Episode #72: Self-Belief: The Foundation of PCOS Wellness

PCOS has a tendency to break down our belief that we can create health in our bodies. And today, we’re going to be talking about an incredible power that we hold in ourselves that can be the key to finally creating that health that we want, that feeling good in our bodies, that energy, the fertility, the fitness and wellness that we long to be able to have but feel like is impossible for us to attain and we’re going to talk about tapping in to that superpower today. So let’s get started.

You’re listening to the PCOS repair podcast where we explore the ins and outs of PCOS and how to repair the imbalances in your hormones naturally with a little medical help sprinkled in. Hi, I’m Ashlene Korcek and with many years of medical and personal experience with polycystic ovarian syndrome, it is my joy to watch women reverse their PCOS as they learn to nourish their body in a whole new way. With the power of our beliefs, our mindset and our environment, and the understanding of our genetics, we can heal at the root cause.

Welcome back to the PCOS Repair Podcast, where today we are going to be talking about creating and cultivating and regaining the power of self-belief. The diet industry, the health and wellness industry, all of the how to lose weight, how to get fit, how to regain your cycle information that is out there, all of that creates in us this belief that our bodies are broken beyond repair, that this is just how it is, that there’s nothing we can do to change it. We have tried everything. Either we don’t have the ability or it just won’t work. This eats away at our self-belief. It eats away at our ability to make a positive change that could change our lives. No matter what program or what you try, if we don’t have that self-belief, that doubt that creeps in will sabotage us every time. While today’s episode doesn’t focus so much on the how to heal our PCOS, it’ll give you a fundamental piece required to both create happiness and fulfillment along your PCOS health journey, but also will provide you with a missing piece that will make it successful. I think as we start talking about cultivating self-belief, it’s really important to tear down all of the things that led to the destruction of our belief and our ability to regain our health, to create the health that maybe we never felt like we had.

For those of us that have PCOS, our bodies function differently to the environment than other people. Just like really, really, really pale people burn in the sun a lot easier than someone who has more tan or darker skin, women with PCOS are more fragile to their environment. We feel like we’re doing all the quotes, right things, but they don’t work for us. Well, a lot of those quotes, right things, don’t actually work for anybody long term but it’s misleading in the short term when we see our friends or coworkers losing weight on some new fad diet, and we just cannot seem to see any progress in our health. Now, we try those things, and ultimately, they’re actually creating more and more and more dysfunction in our hormones. It’s really important that first and foremost, we recognize that we’ve been led astray.

We don’t have to be grumpy about it or negative about it, but just at least acknowledging the fact that the nutrition and diet industry has led us astray helps us to realize and acknowledge that what we were attempting was never going to work. It had nothing to do with our ability. It had nothing to do with, This won’t work for me. It had to do with it was completely the wrong approach for what our body needed. We need to shake off that self-doubt of the things that didn’t work for us when we didn’t know what we were dealing with. If you’ve been listening to this podcast for any length of time, or if you go back and listen to the series that we had in September, we talked about what PCOS is, how the genetics of our PCOS determine how we engage with our environment and how it affects our health. Then we talked about how important it is to understand your specific root cause. Another way of saying this is realizing that your situation with PCOS, your genetics, your current state of health, your environment are all extremely unique, and so does your healing journey needs to be that unique. As we look at how to heal your PCOS root cause or your PCOS environment so that you can create a health bubble that helps your body to thrive, that is the recipe for moving forward in health.

Now, this is where a little self-belief comes in. Now you have the recipe, but not believing in yourself can sabotage us. I know there’s been so many times where in the moment, when I’m frustrated, when I’m hungry, when I’m craving something, when I don’t want to exercise, the choices that I make in that moment are so heavily driven by how I feel about my progress, how I feel about my potential for progress and if I feel like this isn’t going to work for me, well, you better believe I’m not going to follow through. So when we believe in ourselves, when we believe in the process, when we understand that this is different, this isn’t about following some other cookie cutter plan. This is about listening to our body and taking feedback directly from our body about what is working and what is not working. How can we fail? Now, we’ll have good days and bad days just like everybody else and that’s part of cultivating our self-belief is realizing that sometimes we have a bad day where we don’t follow through with what we planned on doing and that’s okay. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have the discipline. It doesn’t mean we don’t have the motivation. It means that life happened and the more that we can cultivate that state of grace in our self-talk to ourselves, the more that we can shake it off, move forward, and actually make progress.

Sure. Our progress is going to be faster or slower based on how often we have days that don’t go quite as planned but ultimately, we’ll get there because we believe in ourselves, we believe in the process, and we keep taking one step forward at a time. So great, self-belief is important. Understanding how our body needs assistance is important. Being sure that we have the unique, correct recipe for us, that we’re listening to our body, making adjustments as our body tells us what is or isn’t working for us but how do we cultivate and nourish that sense of self-belief? So while it comes down to an attitude, a choice, and a mindset, what are ways that we can improve our chances of holding on to that mindset and attitude? And how do we nourish that mindset, our thoughts, our self-talk? First of all, and I know these aren’t new to you, surround yourself with positive, wonderful people. People that are constantly questioning what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, how you’re doing it, are just going to feed the self-doubt. Self-doubt is part of life. We all have it. We do not need people assisting us with that.

Now, these may be family members. They might not be people that you can easily remove from your life, or they might be coworkers. Sometimes we have to learn how to tune out certain people and really focus on our relationships with the people that lift us up. Another way to cultivate that self-belief is to stretch ourselves. When we do hard things, our belief in ourselves grows. This is one of the reasons why I like exercise. When I finish a workout that’s been well done, when I’ve lifted a little heavier than I have before, been able to complete a few more reps at a higher weight than I have before, when I was able to run further or faster or harder than I have before. There is a feeling of accomplishment and belief in myself and it’s not even about having such an amazing workout, but it’s about noticing how far I’ve come. So as we stretch ourselves, as we grow in all areas of our life, it doesn’t even have to be in an area of health but when we take a moment to notice how far we’ve come in our academics, how far we’ve come in our career, how far we’ve come with a difficult problem in our life. When we notice how we have stretched ourselves, our belief in our abilities, our belief in our self comes through in a much deeper way.

Number three is learn from your mistakes. When we acknowledge the mistakes that we’ve made. As simple as, you know what? I overslept and I don’t have time to do my workout this morning. When we acknowledge that and we learn from it of what time we need to actually set our alarm for that we can’t snooze it as many times as we accidentally did this morning. When we take that lesson and we incorporate it in our day, tomorrow, the next day, the day after that, and we start to learn from our mistakes, our belief in ourselves is just incredible because we allow ourselves the grace to make the mistakes because we’re going to learn from them. We don’t feel like we have to beat ourselves up for our mistakes anymore. We can see them as an opportunity to grow. Number four, get up and get going. I just used the example of snoozing our alarm too much but when we wake up in the morning with purpose, we set ourselves up to just take on the day. When we have an attitude of taking on the day, our belief in ourself is so much more elevated than when we get up in the morning and we stumble around and we think about how tired we are and how we need that caffeine or the things that we have to do today that we don’t want to. When we wake up ready to take on the day, our energy, our attitude just fuel our self-belief. Because when we have that attitude, it’s like, well, what can’t we do?

And the number five is to really develop that winning attitude. When we get up, yes, take on the day but how do we maintain that all day long? Well, I think part of it is actually being really realistic. Now, when I pick up my kids from school every day around three o’clock, we are all tired, we’re grumpy, and the expectation of trying to get anything done at that point is a bad expectation and so I have learned to keep my winning attitude throughout the day to be realistic about the various times of my day. How much can I actually get done when we get home from pickup before I need to start making dinner? Well the hard truth that I’ve had to learn is pretty much nothing, so at that point in the day, part of maintaining a winning attitude is their realistic goal that my goal is to stay positive. Get dinner on the table, and be there for all of the emotions of my three kids and myself because the emotions are big by that point in the day and so when I succeed with that seemingly small task, I can feel good about it. And that continues to develop my winning attitude throughout the day, throughout the week and instead of feeling like three o’clock is rolling around and all hell is going to break loose and I’m not going to get anything else done, I realized that my job at that time of the day is literally to hold steady and so when I succeed at that, I can feel good about it and so sometimes developing a winning attitude is setting yourself up for the win so that you don’t feel like you’re pulling in so many directions that you can’t succeed.

And that leads me to number six, lighten up. Sometimes we have so much pressure on ourselves, so much goal-oriented, especially those of us who are type A, and I’m guilty of that, that we can be so structured, so expecting of ourselves that sometimes we just need to lighten up. Similar to the example I just gave of my three o’clock in the afternoon. Number seven is practicing gratitude. When we look at all that we have, all that we’ve accomplished, all that we have going for us, all of the people that are cheering for us and supporting us, it’s so much easier to go about our day than when we focus on the negative things and so when we practice. Intentionally reminding ourselves of the things that we are grateful for, the things that we do have, the things that are going for us, it’s a lot easier to keep taking that one step forward, one step forward, one step forward.

Number eight is forgiveness. When we can forgive others, but even more importantly, ourselves, we release this heavy negative baggage that we have to keep score and keep remembering that something’s not right. Now, forgiving doesn’t necessarily mean forgetting. It doesn’t mean blindly getting into a similar situation again. It means taking that lesson and learning from it. Learning from our mistakes, learning from other people’s mistakes but it doesn’t mean hanging on to it with a grudge and an anger and a negativity. When we can lighten our load and let go of those things to give it some grace, some empathy, some understanding both to others and to ourselves. We can learn from the situation and we can move on with our lives without carrying that negativity with us.

All right, this is a big one number nine. Stop comparing yourself. Stop comparing yourself to yourself even. Social media is a breeding ground of comparison. It’s on one level inspiring, I like to look at people’s homes, their decoration, and then I start thinking, Oh, mine looks like a cluttered mess compared to that, or mine’s boring, or mine’s this, or it’s that and what started out as inspiration can very quickly turn to comparison. Sometimes just scrolling through my own phone or thinking of my workout today versus my workout a few weeks ago, I can start comparing myself. Lately, I’ve been doing a little bit more heavy weightlifting, and my runs have suffered from that and I start to be like, What is wrong with me? and then I realize, Oh, well, my muscles haven’t had time to rest and so sometimes that comparison can be a check-in of what is going on. What do I need to change? I probably need a little bit more sleep. It’s been a little bit hectic with the start of school again. So these are things where sometimes comparison can be a really helpful thing as a check-in, because we can look at it with both ourselves and with others. What is it that I’m seeing in my current day that I’m not satisfied with? Because that may need to become one of our priorities to work on but also letting go of the comparativeness in a negative way of, We are where we are today and comparison can be really beneficial when used as a positive inspiration. It can become very detrimental and pull us way down and decrease our self-belief, decrease our motivation if we allow it to become a negative comparing mindset.

All right, and the number 10, the last one that I’ll leave you with today as far as these ways to nourish your self-belief, and that is to own your own actions. When we make excuses, we reject the ability to learn from what happened. So on a small scale, this could be being late to something. Well, we could make excuses on the traffic, we could make excuses on I needed to stop and get gas, we could make excuses on why we needed to do something before we left the house, we forgot to print something that was needed and the list goes on and on and on. We could always make excuses. But instead, when we own our own actions, why we forgot to prep a lunch, why we didn’t get our workout in, why we didn’t get to bed on time, why we didn’t drink enough water during the day. By making the excuse, we reject the opportunity to learn from our mistakes. Granted, these mistakes I’m talking about are very small mistakes, like not drinking enough water today. But if we make excuses instead of owning the fact that, You know what? I left my water bottle at home, and by the time I got back home, there just wasn’t enough time to drink that much water. Sure, that sounds like a reason but when we own that situation, then we have the opportunity to put the water bottle in our work bag tomorrow so that we don’t forget it.

It’s a very small shift, but that difference between writing off the situation as an excuse versus owning our actions, learning from it, and doing better next time. You think about all the times that we do that throughout the day, throughout the week, throughout the year? and how different that could change our trajectory with where we want to be and who we want to be in very small baby step way.

I really encourage us to, while giving ourselves grace, while not beating ourselves up, to own those actions that led to whatever situation we’re not thrilled with. As you can see through that list of 10, one of the overwriting messages there is channeling negativity towards positivity. Very similar situations. In fact, going through the exact same day, almost taking the exact same actions but these small shifts in how we perceive them, how we deal with them, how we talk to ourselves about them can have the difference between having a very negative impact or an actually very positive impact and it has very little to do with how successful our day was today.

It has more to do with our ability to not get weighed down by it being negative, but instead using it as an opportunity to do better tomorrow and to learn and to grow and to be excited about the possibilities. I think one of the more a little nebulous, a little maybe theoretical but to me, one of the ways that I think about not being where I want to be. So maybe I’m trying to run a certain distance at a certain time, or maybe I’m trying to build some different healthy habits at home. The fact that I have things on my list that I want to do better can either be one of these things where I use it as a measuring stick to tell myself how bad I’m doing, or it can be something where I look at it like, Wow, look at all the things I’m already doing. This is fantastic and then look at these things that I want to include and grow in, so think how much better I can do. Do you feel that small shift from a negativity of like, Look at all the things I’m not doing, look at all the things that I’m failing at, versus, Look at what I am doing, look at the meals that I am doing a good job, look at the workouts I am getting in, look how far I am going when I go out for a run and then when you start looking at what do you want to accomplish, all of a sudden, we can look at it like, Oh, my goodness, I feel like I’m doing pretty good right now. Look how much better I’ll be doing when I start slowly all of these things and then we start to feel like the sky is the limit. The possibilities are endless, and our belief in ourself grows and grows and grows.

So in summary from today, take one of these things. Even just one of them, and start to add it to your day. Go back to that list of 10. Let’s recap it really fast here, pick one of these to either surround yourself with wonderful people, to stretch yourself and challenge yourself, to learn from your mistakes, to get up in the morning and get going, to develop and cultivate that winning attitude throughout your day, to lighten up a little bit and to stop expecting the impossible of yourself, to practice gratitude, to practice forgiveness, to stop comparing yourself to others or your previous self, and to own your actions.

Pick one of those. Try to incorporate it in your day for the next week and see where it takes you, especially in the realm of believing in yourself that you have what it takes to create the PCOS health that you’re wanting. If you feel like sharing the one that you pick, I would love to hear from you over my DMs on Instagram. You know where to find me. I’m @Nourishedtohealthy. And until next time, bye for now.

Did you know that studies of PCOS epigenetics have shown that our environment can either worsen or completely reverse our PCOS symptoms? I believe that although PCOS makes us sensitive to our environment, it also makes us powerful. When we learn what our body needs and commit to providing those needs, not only do we gain back our health, but we grow in power just by showing up for ourselves. This is why I’ve created a guide for you to get started. My PCOS Fertility Meal Guide can be found in the show notes below. I want to show you how to create an environment that promotes healing while still being able to live a life that you enjoy. This guide is completely free, so go get your copy now so that you can step into the vision that you have for your life and for your health.