Right now, I am on vacation in Cancun, Mexico. We did not take a vacation last year. So this year we are taking 2 weeks off to get refueled and focused. We decided to NOT stay in the Hotel Zone with all the craziness it has to offer. Instead, we found a nice condo with a great resort style pool in Puerto Juarez. It is a very nice and relaxing place. We do our own shopping (where the locals do). We have to lug our water in 5 gallon jugs across the busy street. We cook most of our own food and the guards and staff here don’t speak any English.
Now, Karen (my wife) knows Spanish and you’d think living in San Diego, I would know some Spanish, but I don’t. I mean, I know the basics, like “muchas gracias”, “buenos días” and “una cerveza, por favor” and that is about the extent of it right there. During our stay, Karen is leaving for a business meeting for 3 days and I will be here at the condo on my own for a few days. So yesterday I was sitting by the pool staring at my feet and started to think about all of the things I would need to get taken care of before my translator leaves for a few days and how I would communicate.
During the day as I was walking around, I started noticing signs around the grounds. One of the signs at the pool has a picture of a guy smashing his head in the bottom of the a shallow pool. I gather that means ‘no diving’. The sign at the bathrooms with a picture of the man and woman help ensure I don’t walk into the wrong bathroom. There are lots of signs for what to do in case of fire or earthquake, or where to enter/or not enter, and so on.
The point here is that pictures are the universal language. And, with my limited Spanish, I would be quite lost here without them.
What this lesson in language reminded me of is how pictures help with our weight loss goals. When we try to communicate to our bodies, we have to create clear pictures because our bodies do not understand English (or Spanish). The universal language is pictures.
One of the things that I did during my weight loss journey and what I do with my clients is was what I call visioning. There are a couple of ways this can be done. What I did during my journey was created a vision board. On my vision board, I had very specific images of what I wanted my body to be like. At the time, I had no clue why this worked. It was just something we did. But the more research I do into this topic, the more I have come to realize often times, we don’t realize that we are not communicating to our body in a way it understands. We are trying to force it to change, but we aren’t providing a clear picture of what we want it to be like.
In the case of my Cancun example, we are telling our bodies in English what we want our body to be like (I want to be thin, muscular, fit…), but our bodies only understand Spanish.
Riding home in the cab from our trip to the Hotel Zone a couple days ago, Karen told our taxi cab driver the name of our condo and asked if he knew where that was. He said, “oh, sí” – but as we got closer and closer to the condo, the cab was not slowing down. Ass we flew by the entrance to the condo, Karen had to repeat the name and tell the taxi driver to stop. Now, if we had held up a picture of the condo that had the name in huge letters across the arch of the entrance (like it does), he would have known exactly where to go without question. The cab driver wants to get us to our destination, he just needs to know exactly where you want to go. Just like the cab driver, our body want to get us to where we want to go, it just has to know specifically where that is.
Using visioning techniques to communicate with your body and to tell it exactly where you want to go is a key thing that is very helpful in any weight loss or fitness goal you may have. This is one of the tools that will help you more quickly get from Point A to Point B. To learn more about my journey and other shortcuts, you can read my full story.
How are you using pictures to guide your body to your picture perfect weight?
