Your Body Changed. Your Story Didn’t.
You strength train three days a week. “But I’m not really athletic.”
You deadlift 150 pounds. “But I’m not strong.”
You’ve trained consistently for six months. “But I’ve never been consistent.”
You keep collecting evidence, and the story doesn’t move. You set it aside like it doesn’t count, as if the real truth about you is still whatever you decided years ago.
In the latest episode of the Broads podcast, Tara looks at what happens when your body changes faster than your identity, and what to do about it. If you’re doing things your 12-year-old self wouldn’t have believed and still describing yourself the way she did, this one’s for you.
Your Brain Defaults to the Oldest Story
If you can deadlift more than your husband and still flinch when someone calls you strong, Tara wants you to know it isn’t a character flaw. It’s how your brain works.
Your brain doesn’t default to the truest story about you. It defaults to the most familiar one, and familiar just means old. If you spent 30 years believing you were unathletic, six months of training doesn’t erase that on its own.
Nothing pings you the day you hit your first pull-up to say your identity has updated. A new story has to be told on purpose, over and over, until it has enough reps behind it to compete with the old one.
One client described it in a way Tara hasn’t stopped thinking about: “an old narrative that simply hasn’t caught up yet.” You’re not broken, and you’re not in denial. You’re running an outdated file, and outdated files can be replaced.
Women Are Trained to Discount Their Own Evidence
Listen to how women talk about their training:
“I only used 10 pounds.”
“It wasn’t pretty.”
“My squat wasn’t cute.”
“I’m pretty strong.”
Every one of those takes something real and discounts it before it can count. Tara doesn’t think that’s modesty. Women have been taught to make themselves palatable: don’t brag, don’t get too muscular, don’t call yourself an athlete until someone else says you’ve earned it.
Compare it with men. A guy adds 10 pounds to his bench and tells three strangers about it. A woman adds 10 pounds and drafts an apology in her head.
Then there are the women in the Broads community who hit numbers that would surprise most men in their gym. When someone tells one of them “the average woman couldn’t do that,” her answer is: “Good thing I’m not trying to be average.”
Her body didn’t say that. Her identity did. And you don’t need six more months of training to make that shift. Next time someone compliments your squat, say thank you and stop there. No footnote.
Stop Waiting for Your Body to Give You Permission
A lot of women believe the identity comes after the result: you get to call yourself an athlete once your body looks a certain way.
Tara pushes back. What if athlete isn’t a body type? What if fit doesn’t mean visible abs? What if strong isn’t something someone else gets to certify?
She coaches a woman who is embarrassed to tell people she strength trains. She isn’t ashamed of training. She’s afraid of the look on their faces. She’s spent her life identifying as non-athletic. Meanwhile she shows up, trains hard and is stronger than she’s ever been.
“The problem was never her body,” Tara says. She’s waiting for someone to hand her an identity she’s already earned. Nobody is coming to hand it over. It’s already hers.
Collect Your Evidence on Purpose
Identity doesn’t shift on its own just because enough time has passed. It shifts when you start treating your progress as data worth keeping.
Start collecting:
Your PRs. Write them down and say the number out loud.
Your workout videos. Watch what you actually look like lifting, not what you assume you look like.
The firsts. The first pull-up, or the heavier dumbbell you finally picked up.
Showing up when you didn’t feel like it. This might be the most important kind of evidence.
Protecting your hour. Saying no to something so you could train.
Eating enough. Under-eating isn’t discipline. Fueling yourself is evidence that you’re building a body to last.
Resting without guilt, and not abandoning yourself on vacation.
Affirmations in the mirror don’t work without proof behind them. Receipts do. On the day the old story gets loud, you want a list you can point to.
The Bottom Line
You don’t need more evidence before you’re allowed to believe something new about yourself. You need to stop discounting the evidence you already have.
Your body changed a while ago. Your identity can catch up starting today, not after the next PR or after someone else notices. You probably won’t feel certain right away. Certainty tends to arrive after you’ve acted on the new story for long enough. So say the word athlete. Write the PR down. Let the compliment land.
Want help doing this work, with people who’ll hold up the mirror when you can’t see it yourself? That’s exactly what BroadsCOACH is built for.
🎧 Listen to the full episode: Episode 163 on Spotify
So, be honest with yourself: what’s one thing you’ve done in the last six months that you’re still not letting count?
