The Transformative Power of Adversity Paige Bowman

Episode #48

The Transformative Power of Adversity with Paige Bowman

My life coach Paige Bowman is back on the podcast this week to discuss the transformative power of adversity. I’d been through a lot in my life by the time I met Paige, and how she's helped me over the past four years in finding the power in my life’s experiences changed everything.

When you’re aware of your thoughts, you can start to make real changes in your life. The next step beyond that is how you handle your thoughts in transformative energies. You can intentionally grow into a better version of yourself, but sometimes transformation comes because life happens and throws adversity your way. Paige is here to share how to harness the transformative power of this kind of adversity.

Tune in this week to discover the transformative power of adversity. Paige and I discuss the specific adverse events that have vaulted me into becoming the next version of myself, how Paige helped me through these situations, and how to start seeing the options that are available for building a brighter future.

WHAT YOU’LL DISCOVER

The work Paige does in her practice to help her clients grow through adversity.
Some of the specific thoughts about adversity that Paige has helped me work through.
Why it’s possible to get through adversity better than you ever imagined.
How to see the options that are available to you during adverse times in your life.
The ability we have to rewire our deeply ingrained habits.
How to start harnessing the transformative power of adversity in your own life.

FEATURED ON THE SHOW

Paige Bowman: Website | Instagram | Podcast
Huberman Lab – Using Deliberate Cold Exposure for Health and Performance
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
Atomic Habits by James Clear
Deep Work by Cal Newport
Ep #39: The Emotions of Money with Hugh Hale
Ep #47: Learning to Love the Color Orange with Paige Bowman

TRANSCRIPT

Paige: Do you really want to just get through this, or I can help you live today and live the way you want to and show up the way you want to. Or even maybe get through this adverse time even better than you could have imagined. I remember offering that to you. You being like huh, what?

Dr. Crockett: Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa the podcast with Dr. Susan Crockett. You are listening to episode number 48. This is an interview with my certified life coach Paige Bowman.

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast that encourages you to become your best virtuosa self. Each week Dr. Susan Crockett goes where the scalpel can't reach, exploring conversations about how to be, heal, love, give, grow, pray, and attune. For the first time ever, she's bringing the personal one on one teaching that she shares with individual patients to you on this broader platform. A weekly source of inspiration and encouragement designed to empower you.

By evolving ourselves as individuals. We influence and transform the world around us. Please help me welcome board certified OB-GYN specializing in minimally invasive GYN surgery, internationally in the top 1% of all GYN robotic surgeons, a certified life coach, and US News top doctor, your host Susan A. Crockett, MD.

Dr. Crockett: This is actually part two of two, a series I'm doing with my personal life coach Paige Bowman. Welcome back, Paige.

Paige: Thank you for having me.

Dr. Crockett: You're welcome. You're welcome. So we're going to dive a little bit deeper into our topic. Those of you that haven't seen the first episode, we just finished talking about how to love the color orange. That sounds kind of silly, but it was actually kind of a deep conversation.

Paige: It was a great conversation.

Dr. Crockett: It's a great conversation. So that's the previous episode to hear. We'll link that in the links below. But coming out of that conversation, we kind of got into the next step of this, which you and I did in my personal coaching sessions. I want to remind those of you who haven't seen the prior episode, just introduction.

Paige has been my life coach and fellow certified life coach. We certified together four years ago, but she has been my personal life coach for the past four years. So we're taking our conversations and sharing them with you a little bit.

Paige: Yeah, so kind of you.

Dr. Crockett: It's kind of scary. It’s like show you my scariness. Okay, so Paige helps me to become aware of my thoughts. Then I make decisions about how I want to think about things. Then the next step beyond that is how we handle our thoughts and transformative energies. So sometimes we do transformations just because we have an idea that we want to grow into a better version of ourselves.

Paige: Yeah.

Dr. Crockett: We call that our virtuosa selves, right? Because it's the best version of ourselves. Sometimes that just happens because we're naturally curious and growing and reading books like Deep Work, which is behind you. We talk about that book all the time. Sometimes some of our biggest growth happens not because we're intentionally trying to do it, but when we hit adversity.

Paige: When life happens.

Dr. Crockett: When life happens, right? So I'm just curious, in your coaching practice, what percentage do you think you're doing coaching on? Is it more people who are just wanting to learn and grow? Or are you doing more coaching on people growing through the adverse events?

Paige: I think for the most part, it's probably because I do weight loss, like we talked about in the last episode, and emotional eating. I think that, for the most part, when my clients come to me that want to lose weight, and they want to do the work of no longer emotionally eating anymore to make themselves feel better. It's because they started or more heavily used food through an adverse event.

So they came to me because they've gained weight, or they find themselves using food way more often than ever before because of something that's happened in their life. So, yeah, I think that, I mean, I have an episode of my podcast talking about when life gets hard, and that happens. I mean, in the last episode, we talked about how the pandemic just threw timelines off, and it feels like it's been.

Dr. Crockett: Two years.

Paige: Two years and also 10 years. So, yeah, I think a lot of the times maybe I'm not coaching on adverse situations, but I'm helping people who have worked through that or are working through that work on transforming but also their relationship with food.

Dr. Crockett: Right. So remind our listeners where they can listen to your podcast.

Paige: So they you can go to anywhere they listen to a podcast. It's called Weight Loss For Life Coaches. I do focus on helping life coaches, but I tell anyone who wants to listen to it that they're going to get so much out of it, even if they're not a life coach.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah, it’s a great podcast.

Paige: Thank you.

Dr. Crockett: It’s cool. So I wanted to talk about me.

Paige: Yeah, let's do it.

Dr. Crockett: Put me in the hot seat again. I have this story of this huge transformation that happened while I was working with you in the last couple of years. So I used to have a really not healthy relationship with money. In fact, episode three of the show is a conversation that I have with my financial advisor, Hugh Hale, and we'll put those links in the episode notes below also. That was about the full story of the evolution of my emotional changes around money. So I don't want to rehash that whole thing today.

But basically, I went from not being able to look at money at all to now having it be like the color orange. It's a neutralized being that I'm just able to look at and deal with without a lot of negative thought or shame or spinning, having to do with it. I wanted to talk specifically with you about how you helped me take that through the process and do the work because it happened during the course of what we would normally think of as a very adverse event, which was a divorce that took almost three years.

Paige: Yep.

Dr. Crockett: So do you remember what that was like? Like, what I was like at the beginning of that process? Then how you helped me work on my brain and my mind as we went through that adversity?

Paige: Well, I think one of the main things that I remember from when that started happening is you said this sentence, and that's what's beautiful about our relationship is as we continue to work together, and this is any relationship, right? You just grow in your trust of that person.

You said something to me that I pointed out to you because I am your life coach. You said, I want to just get through this time, as one expects, right? Like hunker down. It's a hard time. A lot of us thought that way about the pandemic. Like, let's just get through this. Well, I pointed that thought out to you. I said do you really want to just get through this, or I can help you live today? And live the way you want to and show up the way you want to, or even maybe get through this adverse time even better than you could have imagined. I remember offering that to you. You being like huh?

Dr. Crockett: Because one of the hardest things about that process was the finish line kept getting moved. Like I thought it was originally going to be 60 days. Then it turned into six months, and then a year, and then two years, then almost two and a half years. So the not knowing where the light, like I knew there was a light at the end of the tunnel. We would get through it. But constantly having my life on hold and then not knowing when the finish line was, was a very difficult position to be in.

When you said to me, you could actually be enjoying your life right now, and you could actually be thriving because you're going through this. That was startling to me. That was stunning. That was an aha moment. Right?

Paige: Yes. Which actually takes us back to the last video. Like questioning this belief, right? Like, not liking the color orange, questioning this belief that I have to hunker down and get through this time. What I offer to you is would you be willing to live through this time, not just get through it? Of course, because of who you are, you're like all right, help me. Let’s figure it out.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah. We did. So you met with me weekly. Well, we've been meeting almost weekly since we went through certification together four years ago. The interesting thing was I had to go through a very, very detailed inventory of my finances. I had to look at them. As we were doing that, I worked on changing my mindset. Now the gift of it is I'm become a kick ass businesswoman.

Paige: Yes, you have.

Dr. Crockett: Yes, I have. Money no longer has that shame or that guilt or that power over it, over me, and that's a huge thing. So I think that's a big benefit of life coaching. It's a different thing to think of an adverse event as being something that vaults you up into the next level of yourself, but it was like a catapult up into the next level.

Paige: Yeah. Just as you were talking and thinking about we have options. That's the way I like to think about it.

Dr. Crockett: I love that. We have options.

Paige: We have options when an adverse event happens. It doesn't have to be automatic that you do hunker down, and you just try to get through it. The way I think about, and that's why I offer that to you, is you could hunker down and get through it. You could actually end up better on the other side of that. Or a third option is worse if we want to really put them all on the table.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah.

Paige: But like thinking about it, like there are options. You have options here. It doesn't have to be that You just hunker down and get through it. It could be something that you come out on the other side and are now an amazing businesswoman, CEO, and now helping people transform their lives.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah. Thanks, Paige. Yeah, that's what the show is about. Right? Because we believe that as we transform ourselves, we transform the world around us. So recently, you and I've been working more on how we change habits. So the habit that I had a thinking I couldn't handle money, or that it was shameful, or all of that, that got thrust upon me. I did the work. I'm going to own that. I'm going to own that I did the work on it.

But a lot of times as we're going through life, especially you mentioned your weight loss clients, they're looking to change habits. We're looking to change habits that are ingrained in us and rewire our neural pathways. One of the things I'm really interested in is our neuroplasticity, which means our ability to change our nervous system and our pathways in our brain.

That was something we only thought could happen until about age 23. Until very recently, like last decade or so, we started learning that even in geriatric age groups, the concept of neuroplasticity. I love that word. Neuroplasticity exists like playdough. So sometimes what I think you're doing with my brain is helping me rewire those habits. So talk a little bit more about what you do to help people with those changes and how you and I have worked to change habits too.

Paige: Yeah, well, one thing that I like to explain, and I know we've talked about this, is instead of trying to just stop an old habit, I know there are habit books out there. I think James Clear and Charles Duhigg are one of the top two authors I'd recommend. But the idea of stopping habit is actually, it's hard. The habit gurus say it’s hard.

Dr. Crockett: It’s very hard, or it wouldn't be a habit. Right? So one thing that I recommend and that we've been talking about is creating a new habit instead to replace the old one. There's someone that told me this metaphor, so it's not mine. I'm not claiming it. But it's like a railroad train going down the track is hard to just stop.

I mean, it'll just come crashing. Instead, creating a new train track and starting up a new train. So something that we've been talking about is, for example, with my clients who are wanting to work out more or find joy outside of food, desire outside of food, is a big topic I talk about is if they're coming home, and they're getting off of work, and they just come and sit down and watch TV, plop on the couch.

So they don't do their workouts and not really enjoying the night and a lot of times have food with them. Instead of trying to break that habit and stop doing that, we might create a new habit. so we've talked about like the cold plunge.

Dr. Crockett: Yes, which I recently started doing because what’s his name? Huberman, Andrew Huberman. So yeah, I was listening to his podcast about how it helps inflammation and also dopamine and serotonin. So yeah, go listen to his podcast on that. I'll put the link below.

I actually started doing it two, maybe three weeks ago. Life changing. So now as I'm finishing at work, surgery in the afternoon, instead of thinking about coming home and what I'm going to eat, like mashed potatoes and plopping down on the couch, they're vegan potatoes. They're still vegan.

Now, my brain is already anticipating how I'm going to go through the steps to get to the plunge, they call it the fire and ice room. There's also a massage chair there and everything. There's this great place called Evolve, the human lab that's close to me. Yeah, it's just amazing. So that's been one thing that I've done to change the habit in my life.

The other is behind you. If you look on the shelves behind you, that all those books that are, see they're not even open yet. So we had a conversation about how I hadn't read a fiction book, or just read for pleasure. Like I love reading nonfiction. I just devour information and YouTube videos on self-help and science and everything.

But I used to really love fiction as a kid, and I just hadn't been reading for a long time. I don't mean reading like the internet. Because I'm a speed reader for medical journals and stuff. I can get through them real quick. But for enjoyment, I hadn't. So these are books that you and I talked about that you actually recommended to me for fun. So they're ordered. They've been delivered. Now I have to start actually coming up after my cold plunge. They're waiting to be read.

Paige: Well what I love about your example that cold plunge. So what you've done is you've created a new train track. Instead of trying to get yourself to stop eating or stop plopping on the couch when you get home, you've created a new habit of oh actually when I leave work, I go, and I do my fire and ice.

She says she loves it. I had to laugh because I've done it. I can't say that I love it. So I love that for you. Give it a try for sure. But your new train track, your new habit is to go to do the fire and ice and do the cold plunge. Then we're thinking about like what do you want to do when you come home and you're creating this new habit?

Just being creative and thinking outside of the box. Even going back to our last episode of questioning what you think is the things that you do to find joy and questioning those, and is that true? What else could you be doing? So you're such a great example of being open to new things and seeing old habits that aren't really serving you, getting you the results that you want, and try new things instead.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah, well, I think it's fun. I think one of the keys to longevity and living better as we age, which is another big topic that I love. Yeah, I want to live to be 120. I don't mean just like decrepit condition. I want to be active and healthy and vibrant and having life and relationships as long as I can. So I'm kind of a junkie on the longevity stuff.

But one of the keys to that is always being curious, right, and always being willing to grow. That's actually this one. It’s the light blue color is grow. So it goes be, which is self-care. Be, heal, love, give, grow, pray, and attune. So be is self-care, which is the plunge. The healing is fixing the things that are wrong. Love is love. Give is service and also money. But the grow part we don't talk about very much, or we haven't yet on the show very much.

I think that's kind of where this topic is falling into. Because in order for us to grow, we have to have the idea that there's something beyond where we are right now. We want to continue to transform and become our better versions of ourselves, and that curiosity and that willingness to try something new, the TSN is what I say. Try something new.

Paige: Oh, I love that.

Dr. Crockett: Every day is kind of a little thing. TSN. That is a really important part of aging well. I'm not just talking about middle aged and geriatrics. I think it begins with a mindset when we're younger where we have something to look forward to and continue to challenge ourselves.

Paige: Yeah, no, I love that. I think that it kind of goes back to you have options and thinking about growth as an option. Not necessarily something that it's for other people. It's for you too no matter where you're at in your journey. Again, you're a great example of well, maybe I want to do something different in my afternoon. So maybe I will go do a cold plunge. I've never done it. Now you've been doing it multiple times a week for weeks on end now.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah.

Paige: But thinking of growth as like it's an option for me. Maybe this is something that I want to do no matter where I'm at in my life. It's possible for me too. I think it's an option, and it's possible for me.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah, it's not just for some people. It's not just for the lucky people. It's all of us. It's something that's free. It doesn't require you to have a lot of wealth to learn something new. Pick up the TV and learn something new, find a YouTube channel that you enjoy. Take a walk outside and notice what's around you and be curious about the things in nature. Be curious about other people that you meet.

Paige: Yeah.

Dr. Crockett: That curiosity instead of having that they're the color orange, and I don't like orange. Ask yourself well, what do they love about the color orange? Be curious about that.

Paige: Yes. I love that.

Dr. Crockett: Oh, thanks.

Paige: Because I think we choose the paths that we decide to grow on, right? Sometimes the thrust upon us like the adverse events, but even through the adverse events, we're choosing how we want to grow and which of the paths we want to take for growing through it.

I had more choices than just the money path to grow. It actually took more than just the money path and growing. There's a tremendous amount of other emotional growth that went through that adverse event. So what have you seen in your weight loss clients as you are in your other coaching clients in having those choices about growth or not?

Paige: Well, the reason why I say it's an option, and it's possible is because I think sometimes we don't see it as an option and that the adversity we're going through is a way to grow. So that's even just helping my clients see that is kind of big for them, even if they intellectually know that. When they're in their adverse event, kind of like you. It's like oh wait, you're right. This could be something I grow through.

Especially with weight loss and emotional eating. It's like no, wait, this is actually the time I need food the most because food is the thing I use for comfort. Then realizing no, wait. Hang on. I can change my mindset around food while I'm going through this.

The thing I see the most is people feel like, especially my clients that do the work on feeling their emotions, they feel like they have more strength, and they feel like they have the ability to go through more adverse situations in the future.

Dr. Crockett: So they built their capacity.

Paige: Exactly. They've grown so much in their ability to handle what comes because they decided to grow through this one.

Dr. Crockett: That's a really great insight. I think this has been a really important conversation for us to have. I hope that, in particular with this episode, I hope that this is an episode that you save, and that you come back to, that you share with others. Because I think this is a really important conversation for people to remember that they saw so that when they're going through the hard time, they have a place to come back to and relate on a different level with what's going on with this conversation about getting through those things.

Paige: Hear it again in a different way.

Dr. Crockett: Use this as a reassurance for when they're going through those tough times.

Paige: Yeah because that’s life.

Dr. Crockett: It’s always something.

Paige: It’s always something.

Dr. Crockett: Well, today it was a great conversation with you Paige. Thank you again so much for coming and sharing yourself and your knowledge and everything on the show. I just love you dearly.

Paige: Of course. I love you. Thank you for having me.

Dr. Crockett: You're welcome.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming Virtuosa. To learn more, come visit us at DrCrockett.com, or find us on YouTube for the Dr. Crockett Show. If you found this episode helpful or think it might help someone else, please like, subscribe, and share. This is how we grow together. Thanks, and I'll see you next week. Love always, Sue.

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