Thoughtfully Fit Quotes

“While some question whether Stillness is selfish, it’s the opposite. It gives you greater capacity to embrace others, like putting your own oxygen mask on first in an airplane. As the saying goes, you can’t pour from an empty cup.”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“If you can consciously choose your behavior—by focusing on your choices and what you control—you will be more thoughtful, and it will be easier to deal with whatever life throws at you. This book will teach you how.”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“Even our most misguided adventures were some of the best experiences of my life.”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“I’ve chosen to open this painful chapter in my life to inspire belief in what’s possible for your life.”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“I promise you, there will be no push-ups. I’m not going to have you run laps. And I definitely won’t have you do any dreaded chin-ups. Your life is the gym and the training ground. Think of it as circuit training for your mind. Allow me to be your coach.”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“Strength is about how you show up. It requires you to choose what energy and action you want to bring to a given situation. At its heart, Strength is about self-management. It’s not about controlling your emotions—it’s about honoring them and choosing what you do next. It’s hard to stay in control and get yourself off autopilot. It takes a lot of Strength to move through the world with more thoughtfulness and intention. And sometimes it requires a heavy lift!”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“When you’re aware of your thoughts, you’re able to consciously choose how you behave. When you aren’t aware, you go on autopilot and are likely to act without thinking. But if you can pay attention to what’s going on in your mind—and how it’s affecting the stories you’re telling yourself in any given moment—you can choose to adjust your behavior to get the best outcome. You can identify the choices available to you and focus on what you control, rather than be a victim of your thoughts and circumstances.”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“When you’re working at an unsustainable pace, when you feel emotionally flooded, when things are moving so fast you can’t keep up, then you need to add Stillness to your day. The goal is to take however much time you need to quiet your mind.”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“The months following my husband John’s arrest were like a Thoughtfully Fit boot camp. I had to make many hard choices and deal with crazy thoughts and emotions (mine and others!), so I worked to Pause and Think many times a day before Acting. I won’t lie—it was exhausting. It probably would’ve been easier not to worry so much about doing things right and instead mindlessly blast my way through the mess. But that would’ve come back to haunt me later.
Thoughtfully Fit gave me the tools to come out the other side without extra emotional injuries to myself or others. While I couldn’t control what happened, being Thoughtfully Fit was how I recognized that I did control what happened next. That was a source of power: to explore the choices instead of being a victim. It also helped me access compassion and forgiveness.”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“Coaches provide structure, support, and accountability that help clients focus on what they control. Identifying the places where they can make significant changes, instead of focusing on the frustrations beyond their control, enables them to achieve their goals faster.”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“Agility asks us to override our knee-jerk tendency to fire back, to get angry, and to defend ourselves. When you work your core in Agility, you Pause, Think about what you want or need in the situation, and try to identify a more thoughtful and intentional course of Action. With practice, you can have the knee-jerk reactions without the jerk!”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“The great thing about Strength is that it helps you feel like there are options. Without it, you often feel like life is happening to you, that other people and their actions are in charge of what happens to you. But when you build your Strength and your ability to control how you show up, then you’re in a place to choose what you do next. You’re no longer a victim of the circumstances.”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“Many of us tell ourselves a story that we don’t have time for Stillness. That there’s so much to do at work and at home that we can’t make space for mental breaks. However, you need breaks. Imagine if you finished a hard workout, and immediately afterward you told yourself you had to do another hour of intense exercise. That would be crazy, right? You would insist on a break to catch your breath, drink some water, and slow your heart rate.
Just like your body, your mind needs time to relax and recover. If you ask it to keep going at top speed all day and into the evening, eventually you’re not going to be productive.”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“Some people are good at taking a Pause to put the strategy together, identify all the things there are to Think of, and make contingency plans. But when it comes to actually executing, there’s a block. Before I take this step, did I think through everything that could possibly go wrong?
More Pausing. More Thinking. More analysis.
They get paralyzed in the details. They Pause too long. They Think too much. And they never take any Action.
Maybe you can relate to this? You want everything to be just right before you move forward.
Or maybe you have the opposite problem—you Act hastily without Pausing or Thinking at all! That’s what one client told me recently: “Darcy, I realized that I do it backward. I Act, and then I Pause and Think, Ew, I shouldn’t have done that!”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“You know about taking action. We all do a lot. Say a lot, type a lot, read a lot, scroll a lot. But the key to this third step in your Thoughtfully Fit core is to Act—you guessed it—thoughtfully. The goal is to Act with greater intention, following careful consideration—to have the action be a result of a more deliberative process, not your first instinct or knee-jerk reaction.
Whatever you decide to do might be hard, but as a result of the Pause and Think, you can have clarity and commitment. And, in some cases, the Act is intentionally not doing or saying something, but choosing to self-manage.”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“When you learn to ride a bike, ice skate, or downhill ski, the first thing you’re taught is how to stop. It’s an essential skill because if things start heading the wrong direction, you can stop and limit the damage. This same skill is necessary with conversations that have the potential to go off the rails and create lasting damage. When someone blindsides you and says something that triggers you, find the brakes, so you can hit that Pause button.
This can be tricky because, by nature, we often aren’t patient communicators. We expect responses right away and feel compelled to offer the same. I’m inviting you to challenge that and request a little time to gather your thoughts. It can happen faster than you think, so I advise my clients to make simple requests that allow them to Pause. Some examples include:
• Let me catch my breath here.
• Can we find a place to sit down to talk about this?
• Give me a moment to close my door.
• Let me go to the bathroom/let the dog out/fill my coffee, and then I will give you my undivided attention.
The truth is, your brain needs time to overcome some of your initial reactions and access other choices.”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“I’ve coached on every type of people problem any individual, team, or organization has ever had. You name it, I’ve coached around it. Problems such as

Organizations that want to change their culture.
Teams that don’t succeed because they have turf wars that create silos.
Executive leadership teams that are in conflict and aren’t communicating effectively.
Leaders and executives who want more confidence to make tough decisions.
Managers who have strong technical expertise in their field but have never managed people.
Individual contributors who need to be more engaged with their coworkers and teams.

My clients come to me with these challenges. Nine times out of ten, those challenges are people problems. I coach them to handle these problems and clear the hurdles, so they have more time and energy to do what matters most to them—earn their yoga certification, be a more present mom, learn to play the guitar—and get back to focusing on the things they do best: their job and their organization’s mission.”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“Agility is about handling the curveballs life pitches at us. It’s being able to respond quickly when you’re caught off guard. When you engage your core to Pause and Think, you can Act by responding thoughtfully when you’re blindsided, instead of reacting instinctually.”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“One of the first steps toward building your Endurance is to be honest with yourself about the areas in your life where you have limiting beliefs and where your thoughts are holding you back.”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“Always return to engaging your core, because you’ll need a strong core for all six Thoughtfully Fit practices. I’ll give you a strategy to build your core confidence, which you can use in any situation. It’s deceptively simple in concept and powerful in practice.
The core of being Thoughtfully Fit is three steps: Pause. Think. Act”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“Clients bring their challenges to coaching when they don’t know what to do or when people problems are getting in the way of success. They have conflict with colleagues. They don’t know how to communicate effectively. They become a victim in their own life, paralyzed by seemingly bad choices. They don’t think they have any ability to fix it. They feel like things are out of their control.
And that’s all understandable. But you can navigate these problems successfully. I’ve witnessed my clients do it in coaching, and I’ve done it in my own life.”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“After John’s arrest, I felt like I had no time to Pause and Think. I just needed to Act. Call back the lawyer, get interviewed by the detectives, find a divorce attorney, figure out who was going to pick up the girls, cancel my conference call, monitor the news, clean up the disaster from the police search, remember to feed the girls, remember to feed myself, remember to sleep, try to get my confiscated computers back from the police, remember to breathe . . .
But as someone who is no stranger to working too hard, I reminded myself that if I kept Acting without Pausing and Thinking, I’d only end up in more of a mess. I’d learned that the hard way, and those painful lessons served as the backdrop for developing this model. When I was going into that climb, I was lucky that I had a strong Thoughtfully Fit core. And that core got me to the top of the mountain.”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“Darcy, what’s going on at your house? There are forty to fifty police cars, a SWAT team, and officers with guns surrounding your house. They just took John out barefoot in handcuffs. He wouldn’t look at us as they escorted him to the police car and drove him away. I don’t know what’s going on, but I wanted to call to ask where the girls are, because you definitely don’t want them to see this.”
I stood in the hallway, stunned. Paralyzed. Speechless. But there was no time for inaction. My mind flooded as I tried to make sense of what I needed to do next.”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“If you haven’t exercised in a while and you go to a strength class, would you grab twenty-pound dumbbells off the shelf? Probably not. They have lots of different weights for a reason. As with physical strength, the Thoughtfully Fit practice of Strength requires you to start small.”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“Strength is about consciously choosing how you want to show up, to avoid letting others dictate your emotions and behavior. If you set your own thermostat, you can always be a cool sixty-eight degrees even if everyone around you is at ninety-five. And if you’re feeling a little hot? Take a Pause and a deep breath, then Think about ways to bring yourself down to where you know you’ll be in better control of your actions. Then Act from that cooler place.”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“I had to work on myself and get my own house in order before I was ready to fully return to the world as a single mom and ex-wife of a felon. Just as you can’t love other people before you love yourself, you can’t be Thoughtfully Fit with others until you build a strong internal foundation.”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“Endurance is about overcoming obstacles. Some obstacles prevent us from doing things we’ve set out to do, and some obstacles prevent us from even getting started in working toward a goal or a dream. Without Endurance, we end up stuck or give up trying, and that means we aren’t reaching our full potential.”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“You might be thinking: Okay, great. I definitely have problems in my life and relationships, but how do I overcome them? Where do I even start?
When you encounter challenges, adversity, or conflict, you must engage your core.
I’m a lifelong athlete. Every sport I train for has one common need: a strong core. It helps prevent injuries. It gives you stability that makes you less likely to fall over, and it makes it easier to get back up when you do.
Thoughtfully Fit also has a core that is central to everything you do in the model. It always comes back to control and choices: What do you control? What are your choices?
For example, you can’t control what other people do, but you can control your thoughts and actions. You may not be able to control angry customers, the effects of a global pandemic, the results of a presidential election, or decisions coworkers make, but you do control how you respond. And you always have choices in how you respond.”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“If you’re in an organization, you have no doubt encountered people problems. Ineffective communication with coworkers, conflict on teams, or a lack of trust—all of which prevent you from focusing on the work at hand. These problems plague every industry, because every industry has people. Even the greatest organizations in the world have people problems.
The funny thing is, though every organization has people problems, most don’t want to talk about them. They ignore these problems and hope they’ll go away on their own. Often it’s because they don’t know where to start. The problems feel overwhelming and complex, and organizations don’t feel prepared to deal with them. So, they don’t.”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success

“Thursday, John was arrested. His mug shot was plastered all over the news and social media. Our house was in shambles, ransacked by police, and left in utter disarray, with my files thrown around like confetti by the officers executing the search warrant. I searched for comforting words for my young daughters, while trying to reconcile what I knew and didn’t know about my husband and his secret life. All this under the spotlight of the public watching our family catastrophe unfold in real time.
My husband of ten years went to jail, guilty as charged of something no one wants to talk about: sexual assault of a minor he had met online.
And there I was, at the base of Mount Crisis.”
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit: Your Training Plan for Life and Business Success