12, right? The 30 day unweighting experiment works because it asks you to mix three different types of actions. I call them micro brave, micro rest, and micro pleasure. And you need all three. So let's start with micro brave. These are the small actions that push slightly against your current edge. They're not giant leaps. They're the one step past comfortable. know, so if your focus is voice, a micro brave action might be sharing an opinion in a meeting instead of staying quiet or sending the message you've been drafting and deleting for a week. If your focus is creativity, it could mean spending 10 or 20 minutes on the thing that you want to do without editing yourself. If it's relationships, well, maybe it's telling one person something true that you've been keeping kind of vague. The keyword is micro. We're not doing brave in a way that triggers a full nervous system response. We're doing brave in a way that stretches the edge just slightly enough that you feel it, not so much that you completely shut down. Now the second type is micro rest. And this one surprises people because it doesn't feel like it belongs in an experiment about moving forward. But rest is not the absence of progress. For most of the women in this audience, is actually one of the most counter-cultural self-trusting things you can do because you have been trained to earn it, to justify it, to defer it indefinitely. A micro rest action is a small deliberate pause built into the experiment on purpose. It might be 10 minutes of doing nothing productive on a Tuesday afternoon. It might be one morning a week where you don't check your phone first thing. It might be a walk with no destination or podcast, just the walk. The point is that you're all you're you're practicing receiving, giving yourself something with no output attached, which is genuinely hard for over-functioning women and genuinely necessary for sustainable change. Now, the third type is micro pleasure. These are small. sensory enjoyable things that have absolutely nothing to do with being useful. Like a meal you actually savored, music you love playing while you do something ordinary, a few flowers on your desk, a conversation that made you laugh, 10 minutes with a book you're reading purely for enjoyment. Micro pleasure matters for the same reason micro rest does. You cannot sustain a 30-day experiment on willpower alone. you need the experience of your own life feeling good sometimes. Maybe not all the time, but sometimes. And often enough that you remember why any of this is worth doing in the first place. So a good weekly rhythm for the experiment might look something like this. Two or three micro brave actions, two micro rest moments, and two or three micro pleasure experiences. Not scheduled to the minute, just held as intentions, enough that all three types show up for you in any given week. Now let's talk a little bit about tracking this experiment, because the way most people track personal goals is designed almost accidentally to make them feel bad. You hit a streak, then you miss a day, the streak breaks, and you feel like you failed. You stop tracking, and eventually you stop doing the thing that you're trying to track, so you don't see any change. We're not doing that. Tracking in the unweighting experiment has one purpose, to build evidence that you're someone who keeps promises to herself. That's it. We're not measuring output. We're not measuring perfection. We're measuring presence. Did I show up for this experiment this week, even imperfectly? Here's what I'd suggest at the end of each week, not each day, each week. Write down three things. First. One micro brave action you actually took, just one. Next, one moment of rest or pleasure you gave yourself. And third, one thing you noticed about yourself, about your patterns, about what the experiment is kind of bringing to the surface. That's the whole tracking practice. Simple, three sentences once a week. It takes maybe four minutes and it tells you something that a detailed daily log never could. It tells you the shape of your own experience over time. And what you'll start to see after a few weeks is a record of yourself showing up. Not perfectly, and not every single day, but consistently in the direction of something that really matters to you. And that record is what self-trust is built from. Not a flawless performance, a pattern of return. Because that's the other thing worth saying about the 30-day experiments. You're going to miss some days. You'll have a week where the whole thing completely falls apart because life did what life does. The question isn't whether that will happen because it will. The question is, what do do next? And the answer is you come back. No drama, no self-punishment, no starting over from scratch. You just pick it back up because the experiment isn't over. It's just a week that was hard. Every time you come back after a disruption, you're teaching yourself something important. I don't abandon things just because they got messy. And that's not a small lesson. That might be the whole lesson. Now, here's what I want you to hold on to from today's episode. You don't need a complete transformation. You don't need to figure out your whole life before you're allowed to start moving in the right direction. You just need 30 days, one focus, and three types of micro actions that keep the experiment human-sized and sustainable. That's it. not a new identity, a deliberate low-pressure 30-day practice of showing up for yourself in one specific area and seeing what you learn. Now, before you design your experiment though, there's one step I'd really encourage you to take first because it makes everything else clearer. It's called the Unwaiting Quick Start and it's a short mini course I created to help you do exactly what we talked about in this episode. It helps you identify your focus area, Name what you actually want in that area as the woman you are right now, and you'll walk away with your first one or two actions for the 30 days. Think of it as the pre-work that sets the experiment up. Instead of starting day one with a vague intention, you start with a clear focus and a first move already chosen. That alone changes everything because the hardest part of any experiment isn't the middle, it's the beginning. You can find the unwaiting Quick Start link in the show notes or description below. And before we wrap up today's experiment, I'm going to invite you into something a little deeper. You see, next week, we're kicking off a special 12-week series designed to take you through the entire unweighting method from start to finish. If you've been listening for a while, you know I often say that you don't have an information problem, you have a structural one. I mean, you've read the books, you've listened to the podcasts, but you're still waiting for a feeling of readiness that just never seems to arrive. That's why I've organized these next 12 episodes over the next 12 weeks into a very specific sequence using my "W-A-I-T" framework. We aren't just looking at random mind hacks. We're clearing a path for a repeatable process of change. And here's how we're going to do it. So week one through four are all about the W, witness the "wait" We're going to make your invisible patterns visible. We'll look at the research loop. the permission problem and how your responsible waiting is often just fear with a really nice planner. Weeks five and six, we're going to move into A, attuning into your inner authority or your inner intuition. You're going to learn my signature filter, signals versus spirals. So you can finally tell the difference between your wisdom and your worry. Week seven through nine, we're going to focus on I, initiating the micro pivot. This is where we stop waiting for certainty and start moving. I'm going to show you why courage has to go first and how a small and honest move beats an impressive, unsustainable one every single time. Weeks 10 through 12 are going to put us at T, trusting yourself through evidence. We're going to shift your identity from someone who stalls to a woman who keeps her word to herself. By the end of this 12-week series, here's what you can expect. You won't just feel better for an hour. You're going to walk away with structural clarity on how change actually happens for you. You will have a lived track record of keeping small promises to yourself, the kind of evidence that your inner critic cannot argue with. And most importantly, you'll stop looking at your life as if you're behind and realize you're actually overdue for the life that you have been waiting to arrive. Now, I'm not promising a new you in 90 days. I'm promising a process for becoming a more honest you. The woman you already are. So here's your invitation. Design your experiment this week. Pick your focus, choose your first micro brave, micro rest, and micro pleasure action. And if you want help with that, start with the quick start first. 30 days, one focus, one honest move at a time. Then join me next week for episode 111, where we'll start by dismantling the measuring stick you've been using against yourself. My friends, there really is nothing left to wait for. Until next time, bye for now.