Ep. 27 Determine Your Protocol

I'm Lacey Jones, and this is Elevate the Individual. Episode 27 Determine Your Protocol. Welcome to week three in our goal setting adventure. We've talked about our preassessment. We've done some thinking on the goals and drafting goals that we want to tackle this next year. And so now it's really time to dig into the mechanics of those goals and how we want to go about achieving them. And I've been thinking about the best way to really teach protocol, and I thought I would share a little bit of my personal experience with some goals that I've worked on throughout the last couple of years and how protocol has really helped me to stick with the goal, to analyze the goal, to know if I'm achieving and to know when I kind of hit the end of that goal.

And a lot of times clients will come to me and they'll come up with a problem saying something that's very general, like, Lacey, I need help. I overeat. And so when I hear that, I automatically think, well, how do you know that you've overeaten? What is your protocol? How do you know how much you're supposed to eat? Because one person may eat five candy bars, and that's actually undereating. And one person might eat five candy bars, and that's completely overeating. But we don't know what's over or under if you haven't first set a protocol, a list of, I guess, rules, for lack of a better word, of what you want to do and things that you want to not do.

And so I thought I would dig in, like I said, to a personal experience to kind of illustrate what I'm talking about. So several years ago, I decided to give up candy. It was a Halloween. And I love, love candy. I love snickers, I love skittles, I love mintos. I love anything gummy and fruity. I mean, licorice, red licorice. Yum. These are kind of the comfort candies of my childhood. And one Halloween hit, and I decided enough, I was going to go for the rest of the year. So Halloween to December 31 without candy, just as a personal challenge to see if that was something that I could accomplish. And I did. And the protocol there would have been, if it's considered a candy, I don't eat it. And that was just plain and simple. I knew when I was starting on Halloween, I knew when the goal would end, december 31. And it was very simple. Right? Well, December 31 rolled around. I'd given up candy. I decided that I actually wanted to stick with it.

I saw benefits that I wasn't expecting within my body, and I was okay doing it. So then a friend came along. Out of nowhere, she shares this eating plan with me that has worked for her, and she just started talking about it. And I was really curious because part of that eating plan was to not eat sugar. And again, I had just given up candy, so I was mentally prepared for that.

But if you had talked to me about any of this six months prior, I would have thought you were crazy. There was just no way that I was going to give up sugar completely. And then part of this eating plan also said, no flour. We're not talking gluten. We're talking any form of flour, rice flour, wheat flour, any form of flour. And so I decided, after talking to my friend about it, that it was something that I wanted to do. Now, I am kind of a cold turkey kind of person, where you give me an idea, I glom onto it, and bam, we're off to the races, right? So this was something that I had decided to do. It was the beginning of January, and what better time than the beginning of a new year to start something? So the protocol for this specific eating plan was no flour and no sugar. And to determine whether or not an item had flour or sugar in it, I needed to read labels. And on the ingredient list, if flour was listed, any form of flour, any form of sugar or sweetener was listed within the first three ingredients of a food item.

It wasn't for me. I had just decided that's not a food that I would eat. So really, you kind of have to stick with, like, fruits and vegetables, whole foods, right? Proteins and dairy and grains. Those are your safest, easiest foods at this point. So number one step of the protocol was no flour, no sugar, and to read labels to determine the amounts of those ingredients in each food item. Now, there was also specific amounts of fruits and grains and proteins to eat with each meal. There was also a specific number of meals to eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, and no snacking. Now, as I'm saying, it just sounds crazy, but it was a really kind of a really laid out protocol. And because it was so specific, it was easy to follow or easy to, in times of temptation, to say, no, thank you, because I had very specific guidelines for how I wanted to eat at that time.

And at first it started as a challenge. Then I saw some health benefits. I lost a little bit of weight, which I appreciated at that time after having my five babies, but I did see some health benefits. So again, this was something that worked for me. It may or may not be something that works for you, but I use it as an example to show how a well laid out protocol can really benefit you as you go after a goal. So, again, it was a certain number of meals. There was no snacking. I'm trying to think what else? There was no flour, no sugar.

Oh, again, it sounds crazy, but I weighed my food, so I knew that I was going to have 6oz of fruit at my breakfast along with 4oz of a grain and 2oz of a protein. And I'm trying to make sure I say these numbers correctly because it has been a while since I had completely measured the different food items and the food groups. But it was specific and again, so super helpful. So there was nothing vague about it. I knew that I followed the protocol when I didn't eat a food item that contained flour or sugar. I knew that I stepped off protocol if I ate an item that contained flour or sugar and that I stepped off if I ate more than three meals and snacked in between those meals, or if I ate a larger portion than the 6oz or the 4oz of a specific food group. There was nothing vague about it. And it just helped my mental game in the whole process so much more.

So that's what I want to talk to you about now as we go on to week three of goal setting and working through goals is what is your specific protocol when it comes to the goals that you're working towards? So we've had an assignment each week as you've developed your goal plan. This week, you're going to take the work that you did on the goal sheets last week and different thoughts, and you're going to choose three goals that you want to work on.

Then you're going to come to the website Laceyjonescoaching.com and you're going to go on week three and click on that tab. That tab will pull up the next PDF for you to work on three different sheets. They're the same information on each one, but there's one for each goal. So you're going to write down your starting point for each goal and the finish line. But it's also important to have a time frame. Some of the goals that you choose are going to take just a couple of weeks or, I don't know, a couple of days maybe to accomplish, whereas some of your goals are going to take a longer period of time.

Your time frame is super important. Do you want to slam this change in a short amount of time, or do you want to give your time to grow and develop to the new finish line? That's for you to ponder on. Now the next question is, how are you going to measure your progress? We may say, oh, I want to read more. I don't read enough. Well, that's kind of vague. How many books do you want to read this year? How many do you want to read in a month? How many do you want to read in a week? What's your time frame? And your measurement would then be the number of books. Or you could do number of pages per day, number of pages per week, per month, per year. So how are you going to measure your progress? And once you kind of know that, then you can move on to tracking your progress.

I firmly believe you've got to have some sort of visual, and maybe this is something that I can also create a PDF for. As we dig into next week's. Lesson is how are you going to track your progress? Are you going to make a paper chain? Are you going to fill in circles, one circle for each day of the year and fill in a circle when you stick to your protocol? I wouldn't ever want you to erase a circle if you didn't stick to your protocol.

I want to show you or have you see the progress that you're making. All right. Because how are you going to know if you go off course? If you look at how you're measuring progress, then you'll quickly know if you're starting to go off course if you don't meet that measurement.

Talk about reading scriptures. For some people, I want to read my scriptures more. Well, is that three verses of scriptures a day? How are you going to track it? Are you going to have a nice little chart? And then if you don't read three scriptures a day, that's a really quick indication. Oh, okay, I'm starting to go off course. And again, this is a topic we're going to talk about next week. How do I course correct when I don't accomplish my goal for the day, the hour, the minute, the month? How do I correct my actions? How do I drop the shame? How do I drop the negativity that only further leads you off course.

How do I work through that so that I can hop back on? And then as you work and look at your goals in this sheet that we're going to do this week, you can ask yourself if you need to make your goal more specific, and if so, in what way.

Now, last week we also talked about the why, the why behind your goal. Why are you putting in this time, this effort? Why are you trying to challenge your brain and any sense of willpower and thought process that you have towards these goals? Why do you want to get outside of your comfort zone to get to that finish line in the time frame that you've selected? Lots of questions to think about, but the more time and just genuine energy and thought work that you put into this, the more likely you are to succeed in reaching your goal and the growth that you are going to experience in this journey.

Going back to my food protocol, that was an evolution of who I was, to who I wanted to be. I had to do a ton of thought work. You can only imagine the thoughts at the beginning as you give up candy or something that you just so love. I can think of all yummy sorts of things that have flour and sugar in them. And at first, what was my thought process when I chose not to eat those, it probably was what was my thought process when I said, oh, I can't have that to now where I'm at today. Those are items I choose not to eat because I understand how they affect my body, which is just night and day difference for me personally in that thought process.

And that's where I want to work you through that change in thought process so that your emotional state grows and develops and leads you to different actions which lead you to a different result. We're not just going to white knuckle it through these goals and get you to the finish line in Hooray.

We want lasting change that you can then implement in your life. Once you kind of get to a nice place with your goal and who you've become, you can then tackle other goals and maybe increase in intensity or bigger goals, or if you need to go smaller. Right, so we're doing lasting work here. We're not just doing the quick fix. But you can go to the website again, click on week three. PDF will pop up. You can print those out. You can do three goals. I recommend working on three goals.

That seems like plenty to me. If you choose to just do one at a time, that's fine. Every person's a little bit different there, but there's enough paperwork to get you started on that. And if you have questions, like I always say, please, while you're at the website, schedule a quick discovery, call 25 minutes, we hop on. Those are free to go over any of the questions that you might have. And then if you have a buddy or a friend who's also working on some goal work, share it with them, have them do it with you. You guys can be that support team that you might need as you work towards the new you and these new goals that you're working on. But thanks for taking time to listen. And as always, if you have questions, give me a holler. And we'll see you next week as we talk about course correcting.

When we don't follow protocol 100%, which no one ever really does. I mean, there's a select few of you who are amazing and awesome, but there will be times when you're going to go off course, and we want to have you prepared for that. So I'll see you next week, friends. Thanks so much.