Unlimited

by Jillian Michaels

  Organization also enhances self-esteem. How you keep your living environment is a direct reflection of your relationship with yourself. For example, how you keep your kitchen is a clue about whether you are giving proper attention to your own nourishment. When we were shooting Losing It, invariably every family whose home I invaded had a filthy fridge, overstuffed with food to the point that much of it had gone bad and the family didn’t even notice. The shelves would be sticky with old soda. The vegetables would be shoved in a bottom drawer covered in mold. The pantry would be overflowing with processed garbage that had been opened, spilled, and left unsealed. In some cases mice were nesting in the cupboards.

  These were people whose physical health was in a total state of ruin, which was evident just by the way they cared for, or didn’t care for, their kitchens. The same thing goes for every other area of your home, your workspace, or wherever you spend time; you have power over your surroundings.

  The reverse is true, too—your surroundings have power over you. When your office is a mess, you are often distracted and unproductive at work. When your bathroom is a mess, you are most likely neglecting your hygiene. I could go on. By keeping your life and your surroundings organized and well looked after, you are making a statement that you value yourself, a statement that reaffirms itself to you whenever you look around.

  And last but not least, by clearing things out and organizing your life, you are declaring yourself ready to let go of all the superfluous crap you’ve been needlessly hanging on to and ready to be open to new possibilities. Every magazine and piece of paper you recycle, every book you give to the library, and every knickknack and item of clothing you release to a new owner creates space in your life for new insight, energy, joy, and experiences to come in! It is amazing to witness the transformations and the freedom that you gain by being organized.

  If organization is a particular problem for you, take a good, honest look at your life and ask yourself what being disorganized is costing you in terms of achievement, productivity, health, relationships, and self-esteem. Your answers may help motivate you to make changes. Stop thinking of clutter-clearing as some tremendous chore, and start thinking of it as one of the most effective self-improvement tactics at your disposal.

  ———

  Here are a few tricks and exercises to get you on track:

  Schedule time to de-clutter. Put in fifteen minutes every day to straighten up. Do your dishes, make your bed, put your clothes in the laundry, and so on. By breaking this stuff down into small daily tasks, you won’t be overwhelmed with a huge mess by week’s end.

  Set an example. If you have a family, lead by example and use positive incentives with your kids. Many parents (moms in particular) get overwhelmed when trying to wrangle the family to keep things clean and tidy. Although draconian measures might seem like your only option, they seldom work and will leave you feeling even more depleted and defeated. Your best bet is to set the tone for your family by keeping yourself organized. Then you can establish some positive incentives, like offering them a small allowance or the privilege of an extracurricular activity like cheerleading or hockey if they keep their rooms clean, take out the trash, or wash the dishes. Kids crave structure, and giving them healthy boundaries allows them to feel secure and helps prepare them for the real world. Once you establish these ground rules, be sure to remain firm in your resolve. If you backtrack, you jeopardize your authority and your ability to maintain the rules of your house.

  File it away. Make an action file, to sort all the different paperwork in your life. Each day sort mail and other paper into the appropriately labeled file. Have slots for bills to pay, appointments to make, errands to run, and things to concentrate on at work or at home—the different elements that your life contains. Then take ten minutes over the weekend to manage the business that came in over the past week so you can jump into the new week with a clean slate and no unresolved issues nagging at you.

  Don’t forget your pyramid. Create a daily to-do list from your goal pyramid. This will help you prioritize your time. At the beginning of the day or before you go to bed each night, take a moment to think about what you need to accomplish immediately in order to move your life forward and get closer to your long-term goal. These little actions in the present can lead to big results in the future.

  Time to be smart. Be smart and manage your time properly. Don’t be afraid to ask for help or to delegate chores to loved ones or coworkers. A smart person knows they can’t do it all and has the ego strength to reach out when necessary. When you want to squeeze in a workout, try asking your friends and family to watch the kids. Instead of resorting to the drive-through, take turns with your spouse so that one of you can watch the kids while the other prepares a healthy meal.

  You might have everything organized and planned out to a T, but unconscious actions can creep in and erode even the best intentions. Which is why it’s crucial to create an environment that is geared as much as possible toward your success. And that’s what the next chapter is all about.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CREATE THE RIGHT ENVIRONMENT

  One thing that is paramount to your success is gaining some control over your immediate surroundings. Ever heard the saying, “You are a product of your environment?” Cliché? Perhaps. True? Hell, yes!

  So you need to create an environment that will promote vital behaviors rather than self-destructive ones. Yes, there are a whole lot of things about the world you can’t change. But in your immediate, personal environment, it’s a different story. We all actually have a lot of power over our surroundings. While you can’t single-handedly stop pollution and heal the planet, for example, you can install an air purifier in your house, use natural cleaning products, install energy-efficient lightbulbs, and generally green up your home and lifestyle.

  You can learn how to use your proactive focus to manipulate the aspects of your environment that you do have power over, so that your surroundings are geared as much as possible toward helping rather than hindering your efforts.

  There are two parts to your environment: things and people. Obviously, you can control things, but you can’t control people. Dealing with people falls largely under the umbrella of communication, which I’ll get to in Chapter 12. So let’s start with things, by far the easier part of your environment—not only do things not talk back, but once you change them, they generally stay changed. So what kind of changes am I talking about?

  Whether it’s objects, space, sights, sounds, or smells, everything around you sends you messages and affects your thoughts and behavior. Environmental things, cues, and conditions can sabotage you or support you. So how do you create a supportive environment? It takes two simple actions: attending and pruning.

  ATTENTION!

  More often than not, powerful influences in our environment are invisible to us. This lack of awareness can destroy our good intentions. Unknown to us, these environmental cues can affect our thoughts and behaviors. Work procedures, office layouts, checkout counters at supermarkets, vending machines in schools, super-size meals, commercials on TV, supermodels on every magazine cover and in every ad, and so on—these things have a dramatic effect on what we think and what we do, yet we may fail to recognize the potency of their influence.

  So your first order of business is to look around your environment and identify the things there that trip you up. Be deliberate in your search; if it’s weight you struggle with, look for things that trigger you to eat. If it’s money issues, look for things that trigger you to spend. You get the idea. When you sweep the field for these sabotaging items, make sure you include your home, mode of transport, and place of business—anywhere and everywhere you spend time on a regular or semiregular basis. Here’s the list I made of things at work that sabotage my diet:

  Craft service and catering for production crew

  Coffee truck loaded with doughnuts, cookies, and pastries

  Food commercials on TV while I’m in hair and ma
keup

  WORKING IT OUT

  Now it’s your turn. Take some time, and make a list of all the things in your daily life that have the potential to set you back or do you damage in any way. Remember, be thorough!

  Things that sabotage me at home:

  Things that sabotage me at work:

  Things that sabotage me in general:

  BRING IN A SUBSTITUTE

  Once you have identified as many sources of sabotage as you can, the next step is to see if you can find a way to remove, replace, or circumvent them. Your goal is to get these things out of the way, so you don’t have to rely on willpower alone to keep yourself on track. Willpower, like a muscle, gets fatigued and can sometimes crap out on us when we most need it. I’ll talk about strategies for building and strengthening your willpower in Chapter 13, but in general you should always leave it as untested as possible. All you need to reduce your risk of running into trouble is a little creative planning and forethought.

  Obviously there are some sabotaging elements that you can’t just remove—that vending machine at the office, for example. But there are proactive ways to combat it. Nip temptation in the bud by buying a mini-fridge and popping it next to your desk, then stocking it with healthy snacks so you’re not tempted to go for the processed stuff. If you can avoid walking past that damned machine by taking different routes around the office, do it!

  If the fashion magazines and websites you look at make you feel bad about yourself, stop bringing them into your home and your life! Instead read something inspirational that motivates you, like this book. If you’re in debt and struggling to get out, bypass going to the mall and instead buy the thing you need online to avoid further temptation. It’s kind of like baby-proofing a house—you look for the trouble spots and try to eliminate them or reduce their power to take you down.

  Here are my solutions to the sabotaging elements I’m exposed to at work that could disrupt my healthy diet:

  Problem: Craft service and catering for production crew

  Solution: Though it’s the quickest route, I don’t have to walk past the craft service area to get to the gym or the house on Biggest Loser. I can take the extra five minutes and go the long way, removing temptation from the equation entirely.

  Problem: Coffee truck loaded with doughnuts, cookies, and pastries

  Solution: This one’s tough, because I’m not about to go without caffeine. But I can avoid the coffee truck and the pastry buffet entirely and keep a coffeemaker in my dressing room.

  Problem: Food commercials on TV while I’m in hair and makeup

  Solution: I can simply turn off the TV and listen to music instead, which has the opposite effect and makes me want to work out rather than eat. At home I can TiVo all the shows I want to watch and fast-forward through all the food commercials that tempt me.

  By such techniques you can alter your environment to eliminate choice entirely, leaving less room for error and slipups. It doesn’t require much work either, just a little planning and small changes in behavior.

  Seek out the high-voltage areas of your life, and find resourceful ways of avoiding them. This will help you preserve your willpower for times you simply can’t stay out of harm’s way. Remember, willpower is like a muscle—you can build it up and strengthen it, but the more you use it without a break, the more fatigued it gets. For most of us, willpower is usually a fleeting burst of strength and bravado. It’s the moment where I choose not to walk out the back door past the craft service table and use the front door instead. It’s the moment when you ask the waiter not to bring bread to the table. It’s that moment when your better judgment takes over before your willpower can be worn down. But when we are constantly exposed to temptation, ultimately willpower wears thin, even for the most determined.

  The takeaway: you can’t get into trouble if trouble isn’t there to get into! The more you remove potential trouble spots from your surroundings, or build barriers against them by planning ahead, the less likely you are to be thrown off course or deflected from your goal.

  You can and should take it one step further by not just removing troublesome instigators but also replacing them with positive influences. The more you surround yourself with stimuli that motivate and empower you, the more you will be motivated and empowered. Simple, right? This goes for everything around you. Give your entire environment, including the media you are digesting, an overhaul: the books and magazines you’re reading, the TV shows you’re watching, the music you listen to, the websites you frequent, the route you take to work, the food in your cupboards, the art on your walls, and on and on.

  If you are spending too much money, turn off the Home Shopping Network and TiVo some Suze Orman so she can give you a little money-saving pep talk. Move the elliptical machine that has been collecting dust in your basement up to your living room so you can use it while hanging out with your family or watching TV. If the street vendors in the subway station tempt you on your way to work, be sure to always eat a healthy breakfast beforehand and chew gum so that the thought of mixing gum and fattening street food puts you off.

  WORKING IT OUT

  Now it’s your turn again.

  For every object in your environment that has the potential to sabotage you, come up with something you can replace it with or a behavior you can counteract it with. Things don’t talk back or resist change or have an agenda of their own; once you change them, they stay changed. Alas, people? Not so much.

  THE COMPANY YOU KEEP

  Sociologists have done countless studies on how physical space and proximity play into our behaviors and relationships. Now that we’ve seen how the things in our immediate surroundings have a dramatic impact on us, let’s look at our dynamics with the people around us. You can get physically close to someone in order to foster a relationship, build your circle of influence, gain an ally, learn something new, strengthen your network of support, and so on. Let me give you an example.

  On Biggest Loser there’s always at least one contestant who’s very focused and determined, and there’s always one who’s not. I’ll train them together, put them side by side on treadmills, and make them room next to each other. In almost every case the less focused contestant rises to the occasion and takes on the determined characteristics of the stronger contestant. I have also taken contestants who disliked each other at the outset, trained them together, and watched them become fast friends. I was able to implement a support system for them while simultaneously eliminating excess animosity and tension from the Biggest Loser house. This worked because the frequency and quality of human interaction is largely based on physical proximity. The reverse is also true: create space between people, and they tend to become estranged.

  It’s time for one of my favorite clichés: “You are the company you keep.” This one’s a cliché for good reason. Research shows that we adopt many behaviors from our peers. It’s just basic human nature. We want the people we hang with to like us, so we unconsciously take on their behaviors, habits, and mannerisms. You know where this is going, right?

  If you hang out with positive people, they will have a positive influence on you. If you hang around with burnouts, they will have a negative influence on you. I’ve seen countless articles on this behavior, how your friends and family can affect everything from your weight to your finances. Hell, that’s what Losing It was all about—families who had, together, become so unhealthy that their lives were at risk. The people around us set the standards for our behavior, and we fall in line. Even if you grew up being taught to value independence and autonomy, this instinct to fit in and adapt to our surroundings is a basic human drive.

  Here’s a personal anecdote to illustrate what I’m talking about. When I was a kid going through my parents’ divorce, I hung out with other troubled teens who were skipping school, experimenting with drugs and alcohol, and getting into trouble wherever they could find it. Naturally I followed suit. My grades plummeted, I started shoplifting, and at the ripe old age of
thirteen I hit my heaviest weight: 175 pounds. It wasn’t pretty.

  Thank God my mama stepped in and took action to straighten me out. She’s the one who got me into martial arts, which as you know turned my life around. My teacher and the other students in the dojo were healthy, focused, motivated individuals who wanted to excel in their lives personally, professionally, and physically. Among these people, drinking, eating crap, and failing out of school were shockingly uncool. I admired the students and my teacher and wanted to be like them. As a result, my behaviors, habits, and outlook all changed for the better. You know how it ended: I got thin and healthy, went on to have a successful career, and am living happily ever after.

  This social mimicry most often happens without our even realizing it. I’m now a strong-minded, outspoken thirty-six-year-old woman, and I still find myself falling into this pattern. My Biggest Loser cohort Bob Harper and I were total opposites when we met. He was Mr. Fashion, I was Ms. Jeans & T-shirt. I loved motorcycles and fast cars, and he was terrified of them. Now we’re like twins! He got me into fashion, and we even wear a lot of the same designers. I got him into motorcycles, and now he proudly rides around L.A. on his Ducati 1198S. We find ourselves speaking alike, using similar hand gestures. One morning I even woke up with his horrible laugh: Hunh-hunh-hunh. (And in case you’re wondering, no, I still haven’t shaken it—can someone please shoot me?) We’ve changed each other simply because of the fact that we spend so much time together.