534. Expect More, Resist Less

A lot of people are walking around believing that if they embrace themselves, if they accept where they are, what they’ve done, who they are at this point, what they’re capable of, and what they’re not capable of, the decisions they’ve made, the choices they’ve made, the mistakes they’ve made, their shortcomings, their faults, their weaknesses. If they stop resisting all those things and just embrace and accept and be compassionate about themselves, then they’ll never change. They’ll never get better.

They believe that if they are going to progress, they have to be hard on themselves. That if they’re nice to themselves, they’re accepting mediocrity and stagnation. And today I want to show you why that is absolutely not true. That if you keep resisting where you are, who you are, what you’ve done, who you’ve become, you will stay stuck much longer than if you embrace yourself.

Now, the second half to what we’re going to talk about today is I don’t want you to lower your expectations of yourself. I want you to raise them higher than you’ve ever even considered. And I’m going to tell you why these two things go hand in hand. In my opinion, this is Better Than Happy episode 534: Expect More, Resist Less. Let’s go.

Welcome to Better Than Happy, the podcast where we transform our lives by transforming ourselves. My name is Jody Moore. In the decade-plus I’ve been working with clients as a Master Certified Coach, I’ve helped tens of thousands of people to become empowered. And from empowered, the things that seemed hard become trivial, and the things that seemed impossible become available, and suddenly, a whole new world of desire and possibility open up to you. And what do you do with that?

Well, that’s the question… what will you do? Let’s find out.

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If I love my body, I’ll probably just keep eating crap all the time. Why would I eat better? Why would I exercise more if I love my body? Some of you already know that’s ridiculous. Many of you already know that, especially my health coaches out there listening to this, or any of you who have been on a journey of your own with changing up your eating habits and changing your exercise habits. You know that makes no sense. That the truth is working out because you love your body, eating well because you love your body is a sustainable, lifelong, healthy way to do it, but it doesn’t feel that way, right?

If I just believe that I have enough money, that I don’t have to go into scarcity, that everything I need has always been taken care of in some way or another. I’ve always managed to find food to eat, to feed my children, to provide housing, to provide safety and shelter. Even if in your mind you’re like, except for that one time, I’m want to tell your brain, but you figured it out, right? Because you’re still here and you’re doing it and you’re listening to a podcast. So that means you’re doing it. Trust me. You’ve always done it and you always will. And will it always be easy? And will there not be any negative emotion along the way? No, I’m not promising any of that. I’m just saying you can do it. You’re capable of figuring it out and it will all work out. Your money is already enough. You will be so rich when you realize how rich you already are.

But if I just accept my money, I for sure won’t go work on saving money or spending less or earning more. No, that’s a lie, my friend. You will. You’ll be much better at it from accepting yourself. If I tell myself that I’m a good mom, I’m a good enough mom. I need to be good in all the ways I’m good and not good in the ways I’m not good, and that’s okay and I don’t need to be any better, then for sure I’m just going to keep yelling at my kids, right? No, you’re yelling at your kids because you feel bad about yourself. And then your kids come along and do what kids do, and then it’s like the last straw. Not even mad at the kids. You’re mad at yourself, and then the kids just are annoying and you lose your cool. That’s what’s happening here.

So yeah, if you accept that you’re a good mom and you’re a bad mom some days, and that’s okay. You’re a human mom, and that’s all those kids need, and you don’t need to be any better than you are. You will ironically, accidentally become better because you’ll have more energy to be patient. If you’re patient with yourself, then you can be patient with those kids.

If you just accept that your house is fine, it doesn’t need to be any cleaner than it is. It doesn’t matter if there’s dishes in the sink and you didn’t do the laundry and whatever, who cares? It doesn’t matter. It’s fine. Yeah, you could have done that today, but instead you watched Netflix. Okay, maybe that’s what you needed today. If you just stop resisting where you’re at, are you ever going to get the house cleaned up? Well, is the alternative working for you? Just saying. Just saying.

Some of you do this with your to-do list. Oh my gosh, I have so much I have to get done, and you’re so overwhelmed. And then when you don’t get it all done because the list just keeps growing, right? You can keep checking stuff off, but there’s still going to be more stuff that will be added to the bottom that you didn’t think of or didn’t know needed to get done. And if you never get that list done, can you ever really relax?

Seriously, this is not a good way to live your life. You’re not getting more done by judging yourself for not getting enough done. You have less energy to get stuff done from that space. You certainly have less access to your own creativity, to your own ability to think outside the box or find different solutions or easier ways to do it. You got to accept that you don’t need to get anything more done than what you got done. It’s fine. It’s going to be just fine.

Some of you do this with like what you said to your friends yesterday, what you said to your husband last night. You think back the next day and go, I shouldn’t have said that, I shouldn’t have done that. And you beat up your past self instead of embracing, accepting, and being compassionate with and curious about your past self and loving your past self. You don’t have to resist who you’ve been being to be somebody different. In fact, the best way to be somebody different is to embrace who you’ve been being and then set super high expectations for who you’re going to be going forward. So let’s just dive in. Let’s just dive in. Are you ready?

All right. First of all, when you accept where you are, the reason why this is so much more useful than resisting where you are is because from acceptance, you have access to curiosity. Okay? I often use the analogy of this is like a pot with a lid on it. When we’re resisting who we are, we’re shamed or feeling guilty or bad about who we are, we put the lid on that pot because our brains do not want our weaknesses to be exposed to anyone, including ourselves. So if I have lots of judgment of who I am, I’m going to put a lid on that pot all day long. In other words, don’t look in here. It’s not pretty. You don’t want to see this. You’re going to feel bad when you see this, so we’re not going to look in there.

If I take the lid off of the pot, which is the equivalent of going, it’s fine. I’m fine with whatever’s in that pot. I’m not going to feel bad about it. I’m not going to judge myself. I’m not going to beat myself up. I’m not a terrible person. Let’s look in the pot. Let’s see what’s in there. Let’s dig around in that stew. What’s hiding out in the bottom that I didn’t even know was down there? What’s getting stuck up on the edges? Let’s scrape the edge of that pot and let’s really see what’s in this stew.

You will have way more insight and understanding into yourself if you take the lid off the pot, which is the equivalent of stopping judging yourself. Just get curious. Hm, interesting. I wonder why I’m doing this thing or why I’m not doing that thing. I bet I have a good reason. I know I have a good reason. I mean, even if the reason’s just how very human of me, I’m a human being. That’s reason enough, right? You’ve got to be curious. And when you accept where you are, you can be curious.

The second thing that accepting where you are does is allows you to be more confident. More confident. If you are confident, you are better at anything you’re trying to do, right? You have more energy. I want you to think about this. Okay, ladies who can relate to this analogy, stay with me. Let’s imagine that you are having a really good hair day. Like you washed your hair, it feels clean, you styled it, everything went the way it’s supposed to and you’re just like, I mean, I look good today. Look at, check out my hair, check out my outfit or whatever. How much better are you on a day like that at doing the things that you want to do?

Sometimes if I, like, you know that day when you’re like, I should wash my hair, but I don’t want to get up early, so you don’t and you just go one more day. But then your head feels greasy all day and your hair’s sticking to you, and you’re just like, I should have washed my hair. Those are the days when I’m like, I might need to take a nap today. I don’t really have it in me to make these decisions or follow through on this thing in my business, and I certainly don’t want to make dinner. And I know this seems ridiculous. My point is, when I feel confident, which I feel more confident when I’m clean and take care of my hygiene the way I want to, then I have more energy, more creativity. It just serves us better.

And that begins from just accepting where you are. Confidence isn’t about doing enough to be good enough. That day never comes. There’s no end at which your brain will be like, now you’re good enough, right? It’s about accepting that I’m good enough where I am. And I’m going to keep growing and learning, but I’m never going to get to the end of the possibilities of what I want to grow and who I want to become. So I have to just choose to accept myself right now as I am.

The next thing that happens when you just accept where you are is you become unattached to the next level, to the thing that you want to do. And unattachment, detachment, we might say, is the best way to achieve it. Again, this feels completely wrong to your brain. Part of your brain will want to say, if I detach from it, in other words, if I don’t think this is really important, we’ve got to do this thing, then for sure I’m never going to do it, right? No, opposite is true. I could do this thing or I could not do this thing, and it would be fine either way. But let’s go for it. Let’s do it. Let’s commit to it. Let’s see what’s possible. Let’s show up. Let’s give it a try. Okay?

So that kind of unattachment, detachment, I should say, is the best energy by which to accomplish anything, to change a habit, to go after a goal. Detachment is our friend. We know this from the Buddhists, we know this from a lot of teachers of thought work, right? One other thing I’ll say about detachment is, for me, the easiest way to think about detachment is I detach my worth from whether or not I’m doing this thing. Or like I said before, I detach my confidence from whether or not I achieve the thing. Like I’m going to achieve this thing, but I’m going to love myself anyway, no matter what, and I’m going to believe in myself anyway, no matter what. That’s detachment.

So we’re not doing a thing in order to prove that we’re capable. We’re doing it because we believe we’re capable. And so why not? Why not give it a try? So today I taught a workshop in The Lab called Should Free where we dive really deep into this subject. And one of the things we talked about on there is how grace actually leads to progress. The scriptures say that it is only through grace that we are saved, right? And we in the Christian faith tradition use that scripture to connect back to Christ and the sacrifice that he made for us and his atonement for us, which I’m still saying is valid and true. But if grace is how we’re saved, right, through the grace of Christ, then why do we think that beating ourselves up, judging ourselves, rejecting ourselves is going to in some way help us improve ourselves in whatever capacity we have to improve ourselves? That makes no sense to me.

It is through grace that we are saved. Meaning Christ closes the gap for us, but also meaning give yourself some grace. That is how you are going to evolve and progress and grow in the way that you want to is through grace. Again, like I said at the beginning, a lot of people think that grace equals stagnation. If I give myself grace, I’m going to stagnate. That is not the way human beings operate.

Okay. So that is why I want you to do less resisting of yourself and where you’re at. But now I want to talk about the second part of this episode, which is expecting more. I want you to have higher standards for yourself than maybe you’ve ever even considered having. And I want you to do this from acceptance, from love, from curiosity. I want you to set higher goals, bigger goals. Whatever you think is big, if you were to 10x it, now what? Impossible goals, we might even say. I want you to go after something really next level. I want you to commit to working harder than you’re working. And I want to argue that these things go with self-acceptance and compassion and grace.

If you embrace yourself and love yourself, you can set big goals because you know what happens when you set a big goal? Fear comes up, doubt comes up, overwhelm comes up, a bunch of negative emotions because of your own limiting beliefs and thoughts will come up for you. And if you already have been judging and beating yourself up, you’re not going to have the capacity or the energy or the bandwidth to overcome those things. But if you are operating from a space of self-acceptance and love and gratitude, then you will, you have it within you to overcome the fear, to overcome the overwhelm. We do this by paying attention to our thoughts, but you also do this by taking action, by just getting started one step at a time. Okay?

I want you to be even more disciplined than you’ve been in the past, but not because you should, only because you could. Because you’re capable of it, because you’re amazing. Why not do that? I want you to be the best at what you do. Don’t decide, well, I’m just going to do a little bit because I’m not that type of person that’s really all that excellent. No, why not you? Why couldn’t you be the best at what you do? You could be. Did you know this? Set your sights on something much higher, but not because it’s needed to earn your own approval or recognize your value, not because you’re trying to impress anyone else, just because you are a human being who’s alive and you’re here in the game, why not go all in? Why not play big?

Now, this is different than perfectionism. Okay, perfectionism is, we better do this thing really well because we wouldn’t want anyone to judge us. We wouldn’t want anyone to see our shortcomings and have a negative opinion about us. That’s not what I’m saying. That’s perfectionism. Excellence is, hey, I came to play. I’m alive. I have some experiences and some knowledge and some desire, and I want to see what I could do with it. I want to see what I can create. I want to see who I can become. I want to see what I can offer to people. Why not me? What do we got to lose? What’s the harm of going all in?

This is going to be fun. Let’s go. Let’s just play this game because it sounds fun. This will be really good for me. I want to become a person who knows how to do this. I want to overcome my own self, which is going to be necessary to achieve what I’m trying to achieve or to create what I’m trying to create or to change in the way that I want to change. That’s who I want to become.

Notice it has nothing to do with what anybody else is going to think of me. And it also doesn’t paint the picture that it’s always going to be easy. It’s not always going to be easy. It’s going to be challenging. That’s why I want to go all in on doing it. I can set small goals and have low standards of myself, but I don’t grow that way. I don’t evolve that way. I don’t become a more useful to myself version of me unless it’s challenging.

So the difference is should versus could. It’s basically two letters and it makes the biggest difference in the world. Should is more toxic than you know. Not only is it a, now by the way, if you’re like, I know I shouldn’t say I should, you’re doubling up on should. You can’t do that and expect to have less should. It’s more toxic than you know. But also, could is more powerful than you may have ever realized. All right? So like I said, I just taught a class on this in The Lab, better than Happy The Lab. So those of you in there, if you missed it, go catch the replay. It’s a really good one, and I give you practical steps of how to move out of should. We all know we’re not supposed to should on ourselves. We’ve all heard that. And the problem is nobody taught you how before, but I taught you how today.

So go watch it if you’re in Better Than Happy: The Lab. And if you’re not in there and you just want to purchase that course, you can by going to JodyMoore.com/workshop. I should mention that this course is only available to purchase during the month of October. So you got to go grab it and then it will be gone unless you’re in The Lab and then you’ll have access to it as long as you stay there. But for everybody else, JodyMoore.com/workshop if you want to get my step by step how to get out of should and into creating what you want in your life. Thanks for joining me today, everybody. I’ll see you next week on another episode. Take care.

Oh wow, look at that. You made it to the end. Your time and attention is valuable, and I don’t take it lightly that you made it this far. In fact, it tells me you might be like me; insatiably curious about people and life and potential and connection. Maybe you have big dreams but a small budget and no time. You’re tired, but bored. You’re content, but dissatisfied. Sound familiar? Come to a free coaching call and see for yourself what’s possible: JodyMoore.com/freecoaching to register. That’s JodyMoore.com/freecoaching.