272. Exercising Intentionality

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy episode 272: Exercising Intentionality.

Welcome to Better Than Happy. I’m your host, Jody Moore. I’m a mother to four children. I’m a huge Taylor Swift fan, and I’m a Master Certified Life Coach. I’m here to teach you how to manage your brain and manage your emotions so that you can create a life that’s even better than happy. Are you ready? Let’s go.

Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast. Before we dive into today’s topic I want to speak to those of you that are coaches who are certified through The Life Coach School who want to take your coaching to the next level.

I have a program that I am in the middle of right now with a group of coaches that is so amazing. We really are just taking their coaching beyond what I even thought we were going to be able to do. And I love seeing their growth, and progression, and the aha moments that they’re having. And it’s just super fun. And I’m going to be launching it again soon. I am changing the name of it. I called it Coach Incubator the first time. We’re changing the name to An Advanced Certification in Faith Based Coaching.

And there’s a lot of reasons for that, but faith-based coaching is of course my specialty, I coach, a lot of my clients are members of the church that I go, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Not all of them are. So similarly, you don’t have to be a coach who coaches within any religious context necessarily to come to this program. But that is my area of expertise.

So I’m going to be teaching some tools around that topic along with teaching you all of the other coaching tools that I have developed for myself over the years as a coach. And just helping you take your coaching to that next level. So there’ll be clients for you to coach, there will be lots of feedback on your coaching and a lot of other good stuff that I don’t want to spend a lot of time here on the podcast talking about.

But if you are certified at The Life Coach School and you have a possible interest of joining me for that program then make sure you get on the wait list at jodymoore.com/coach. What we’ll do is around the end of October I’ll be doing an information call where I’ll really go into depth about what you get in that program, who it’s for, who it’s not for. You’ll have the opportunity to grab a spot, so jodymoore.com/coach.

Okay. Now, let’s talk about exercising intentionality today. And here’s what I want you to keep in mind, I love that word ‘intentionality’ because I love the idea, the concept behind it which allows us to maximize our brains. It allows us to use all the functions that we have in the brain that happen without us directing it, without us paying attention. That we’re not even really able to describe or put our finger what’s going on, but the brain wrestles with it to get us the result that we want if we have intentionality.

So for example, maybe I have someone who has never wakeboarded and they want to learn to wakeboard. And so we go out on the boat and they get in the water. And their goal is to figure out how to get up on that wakeboard and then just stay up for a little bit. That’ll probably be the first goal, get up and stay up for a little bit of time.

So as someone tells that person what to do, my husband’s really good at this, he’s a really good teacher. He’ll explain to people, “Okay, you want to keep your knees bent and your arms straight. And you want to keep the board tilted up in this way and you want to let the boat pull you up out of the water. You don’t want to stand up too soon. You want to let the boat pull you up.” So we can give verbal direction like this. And that’s helpful and I love that.

But the person in the water, their amazing brain is going to go to work on calculating all the little nuances that go along with how to get up out of the water on a wakeboard. So their brains, every time they try getting up and they don’t get up, their brain takes note of what it thinks might have gone wrong. Maybe it thinks you stood up too soon, or maybe it thinks you didn’t stand up soon enough or whatever. Now, again, my husband Jake will often give some direction too like, “I notice you’re doing this, I notice you’re doing that.” That can be useful.

But remember your brain and body are working together to try to make your muscles work the right way, to try to get you to balance in the right way, to try to make everything line up so that you can achieve the goal that you’re trying to teach. That’s intentionality.

So what happens is we go through life and sometimes we lose intentionality around things. This is because sometimes we just get overwhelmed or discouraged and we think I don’t really want to try to do this thing, it’s too hard. Or we start believing maybe we can’t do it. Maybe it’s not possible for us. Or we move into a victim place, or a self-pity place. Or there’s all kinds of reasons why we lose intentionality around things. We start doing things for the wrong reason. We start doing things just because we’re supposed to, to check a box.

But intentionality is where you align with your own inner wisdom. I think it’s where God’s able to best direct us, but also of the amazing ways in which your brain and body are created go to work together to get you that result that you seek.

Now, the reason I bring this up, and the way I want to speak about it today is because sometimes we just take things really literally and we don’t go internal. We don’t allow our amazing brain and the nuances that it has to help us achieve our goals. We do too much of relying on the person in the boat telling us what to do and not enough of relying on our own internal wisdom.

So I want to encourage you to notice when that’s happening and to ask, what is the intention behind this direction? And how do I take that and then interpret it in the way that serves me best in my life? How do I have intentionality around it? So I see this happening sometimes for myself as a coach because as a coach I am not a therapist.

And while I do have a lot of clients who either are in therapy or have been through therapy, and have benefitted a lot from therapy, traditionally the kind of work that happens in therapy is quite different from the kind of work that happens in coaching. Because the problems and challenges that require therapy are much different than the problems and challenges that require coaching. Coaching is for anybody with a healthy functioning brain. So therapy is going to be typically reserved for more dysfunctional areas, we would say lack of health in a certain way.

And so if you try to take what I’m teaching as a coach and then make it fit every situation, especially somebody that has a dysfunctional area of their life, it’s not going to resonate. It’s not going to come across as relevant and true. And I see this happen sometimes on my Instagram, I’ll post a quote, or a video or something, and I get sometimes people on there who are in a situation that I would say requires therapy. And they want to tell me why what I’m teaching it’s actually really harmful.

Or sometimes it is an actual therapist saying, “I work with clients in this particular way and the message you’re putting out could be really dangerous for them.” So I just want to be clear that as a coach I am not a therapist.

And it’s not uncommon for me to recommend to clients in certain situations, “Hey, I recommend if you want to keep getting coaching, great, we can do that. But I highly recommend you seek help from a psychotherapist or a more traditional clinical situation. Because there’s work that needs to be done here that’s outside of my pay grade, to be honest.” I’m not trained in that. I’m not trained in mental disorder or mental illness, if you will.

So I want to give you a bunch of examples because I think it’ll help you understand what I’m trying to say with intentionality. And how to apply, not just my advice, but any advice that you get from anyone in a more intentional way to help you get the result you want in your life. But not use it to sabotage yourself.

So I think the easiest example to see this in is with food. So if somebody advises us, “Hey, to achieve your nutrition goals, to achieve your health goals you probably need to eat less. You certainly probably need to eat less of certain kinds of foods.” That’s true for the majority of the people. Most people when they say, “I have a health goal, a weight goal.” What they tell us is that they’re trying to lose weight, especially women, sometimes men too.

Now, occasionally people might say, “I’m trying to gain weight, I’m trying to gain muscle.” So that can be relevant too. But ultimately it’s you’re going to need to watch what you eat. You’re going to need to monitor what you’re going to eat. You’re going to need to probably eat less sugar, maybe less carbs and fat or something. Maybe you’re going to need to increase protein. Or maybe you are trying to build muscle, you need to increase what you’re eating but you want to increase the right kinds of food. So we’re going to be more consciously aware of what we’re eating.

Now, this does not apply to somebody who has an eating disorder like anorexia. We would never tell somebody who has anorexia, “Hey, let’s monitor your food more closely, in fact, let’s eat less food. Let’s cut out sugar. Let’s decide that these certain foods are off limits for a little while.” In my understanding anyway, not useful advice for somebody with an eating disorder like anorexia.

Now, like I said, I am not a specialist in that area, that’s why I don’t do podcasts on how to overcome anorexia. I do think some of the tools that I teach apply and can be useful to someone in that situation. But the advice that I’m giving someone if I say, “Why don’t we eat less to achieve your health goals,” does not apply to someone with anorexia. That doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s useful advice for a lot of people.

So let’s go through some other examples. That’s kind of more, I mean, it is sort of an example but it’s more like metaphorical. I want you to think of that as we go through these other examples that are more the types of things that I talk about a lot more. And I want you to use intentionality behind how much to apply this advice and how does it really help you instead of you using it against yourself.

So one of the things I teach and I’ve been talking about this quite a bit on Instagram. That it’s not useful for us to have expectations of who our spouse should be. I call it having a manual for them like my spouse should be a righteous priesthood holder, and he should be good looking, and he should be a good father. And he should be kind, and he should be patient, and he should take out the garbage, and he should support the family.

That list that many of us wrote when we were young girls is not useful, because what we do is we use that as a reason to not connect with our spouse, and as a reason to judge, and to be frustrated, and to think that he’s doing it wrong. And we actually drive distance in our marriages because nobody’s probably going to meet that entire list perfectly.

Now, again sometimes people come along when I say, “Listen, drop your expectations. Just expect him to be him.” What if that was your only expectation? And inevitably I always get a psychotherapist or somebody who says, “This is dangerous advice you’re giving out because I work with clients who are in abusive marriages. And their spouse may be verbally abusing them, or physically abusing them, or what have you. And you’re telling them to just let them be them. I think that’s bad advice.” And I would agree that is bad advice for somebody in an abusive marriage.

So if we have intentionality behind it, what I mean is let’s connect more with our spouse, let’s love them as they are, let’s stop thinking we understand how people should be. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t love yourself first and foremost, and have respect for yourself, first and foremost. And that that work is absolutely necessary in order for you to actually do the other thing.

Now, again some of my advice overlaps because I do think instead of waiting around for spouse to change I should expect that maybe he’s never going to and so now what? Do I need to have clear boundaries? Do I want to leave this marriage altogether? If I stop waiting for him to change, if I just expect that that’s who he or she is going to continue to be because I haven’t seen evidence to the contrary, then I put the onus back on who I want to be and what I want to do. So in that way I do think there’s some overlap.

But again I am not a therapist. I am not trained to help someone out of an abusive situation. And I’d highly recommend if you’re in a situation like that, that you go to a good psychotherapist who can help you in that situation. However, for a lot of people out there, we’re doing the opposite of that. We’re simply using our expectations of how people should be as a reason to not love and connect.

Another piece of advice that I give out is some version of what if you just allow yourself to do more of what you want to honor your desires, and less of what you just think that you should do. Now, for a lot of people I think that’s a powerful way to explore being a better version of you.

But if you’re addicted to drugs or some other substance then honoring your desires and doing more of what you just want to do and less of what you think you should do is probably not going to serve you very well. Because what your brain wants in that moment is to take drugs. Not going to work out to your advantage in the long run.

So again if you have an addiction to drugs or some sort of substance, that’s above my pay grade, friends. That I recommend you go seek some clinical treatment for. And there’s a lot of amazing brilliant individuals out there who can help you in these kinds of situations.

I’m talking to everybody else who is people pleasing and delegating their agency to people and events outside of them, which you can’t really do, but in your brain you’re doing that. So what I’m talking about is taking back all of the ownership over your agency and deciding who you want to be. And honoring that version of you, which is a lot scarier than people pleasing, by the way.

Okay, here’s another example. One of the things when I teach time management is I teach to create a schedule and then follow your schedule, even if you don’t want to. To decide, at least in certain parts of your life, maybe it’s with your whole day, or maybe it’s just with certain parts of your day where you schedule out, I’m going to do this from this time to that time. And then I’m going to move on to this task, and to know that you won’t want to do it and to just do it anyway.

Now, that is not the advice I probably think would be good for someone with OCD tendencies. If someone is extremely perfectionistic, obsessive, compulsive disorder, then that’s something where I would recommend some psychotherapy treatment, or some other kind of clinical treatment. And I don’t even know what kind of treatment. But I’m not talking to that person that already operates on such a rigid regime and feels really stressed and uncomfortable if they break out of that regime.

I’m talking about everybody else that is sort of sloppy, and unfocused, and lazy, with planning our time and sticking to our schedule. So use intentionality. You don’t have to be all the way over to the point on the continuum where you think you need psychotherapy either to know that maybe you tend towards some of these things. And to know that you need to take the advice I’m giving you a little bit softer. That you need maybe a little bit of that but not as much as someone who tends to the opposite extreme.

Use your intentionality to determine how that applies to you, or if it even applies to you. Maybe it doesn’t apply to you at all. Maybe that’s not your problem at all. Feel free to throw out any advice that I give, if so.

Another thing that I teach is this concept of B-minus work, that what if we were just okay with B-minus work? What if we were comfortable with it? What if we decided it was good enough and then we don’t slow ourselves down with perfectionism and thinking that everything has to be amazing? Everything doesn’t have to be amazing, B-minus in most cases gets it done and allows us to do a lot more in our lives, experience a lot more in our lives, and move on, and find fulfillment along the way.

But I taught this one time at a Religious Society meeting, somebody raised their hand and said, “Well, that’s terrible advice. I have a son that’s failing out of school and if I tell him to just be happy with B-minus work. And basically telling him shoot for not very high and he needs to shoot higher.” “Okay, well, I’m not talking to your son right now. I don’t see him here. I was talking to you.”

And second of all, if I have somebody that’s failing out of school the tool I would pull out of my toolkit probably wouldn’t be let’s just shoot for B-minus and stop being a perfectionist, because that’s not their problem. They have a different problem that we need to attack in a different way.

Another thing I teach is the idea that you are already an amazing mother. So many of you are so hard on yourselves, I am hard on myself sometimes too, all of us. But if you’re walking around thinking I need to be a better mother, then sometimes when I’m coaching or teaching, or what I post online even is what if you don’t need to be any better than you already are? What if you actually already are a brilliant, amazing, wonderful mother?

Now, again it never fails that I get somebody come along and say, “I wish you’d stop telling women that because I know some women who beat their children and I think they should take a second look at whether or not they’re being the best mothers.” And I would say again, “You are probably right, and I’m not talking to the person who is beating their children.” I think there is a time for us, whether it be our mothering or anything else, I think there’s an appropriate time for questioning is that really my best, or what’s going on for me, how can I do better?

I’m all for us having those kind of conversations with ourselves. But so many times we actually take that and we use it against ourselves to keep ourselves stuck in a trap. So it’s almost like there’s this point of diminishing returns. Where yes, I want to assess myself, I want to notice areas I can do better. But as soon as I use that to shame myself, to guilt myself, to beat myself up, then I’m going to stay stuck in this negative spin.

So the irony is when you really embrace that you already are as good of a mother as you ever need to be you start feeling better, which makes it easier to do all the things that we do as mothers. And so we actually do become better mothers. It’s ironic, we let go of thinking we should, that’s when we do.

But I’m not talking to someone that’s beating their children. That again is above my pay grade. I highly recommend that we get some intervention in that situation and we figure out what’s really going on. Although I do think that the person doing the abusing has a lot of negative self-talk and things that probably needs to be addressed as well.

Okay, here’s the last one I want to give you. I talk a lot about allowing negative emotion. Not just allowing it, but really learning how to process it, knowing that it’s not a problem, nothing’s gone wrong. As human beings we are supposed to experience negative emotion, and we’re going to. And I’m not trying to turn anyone into a robot who never experiences negative emotion. So negative emotion equals nothing’s gone wrong, I’m just a human.

Now, I’m not saying that that doesn’t mean that sometimes your negative emotion is a result of something having gone wrong. That is a real thing, it’s called clinical anxiety, clinical depression. So I’m still a believer in processing the emotion and opening up to it. But I want you to seek treatment from a clinical specialist if you have some clinical things going on, or some hormonal imbalances or something.

There again are so many amazing tools in our world that can help to treat chemical imbalances in the brain and in the body. And I highly recommend, that is sort of like having the flu, or having diabetes, or something that’s medically treatable. But again, a lot of the time what we do is we use negative emotion as a reason to think that something’s wrong and that we need to fix it or solve for it, instead of just opening up and allowing it.

So use intentionality, not just behind what I teach you, certainly I hope you’ll use it with what I teach you. But I hope you’ll use it with anything anyone’s teaching you. As soon as we want to just be literal and think that there’s a one size fits all and that whoever’s giving us advice is saying that this is always true and we sort of oversimplify everything. Then we miss out on our own ability to use all the amazing skills and tools that God gave us.

He gave us brains, he gave us bodies. All these things navigate us. He even will speak to us and help to guide us. But we have to be operating with intentionality to maximize all of that. So please, please use that intentionality behind your self-improvement, your self-help, your personal development help and your spiritual, physical, any other kind of development you’re doing. I promise you it will work far better.

Alright you guys, thanks for joining me today. Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast and share it with your friends. And I’ll see you next time on another episode.

Who is your life coach? If you don’t have one I would be so honored to be your coach. I created a virtual coaching program called Be Bold that I want to invite you to join me in. We can address challenges, we can work on goals, and we can do it in so many different ways.

We have group coaching, individual private coaching, and online chats along with hundreds of hours of courses and content that I’ve created just for you. When you’re ready to really take what you’re learning on the podcast to the 10x level, then come check out Be Bold at JodyMoore.com/membership.