[00:00:00] Welcome to the UFFDA! Podcast hosted by Emily O'Connor and Jordan Rudolph. The UFFDA! Podcast brings you a surprisingly fresh take on everyday topics in health, fitness and everything in between. We want to open the door to explore new information and new solutions in a way that's easy for you to understand and apply to your own life.
Let's get into today's episode.
Introduction and Episode Overview
---
Hello everyone and welcome back to the UFFDA! Podcast season 4 episode 27. My name is Emily Morris and I have another solo episode for you today. So in all of our previous, my [00:01:00] previous solo episodes, I have a I have really dove into language and the words that we use impacting our outcome and impacting our lives and our actions.
And it's really centered around that. And today is no different. We are diving into five pillars of the victim mindset versus five pillars of the creator mindset and diving into how those two things impact and play a role in the in your everyday life.
Now, this one is highly personal. Uh, for me, it started earlier this week when we had our first snow.
Uh, and as someone who doesn't look at the weather very frequently, I didn't realize it was happening. Um, but as everyone's coming into the gym and I'm having conversations with people throughout the day, there was just a lot of complaining and kind of noticing the snow and the chilly weather. We've been blessed with a mild November up until [00:02:00] this point, but honestly, the more I thought about it, complaining about the snow and the cold in Wisconsin in December puts you right in that victim mindset, right?
And if we're being honest, it might not be the only area where you're playing the victim. Right?
Understanding the Victim Mindset
---
A lot of times we place ourselves in this victim mindset, sometimes without realizing it because we don't know what it is, and that's what part of today we'll be defining what that is, and partly because it's just how we're operating, and we need to break those habits In order to be able to break out of them, oftentimes the mindset we have behind things drives the action subconsciously without even thinking, without us even really consciously knowing what that change should be.
So diving in, there's two sides of the coin we can [00:03:00] think of this as, right? The victim versus the creator. So as we dive into all of these, and this is not an all encompassing list, there are other qualities, but I picked five that seem to stand out to me from a health and fitness realm. So as you hear these, you might resonate with one side or the other, and maybe some you identify as the creator, and some you identify as the victim, and that's okay.
Pillar 1: Fixed vs. Growth Mindset
---
Part of the Part of my goal of this podcast is for you to start to bring awareness to and while this might not be the most Surprisingly fresh take hopefully you take away Something surprising to you whether you're noticing yourself be more creator or whether you notice yourself be more victim Either one of those can have impacts then on your actions that you take moving forward The first pillar we're going to talk about is one that we've referenced so many times here on the UFFDA! Podcast and that [00:04:00] is the fixed mindset versus the growth mindset, right?
In a victim mentality we are thinking very fixed. We are stuck where we are with very minimal control to change our surroundings. We don't see things as opportunities, we see them then as roadblocks. full stop throws us off the path. This can also be fixed mindset associated with all or nothing thinking, right?
It's the nothing side of that coin. And quite honestly, it can be maybe even the all side of that coin. As we dive into it, there's minimal flexibility in a fixed mindset. Versus a growth mindset. We're always looking for opportunities. We're looking for the next challenge. We're always looking to get better, to improve ourselves, our situation, whatever that might be, right?
So, kind of two sides to that coin. Whether it's fixed, we're stuck where we're at, or growth mindset, we're open to opportunities, we're looking to [00:05:00] grow, we're looking to improve.
Pillar 2: Excuses vs. Solutions
---
Pillar number two, in the victim mentality or the victim mindset, you're going to hear a lot of excuses, right? Excuses such as, hey, there's lots of gatherings and holidays and I just had to eat that bad food, like it just is what it is, right?
Those are all things excuses. Right? Hey, we're, you know, there's snacks in the house and someone I live with brought them in, like, I just had to eat them. We're excusing our behavior. And which will lead into the next one, blaming others for our behavior, when really, the person to blame, if I'm being honest, is yourself.
And it's not anyone else's fault, but ours. Right? So Victim focuses on excuses and excusing away some of the actions that they've taken. A creator looks to seek solutions, right? So [00:06:00] instead of excusing the problem, and the problem still arises regardless of the mindset that we have, The creator looks for solutions.
We look for ways to improve. We look for ways to make sure that that doesn't happen again. In a creator mindset, your openness there speaks to the growth mindset that we just talked about initially, where instead of trying to brush things under the rug, we're really opening them up. We're looking for the solution to the problem instead of excusing the problem and focusing on only that problem.
Third.
Pillar 3: Blame vs. Responsibility
---
And I just alluded to it right before this, in a victim mentality, we like to blame other people, right? It's the other people that brought the food into your house, it's not you, right? It's, you know, the person who, you have to go out to eat because they invited you, so you have to go out and you have to partake in the food that they're eating.
It's not [00:07:00] your fault, it's theirs. When maybe that's not true, right? When we flip our mindset, the creator mindset then talks about Accepting the responsibility, right? No one is sitting and you know, this will be a little bit direct here No one is sitting there force feeding you to eat the foods that we are consuming No one is doing that listening to this podcast Certainly, it's an option, right?
And maybe there is a 0. 001 percent chance that someone is However Chances are, if you're listening to this, we're all adults here and, by and large, make the decision to put the food we eat in our mouths ourselves. So we, then, accept the responsibility of the situation, right? Yes, things cannot go our way.
I was just talking to someone this morning about some nutrition stuff, and we were working on specific, uh, a specific behavior change habit, uh, on their nutrition. [00:08:00] And they were like, no, you know what? I actually did have a slight setback yesterday. I stopped at QuickTrip, grabbed something that wasn't on our list that we had talked about, but I knew when I did it that it probably wasn't the best decision.
So I only had a little bit of it and then I moved on. And to me, that was the accepting responsibility, right? That was, Hey, I intentionally made this decision. It was my ownership. I know it wasn't the perfect outcome, but it wasn't the worst, but that was the responsibility. That was the solution that we found to.
The end result. So as we dive in adopting more of that creator mindset can open up the doors for not the all or nothing, right? It's the black and whites. It instead becomes the grays, the in betweens it's our ownership. And therefore it gives us the control and the option to [00:09:00] continue moving forward in our goals and to push moving forward in our goals, right?
We're not waiting for someone to pull us along. We're now the driver. We're in the driver's seat the entire way through.
Pillar 4: Challenges as Opportunities
---
Our fourth pillar of our victim versus creator mindset in a victim, we see challenges as permanent obstacles that can't be overcome. This speaks back to the fixed mindset of it, where if we hit a challenge, we are dealing with that challenge forever.
It will never go away. Things will never change. And you often might hear yourself using words like this. Never, um, always. Oh God, like the Lost my train of thought. You might find yourself using words and this polarizing language like always or never to really kind of silo into that challenge as something that will be there forever [00:10:00] that you have no control over.
Versus the creator mindset, again speaking to the growth mindset, starts to see the challenges as opportunities, right? Speaking to what we just talked about, starts to accept the responsibility to change their situation, to change that challenge, and find solutions to that challenge. So it's the constant evolving and growing that really places the creator in the position of control versus making sure that they stay stuck in that kind of challenge spot where it seems like an immovable wall when we have that more victim mentality or victim mindset around situations.
Finally, in one of my Kind of favorite pillars, if you will, uh, of a victim mindset.
Pillar 5: Comparison vs. Self-Improvement
---
They really tend to compare themselves to others. And we hear about this a lot, especially in health and fitness, right? Like, oh, my friend did X, Y, Z, my family member X, [00:11:00] Y, Z. And we start to look at others as comparison, as almost competition, when really there shouldn't be much competition at all.
Everyone's on our own journey. We're all looking at things. Right? And that's where, if we shift our mindset, those who are, quote, better than us, or those who we might see as on a pedestal above us, are those who we can seek help from. They're more skilled than we are. They're people that we are able to reach out and say, hey, actually this, right?
How can I, we can seek advice from them. We can look to them for guidance and mentorship throughout. And this doesn't have to be a coach, right? This can be a peer who's doing something that you admire that you'd like to do. This can be someone who you see as inspiration in your journey who might be just a little bit ahead of you.
In [00:12:00] terms of their own, their own journey, it might be not someone who is years and years ahead. Maybe it's someone who just started a couple of weeks before you where it is more peer to peer and they admire things in you and you admire things in them and together everybody gets better as a result, right?
But if we are stuck in a victim mentality where we see that comparison and we're constantly putting ourselves down and comparing ourselves to others, Where we're hitting challenges, and we just believe we are stuck with them forever. Where we're blaming others for things that come up in the areas of our life or areas of our health and our fitness where we fell short.
If we're making excuses for that, if we're not seeking solutions to them, we just find ourselves stuck. And this is where it can be frustrating. And I know I've used that word in previous episodes, but before as well, with that feeling stuck, right? No one wants to feel that. No one [00:13:00] wants to be the victim.
And oftentimes that's where, subconsciously, we place ourselves there with little things we're doing, like complaining about the snow, which is where this whole episode initially stemmed from, where it seems mundane. Right? It seems like such a small thing to just say, Oh gosh, like he had the snow, like, Oh, like I wish we didn't have to deal with it.
Right? But when we do that, we immediately flip the language in our head. We change our thoughts. Right? And we know, if you've listened to previous episodes, especially my solo ones, we know the thoughts start to drive the language that we're using. And the words in the language that we're using shape the stories that we tell ourselves.
And the stories become our actions and what we're doing in everyday life. And those actions are what creates then our reality. And the cycle [00:14:00] then continues. So if we're constantly telling ourselves stories and thoughts and using words that keep us in this victim mindset, we will continue to be the victim.
We will continue to feel like we are stuck, like we have no control, like we have no power. Alternatively, if we start to talk and we start to think like the creator, instead of seeing snow as A bad thing or complaining about it when it's December in Wisconsin. We can see it as. Just a neutral thing. It doesn't even have to be good, quite honestly.
It doesn't even have to be the best. You don't even have to love it, but it can just be the thing that exists. It can just, to take an element from Stoicism, be an area where, yep, it's, it's just snowing today. That's just, is what it is. Like on days it's sunny. Yeah, it's just sunny today. It is what it is. So it's not even like we have to make that a good thing.
[00:15:00] It can just be a thing that exists. Whereas in our mindset then maybe in other areas we start to realize times when we can shift more into a growth mindset where we can look for the opportunity to improve and we see those challenges as opportunities. Where we can seek solutions instead of making excuses, we can find ways to do it better next time.
Where, if we're in a situation where we don't feel like we have control, we can turn and accept responsibility to change for the future. Where, if we are stuck, we can seek help from those who are better or more skilled at something than we are. We immediately, with these small action changes and these small things, Thought changes start to create an entirely new reality for ourselves.
It starts to become one in which we are the creator. We are the driver of our life. We are not the victim of it, right? In other words, to use our story analogy, instead of [00:16:00] the victim, we start to become the hero of the story itself. We start to put ourselves in the driver's seat and take control of everything that we have going on.
Conclusion and Homework
---
So, homework from this episode, I'm going to leave you with something to do. Notice the times that you find yourself falling into the victim mindset and write them down. Make a notes app in your phone. Give yourself a trigger, but start to write them down. And And from there you'll start to see either commonalities or maybe you're finding something that is, you know, a trigger for your victim mindset.
Something that happens that immediately puts you into that victim mentality that throws you down the rabbit hole, right? Maybe it's, maybe it is the snow and complaining about the snow and then all of a sudden the complaints just keep tackling on when there's nothing that you can do. about it, or we might not see what we can [00:17:00] do about it.
Likewise, you can notice the times when you're in that creator space. You can notice the times where it is more natural for you to really kind of find that growth mindset and seek solutions and see more of a positive outlook on things, right? Noticing those elements, you might also find a common thread or also find a trigger for those.
And likewise, that can help start to drive some of those areas where you are feeling like and acting like the victim to be more of the creator, right? To change your behavior, to change your words, to change your actions, and therefore drive your outcome and drive your life from that. So, go do your homework.
Re listen, take some notes if you need to know our five pillars that we talked about today. Bye. Again, not all encompassing, right? You'll, you'll start to piece those together as you learn and as you recognize more what a victim is and what a creator is and start to place yourself more in that creator mindset versus the victim.[00:18:00]
Closing Remarks
---
As always, thank you guys so much for tuning in to this week's episode of the UFFDA! Podcast. Share this with someone who you think will find it valuable. Leave us a rating, a review, subscribe, download all the things that help us grow organically and we'll catch you in the next episode. Bye everybody!
I'm going to be doing a little bit of it.
