389. Get Your Own Back

I’m Jody Moore, and this is Better Than Happy, episode 389, Get Your Own Back.

Did you know that you can live a life that’s even better than happy? My name is Jody Moore. I’m a master certified life coach and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And if you’re willing to go with me, I can show you how. Let’s go.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. I am so delighted that you’re here today. I’m recording this episode just a couple of days before Christmas. It’s going to go live a few days after Christmas. So not too long of a window between one I’m recording, and you will be able to hear this unless you’re listening in the middle of June, which could be a thing too. So hello, wherever you are, whatever’s going on for you.

We are just trying to lay low. We’ve got that arctic storm that’s affecting so much of the country moving through our town today, and it’s very cold. So we’re just hanging out at home with the fireplace on and the Christmas music, and everybody’s in a pretty good mood so far today. That might change at any minute, but so far, it’s a good day. Hope it’s a good day wherever you are. I want to tell you because, by the time you listen to this episode, it will be either just before the New Year holiday or some time probably shortly after.

And I just want to mention to you that when you think about your year, if you’re the kind of person who likes to reflect back on your year. I want to give you a strategy to try out that has been really useful for me, which is to only think about your wins and successes. I don’t want you to spend any time thinking about where you dropped the ball, or didn’t follow through, or failed, or fell short. And here is the challenge with this. It’s really hard for our brains to think about our wins and successes. It requires prefrontal cortex energy.

It requires the part of your brain that needs a lot more fuel and energy to function. And so I don’t know about you, but when I say to myself, “I’m not going to think about my failures or where I dropped the ball. I’m only going to think about what did I achieve, what have I learned, or what people have I met, or in what way have I grown or accomplished something.” That is hard to think of. It requires that I sit down and focus and turn on a part of my brain. And so my brain’s like, “I don’t want to do that. It just sounds like too much work. Who cares?”

I don’t want to waste my energy on that is sort of the way the brain thinks about it. And yet, if I was like, let’s think about all the ways we fell short this year, all the goals we didn’t hit. It wouldn’t require prefrontal energy. My natural lower unconscious brain could come up with them very quickly. Isn’t that interesting to notice? Is that true for you, or is it just me? Tell me; I’m not sure. I am just noticing this myself because our failures or shortcomings, areas where things didn’t work out, we are already highly aware of.

Our brain already takes a really engraved note to anything that it thinks is dangerous, or wrong, or bad. And yet things that are good, or happy, or successful, or worked out, aren’t that relevant to us because they’re not a threat ultimately to our survival. And so the brain doesn’t like etch them in as strongly. Do you see what I’m saying? It’s sort of like we can forget about those things that worked because that’s great, but it doesn’t really matter.

But these things that didn’t work or these areas where you fell short, those things ultimately could be real problems, we should pay special attention. Your brain is just more aware of them than your wins. So I don’t like to reflect on my failures because I already know very well. Sometimes people are like, “Well, it’s useful to look back on where you fell short and take the lessons.” I’m like, “Guess what? I already have the lessons. I’ve already taken them. In fact, I can’t shed them sometimes, even when I want to.”

The learning, the awareness that that didn’t work, I didn’t follow through, or that thing didn’t play out how I thought it would, is already so strong in me, I don’t have to consciously call it up. Instead, when I focus on my failures, what I have to do is coach myself around not feeling a bunch of guilt and shame and beating myself up. So I don’t see any reason to look at the failures.

But if I can look at my successes and be proud of myself, and be grateful to my past self, and notice that I actually have accomplished and achieved way more than my brain thinks, I just sort of wrote it off and forgot about it. That could be useful. And from there, I’d like you to just focus on the future. Stop focusing on the past. So if you’re going to focus on the past, just focus on your wins, your successes, your achievements, your growth. If you can’t do that, if you’re like me and you’re like, “I don’t know. That kind of sounds overwhelming. I don’t know that I want to do that at all.”

Okay, that’s fine, too, just start focusing on the future then. Don’t focus on your failures from the past. There’s no reason to. You already have the lessons, I promise. Many of the lessons you’re not even consciously aware of, and you don’t need to be, but they’re there anyway. They’re wired in you. You will make different decisions because of the lessons that your brain already picked up. Okay, so that’s just what I wanted to say about focusing on your past and focusing on your future.

And I want to invite you to come to get your goal which is a coaching intensive happening in a couple of weeks where we’re going to go deeper on all of this, on how to do it, how to think about the future, how to create the future that you want even if you’ve never been able to do it before. Maybe you have a goal that you’ve attempted 75 times and failed. This is the year, my friends. I’m going to teach you what needs to change. So go to jodymoore.com/intensive, and for 19 bucks, you can join me for Get Your goal, and it’s going to be amazing. I’m excited to teach you that.

Okay, so today, we’re talking about getting your own back. This is a phrase; I don’t know where I first heard it. I don’t know where you first heard it. But every time I say it, people really latch onto it. I think there’s a part of us that feels the power and the truth in that we should be getting or our own backs because don’t we walk around saying when we’re younger or when we’re less aware anyway. We say things like, “I just wish she would get my back. I wish he, I wish my husband would get my back. I wish my best friend, I can’t believe she didn’t get my back.”

Other people are supposed to get our backs and I’m all for that. I like it when people get my back. But ultimately, I should be the one getting my back. I’m the one I can count on. And so I want to just speak to this today because I’ve had several thoughts about it lately. I’ve seen it come up a lot in coaching. I’ve seen it come up in my own life. And I want to clarify what it doesn’t mean because it’s one of those sayings that gets misinterpreted, I think, and misused. And I want to give you some tips and strategies for implementing it in a useful way in your life today.

So let us talk first about what it doesn’t mean. Get your own back doesn’t mean that you are putting your hand up and turning your head away in defensiveness to someone who disagrees with you or who you don’t think has your own back. It’s not defensive strategy. It’s not, well, forget you. I got my back, and I don’t care what you think, or I don’t need you to get my back because I’ve got my back, forget you. Do you see how that’s like a defensive way of using that phrase?

And I can see why it gets interpreted that way. That’s not how I think of it. It’s not what I want to recommend that you think of it because being on the defense puts us in a conflict situation, if you will, like Byron Katie says. Defense is the first act of war. So if I have to defend myself, I’m still telling my brain that there is danger out there. I’m simply going to defend myself from it. And I don’t find that to be a very useful way to think about the world. That the people and the things out there are dangerous, I need to defend myself. I don’t think that’s usually the case.

And here’s what I know for sure. We are not defensive, hateful, fearful people by nature. We are not defensive creatures; we are loving creatures. We were created by God, who is love. We were created by heavenly parents who are loving beings, and they made us loving. There’s a couple of phrases I want to highlight today from A Course in Miracles. I listened to recently Gabrielle Bernstein; I really like her stuff, if you’ve ever listened to Gabby.

And she cites A Course in Miracles a lot. And so the way they say it is, kindness made you kind. Isn’t that beautiful? Kindness made you kind. And I like to translate it into other words, too, like loving beings made us loving. We just are, we are Kind, we are loving. We are not defensive, conflict-evoking people naturally. And so when we move away from who we really are at our core, we will feel the dissonance of that in some way, sometimes, maybe it is necessary to defend yourself, but the majority of the time, not.

So speaking of Gabby, she told this story because the first way that we get our own backs is by becoming loving beings, by moving closer to our true center, to love, to kindness, to all of those Christlike or Godlike attributes that each of us has. So Gabby told this story about a client she worked with, high profile, very well-known person who started to get a lot of heat, you might say, on the internet. So she does work that is somewhat controversial and receives a lot of backlash as a result.

And so she ends up, her client has this team of people whose job it is to pay attention to all of the negative backlash coming her way, and to do what they can to manage it, remove people from their social media following, to defend themselves, to reply at hateful comments. It felt necessary to her to have this team of people watching out for their work in their organization in a defensive way.

And what Gabby said to her is, “What if we took that team of people and we changed them from being a defensive, if you will, and we turn them into a love army? And instead of their job being to go out and find people who dislike you, who are hating on you, who are criticizing you. What if their job was to go out and find people who love the work that you’re doing, who connect with and want to be a part of, and support the work you’re doing? And their job, instead of being defensive, is simply to love on all the good people who are trying to join your cause.”

So they turned their army into a love army. And the transformation for both obviously the people working for her, that was a huge change to their job description, probably a much-welcomed change. But also, the change for this woman, and her organization, and her cause was exponential. Instead of walking around trying to defend yourself from haters, whatever that looks like in your life, for most of us, we’re not high profile figures having to worry about that. But there may be certain people in your family and your social circle etc.

Instead of focusing on them, what if you focused on all of the people who support you and love you, and you turned around and loved them even better? I promise that is, first of all, the way that you get your own back with the people outside of you. You don’t put up a hand; you simply redirect your focus. Now, again, of course, there are extreme cases when boundaries may be necessary. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the majority of the time, your brain thinks focusing on what’s wrong or bad is useful, it is not. It takes you away from your center and from who you truly are.

So I want to give you a few other strategies here that will have to do with you supporting you. That’s what I wanted to say about the other people outside of you, some of them will support you, and agree with you, and adore you, and others of them will judge you, and disagree with you, and even have a lot of negative things to say. Focus on the ones who support you, become a love army of your own, for the people in your life. But in terms of your support of yourself, there’s three strategies here I want you to keep in mind.

Number one, you’re going to make decisions today based on what seems like the right move. Maybe it’s a decision about a parenting strategy with your child, whether or not to have a conversation with a teenager about something difficult, whether or not to go on a family trip, whether or not to pay for your child’s summer camp or to require that they pay for half. I could go on and on. These are the types of decisions I’m talking about. I’m not talking about a decision like, should I steal this thing from Target, or should I pay for it?

Those are pretty obvious right and wrong decisions. I’m talking about the kinds of decisions most of us have to make most of the time, which is what is the right way? I don’t know. I can see pros and cons to each. Or those of you that are entrepreneurs, should I try this marketing strategy or that one? Should I target this niche or that one? How much should I charge? What should I try? What should I do? Those types of decisions, you can just decide right now that no matter what, you will get your own back.

Here’s what I mean. Let’s say you decide to pay for your child’s summer camp and not require your child to pay for any of it. And there’s this little voice inside of you that’s like, “Maybe that’s the wrong choice. Maybe you’re spoiling that child. Maybe he or she is going to become entitled, or they’re not going to learn how to make money on their own or how to be independent. And maybe one day”, I don’t know about your brain, but mine can get very imaginative.

It’s just picturing them in a therapy session and the therapist is like, “Why do you think you have such a hard time believing in yourself?” And after they break it all down, it comes down to my mom never even gave me the chance, or encouraged me, or pushed me the way my friend’s moms did, to pay for my own summer camp. She enabled me. I think that is where it all began. Does your brain do this like mine? Please tell me I’m not the only one.

Okay, so if that were to happen even, whatever we are afraid of, worst case scenario, you can still decide right now that you will get your own back. That on that day when your child tells you, “Mom, this is what I discovered in therapy, I am a mess and it’s your fault.” Then I can still say to myself, “Alright, maybe that’s true. If you had made a different choice, maybe your child would be better off today and I love you anyway.” Because you made what seemed like the right choice. How could we have possibly known back then what the right choice is?

We had valid reasons for either one. And even if you don’t think you had valid reasons, even if you know, I was just scared, and I didn’t want to make the difficult choice, so I made the easier choice and I know the other one would have been right. You’re still allowed to get your own back. It sounds more like, I love you, I’ve got you, you did the best you could. You weren’t capable at that point. You didn’t have it in you to do better and it’s okay. And I love you just the same and I’m here for you and I’ve got you.

And we can do better now and there will be times when we won’t do better now and I will continue to get you, to support you, to love you, to nurture you, to pay attention to what you’re needing, to strengthen you, to help you. That’s called getting your own back. I talk to so many clients who are afraid to make decisions because they’re afraid of regretting it. And they’re afraid of being disappointed. And I don’t think that we get to escape those emotions in our human state completely, but we certainly can minimize their impact on us in the long run.

If I make a decision and learn later that making a different decision would have possibly most likely taken us in a different path that would have ended us up in a different place then I want to be disappointed, and I might even want to regret, but I don’t have to linger in that disappointment and regret and beat myself up and tell myself how could you. And spin out in it and stay stuck in it. I can say, “And I love me anyway. Some days I get it right and other days I get it wrong. What are you going to do?” And maybe I apologize. Maybe I need to apologize to someone, or to myself, etc.

I can do what I can to make it right. And I don’t have to beat myself up. I can still get my own back. That’s number one, decide right now not to shame your future self for what your current self is choosing. That is getting your own back.

Number two, stop it with the negative self-talk. I did a Take Tuesday. If you’re not getting my Take Tuesday messages I have turned them into little, they’re two minute or less videos and they’re pretty good, I’ve got to say. So make sure you’re subscribed to Take Tuesday. You can go to jodymoore.com and subscribe if you’re not. But anyway I did a Take Tuesday about this where I talked about talking negatively yourself, beating yourself up, you know the recurring thoughts. I’m not talking about the ones that are specific to a choice or something like we just talked about.

I’m talking about the ongoing recurring thoughts; what do yours sound like? Mine are like; you sound so dumb. You look dumb. And so usually calming myself dumb. You sound dumb. You look dumb. You are dumb. That was dumb. I don’t know why that’s the word of choice for my negative brain. What is yours? Is it, who do you think you are? You’ll never be able to do that. You’re not like other people. You’re not that kind of person. What is it? What is the negative self-talk? We usually all have a handful of thoughts that are just recurring that show up in all different areas.

And we don’t get to get rid of them altogether, but we can choose to redirect away from them to change the channel when they come on. And my Take Tuesday message was about that. Was about it really is a choice that you make. People say to me all the time, “I need to work on that. I need to work on not being so negative to myself.” And what I mentioned in Take Tuesday, “It’s not something you work on; it’s just a choice.”

So I want you to imagine that one of your children says to the other one, “You are so dumb. You look dumb today”, whatever your brain might say to you. Imagine one of your children says that to the other one. We don’t say, “Listen, you need to really work on not saying that.” We say, “No, that is not okay. We don’t talk to each other that way in our family.” And we just put our foot down. We’re like, That’s a no.” That’s what you do with yourself. It will still come up sometimes, at least for me it does.

I still have the thoughts that come up. But I’m just like, “No, we’re doing that today. We’re not going there today.” And then I can redirect away from it. We don’t want to focus on instead, I don’t even have to go to like, “You look beautiful today. You said an amazing, lovely, brilliant thing that just came out of your mouth.” No, I don’t try to do that. I just redirect away from it. It’s like. “You shouldn’t have said that. You sound dumb.” And I just go, “No, we’re not doing that.” And then I move on to whatever I want to do instead, to making breakfast for my kids, to recording this podcast for you.

So stop it with the negative self-talk; it’s a choice. Put your foot down and decide right now that that’s enough, that you’re not doing that to yourself anymore. You’re getting your own back. You’re loving you. The truth is, you do say dumb things, you do look dumb, at least, I’m talking to myself right now. And who cares? I love you anyway. We all do dumb things and look dumb at times. It’s just so irrelevant. It’s so not in important. Why do we expect that we should be brilliant, and amazing, and smart, and wise, and kind all the time? We’re not.

So it’s like, yes, it’s true, half the time you’re a mess and who cares? We’re not focusing on that. It’s irrelevant. And when it comes to your worth and your value, you’re just as valuable, and worthy, and whole. I’ve got you. I love you. I embrace all of you. That’s how stop with the negative self-talk by just choosing. I want to give this one other example.

I was listening sometime recently within the past couple of weeks to a coaching call, and Brooke Castillo was coaching. And Brooke was coaching this girl on this exact topic. This girl has all kinds of negative limiting thoughts about herself and her ability to grow her business in the way that she wants to. And after a while of coaching and discovering the thoughts. She has a lot of thoughts like, you’ll never be able to do it. You’ll never be successful; you’re not good enough, you’re not smart enough, thoughts like that.

And Brooke was offering to her this idea that she could just choose not to focus on those thoughts or not to allow those thoughts anymore. And the girl said, “I don’t know how. How do you do that?” And Brooke said, “Go ahead and say those things to me. The things that you say yourself, I want you to say it to me right now, tell me. Tell me that I am worthless, I’m not good enough, I’m never going to achieve my goals. Go ahead, tell me those things.”

And the girl just sat there for a minute until tears filled her eyes, and she started crying. And she said, “I can’t. I can’t say that to you.” And Brooke’s like, “Yeah, why not?” And she said, “Because I love you, and that’s so mean. I would never say that to you.” And it brought out the reality that it is just a choice. She would never say that to another person. She can choose to stop believing that when it comes up her own mind. She can just dismiss it as brain chatter, that’s all it is, brain chatter.

Alright, the third part of getting your own back is to tell other people what you want and need. Ask for the help that you want. In fact, I think we should be doing a lot more asking and requesting of each other for the help and support that we want and need. And when I teach, get your own back and you’re responsible for meeting your own needs, again it gets misinterpreted sometimes as that you shouldn’t ask other people. That’s not what I’m saying at all. Here’s what I’m saying.

Sometimes other people will be willing to meet your requests or they will be able to, or they will do it in the way that you hoped they would do it, in the way that you envisioned and that will be a lovely thing. And many other times, they either won’t do it right, even though they intend to and they think they are. They won’t do it the way that you had in mind, or they’ll just flat out forget that they agreed to do it, or they won’t even be willing in the first place. And in those cases, we’re not going to sit around and feel bad. We’re not going to wait to feel good and get our needs met.

We’re not going to count on other people for it. We’re going to know that we can do it and/or we can find someone else. So we’re not going to be mad when they don’t but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be reaching out to one another asking for help. And that might be literally asking for someone to do something. I am so guilty of – not guilty. I shouldn’t say guilty. I am so good at asking for help, I really am.

I’m good at asking for help from my husband, first of all. I ask him for all kinds of things, “Could you figure out what’s going on, on my computer? Could you help with this thing in the house? Could you figure out what needs to happen with the car, could you?” I ask him all day long for help and he is willing to do a lot of it. I am very fortunate that way. But you know what? Some of it he doesn’t do the way I would do it. He doesn’t do it in the timeline that I had in mind. He doesn’t do it in the way I envisioned, or he just flat out forgets or occasionally can’t or won’t do it.

And I do a pretty good job of managing my own emotions when that happens. I’m not perfect at it by any means, but I’ve gotten pretty good at it. And I think that’s why I’m not afraid to ask for his help. I’m also not asking for help anymore, I should say, after a lot of work. I’m not asking for help out of resentment, or frustration, or overwhelm, or poor me. I have to do everything, and this is so hard. That’s a totally different kind of asking for help than just like, “You know what would be lovely?” As if this thing could happen.

I love the idea that when we keep our heads in the right space, which, again, none of us are perfect at. But when we can stay in getting our own back when we already are confident in ourselves, we are way more effective at influencing those around us, we just are. We do it in a more loving, kind, generous way and we get a more loving, kind, generous response as a result, I promise that’s true.

Now, I want to take this to the next level even though. It doesn’t have to be a specific act of service that you’re asking for. It may just be what you need in terms of the conversation you’re having with someone. I’m starting to notice this everywhere around me right now. I don’t know why it’s come into my awareness. Maybe it’s important for us all to pay attention to. But I notice that in conversations around what are emotionally charged topics we tend to have ideas about how we think people should respond.

And they seem so obvious to us that if other people don’t respond that way, we go immediately to, “What’s the matter with them?” Why would you say that? Would you ever say that to someone in my situation?” We become offended, or hurt, or just shocked, or disgusted. So, for example, maybe you have a child going through something challenging. I had a conversation last year with a friend who said, “My child is struggling with his identity, his gender identity.”

And when you share something like that with people that a lot of people don’t have experience with, that is emotionally charged and it is politically charged. And there’s a lot of controversy and opinions around a topic like this; people don’t know what to say. I think that, in general, we’re all afraid of saying the wrong thing. The last thing we want to do is hurt or offend somebody. What we hope to do is say something comforting, but we usually don’t know what would be comforting to the person sharing the message.

So my friend was telling me this story, and she said, “I recently shared this with somebody who said to me, “That must be really hard for you.” And then my friend said, “Isn’t that a beautiful thing that she said? That was so amazing that she said that to me. And she’s one of the first people that’s said that to me.” And then my friend and I had this discussion around, “Yeah, that’s amazing. I’m so glad that she said something comforting.”

But all the people who have said whatever else they’ve said, who have said things like you know? “It will be fine in the end.” Or, “We need to embrace people regardless of their gender.” Or, “You should read this book or listen to this podcast.” Whatever else anyone has said, their hope and their intention is that they provide you comfort. It’s just that we don’t know what the other person wants to hear on that day about that topic.

But we could say to people, “This is what’s going on in my life. This is what’s going on with my child. And what would have really help me a lot is just a little bit of support around how hard this is for me.” We could just tell people what we want to hear. We could say, “What helps me the most right now is when people just validate my pain.” Wouldn’t that be amazing if a friend said to you, “I’m getting a divorce. And what’s the most supportive to me right now is for my friends to tell me that it’s okay and I’m going to be fine.”

And they’re like, “Wouldn’t that be great.” You’d be like, “Amazing. You know what? It is okay. And you are going to be fine. And I genuinely believe that and let me tell you why.” Or, “I’m getting a divorce and what I really need right now is someone to tell me it’s okay for me to be really mad about it.” And then you’d go, “You know what? It is okay for you to be mad about it and let me tell you why.” Wouldn’t that be amazing if we all just started telling each other, “This is what’s going on for me in my life and this is what would be most supportive to me. This is what would help me the most.”

That is getting your own back, my friends. Ask people for whatever kind of support you need. We can’t read each other’s minds. And even though we might think we know what that person is thinking or feeling, I think we’re wrong a lot more than we realize. And certainly, other people are not going to be able to read your mind. So don’t be afraid to ask for what you need. Get your own back. Become loving; first of all, stay in love. Don’t move into defensiveness, anger, resentment. That is not getting your own back. That is actually pulling you further away from who truly are.

Decide right now not to shame yourself or your current decisions. Stop with the negative self-talk, change the channel, enough is enough and finally, tell people what you need. Alright, thanks for joining me today. Have a beautiful, lovely New Year’s, and I’ll see you next time, bye bye.

Hey there, if you enjoy this podcast or even if you just find that it sort of piques your curiosity or it makes you think, you’re going to love the book that I wrote. It’s called Better Than Happy: Connecting with Divinity Through Conscious Thinking. And it’s available now at Amazon in print or kindle version. Or if you want me to read it to you, head over to audible and grab the audio version. And why not grab a copy for your sister, your best friend, or your mom while you’re there too. Just saying.