Tanja Shaw is a sought-after lifestyle coach, successful entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and is one of 500 Certified High-Performance Coaches in the world. As the founder of Ascend Fitness + Lifestyle, a holistic health coaching studio in Chilliwack, BC, and The Whole You Transformation Project™. Tanja has built a credible reputation for helping 1000s of men and women feel GOOD in their bodies, through her powerful holistic focused health, fitness, nutrition and personal development programs.

Through motivational speaking, coaching and training Tanja inspires audiences and clients around the world to challenge current beliefs and bust through limitations to get to the next level in their life- not just in the health space, but in relationships, career, and overall quality of life. Tanja’s offers the perfect balance between practical strategies and shifts in perspective and mindset to help others feel good, and to have the freedom to fully experience life.
This episode you will learn practical strategies and how to shift your perspective and mindset. How to implement and make the changes in our thinking. How does wellness, fitness, nutrition, etc. tie into mindset coaching. Diet plans/meal plans/ workout plans focus on the what to eat, when to eat, what workouts to do. But they don’t tell you what to do when you really want another glass of wine, or if you have eaten something off-plan. They don’t help you implement the how or why. Tanja has been redirecting her practice away from weight loss focused and more towards whole wellness based on how we think.
We shame ourselves, and guilt ourselves and beat ourselves up so often, we wonder why we give up. Or slip up and go off-plan and it impacts our ability to keep going. We need trust and kindness in order to like someone. How often do we treat ourselves like a good friend? Are we lacking trust and being nice to ourselves? Do we cancel plans to ourselves, show up late or not at all?
Sabrina suggests calling out your “mean girl” that we all have who lives in our brain, and in her Boss Mama Mastermind, they even name their mean girl in the first week. By doing this we can associate all those negative, unkind things to this mean girl and not let her get in the way of our progress. We can move our guilt and shame to the mean girl. She wants to keep us small, and safe, and the things we say to ourselves are always the meanest.
The problem with simply dismissing what she says is that we often feel what we think. It's similar to the feelings nightmares can leave us with, where we know it isn’t real but we can still wake up in a panic, experiencing the feelings of fear and anxiety.  We have thoughts that go on all the time, and depending on how much attention you give your mindset, 70% of those thoughts could be simply brain errors, stories we were told as children or things we thought that we don’t need to hold on to anymore.
Tanja talks about how the biggest barrier to sustainable change is when we are not on our own side. We often fight against ourselves instead of on the same side. It takes a lot of practice and work to get on the same team, but it is such a powerful step, to think about things in a new way. Things from the past can creep in. Everyone has a history and a past. We carry our stories and history with us. Like an onion, there are layers to us that need to be peeled every so often. Working with a coach, you can work on identifying and shedding the layers we need to in order to continue sustainable changes.
Bringing up weight loss (which is a frequently reoccurring goal for a lot of people), Tanja suggests that when you focus on nourishing the body and mind, you’ll find a healthy body. And a healthy body no longer needs to hold on to the excess, so weight loss is a natural consequence of taking care of ourselves. Sustainable change happens in spaces where we feel safe. And often, the mean girl, society,