417. A’s to Your Q’s

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, episode 417, A’s to your Q’s.

This is Better Than Happy, the podcast where we study what the healthiest, most successful people in today’s world think, feel and do. And we leverage this knowledge to create our best lives. Are you ready, little bird? Let’s fly.

Hello everybody, welcome to the podcast. I want to give a huge thank you first of all to all of you who submitted questions. A couple of weeks ago on Instagram I put up a Q&A box and I said, “Hey, I want to answer some questions on the podcast. I haven’t done that in a really long time.” Gosh, you guys, I’ve got to tell you, I got 85,000 followers on Instagram, which is to me a lot. And there’s a lot of you that listen to this podcast, and yet my brain still, when I post a Q&A box like that is nobody’s going to reply. Nobody’s watching or listening. That’s just what I think.

But you did reply, many of you. So I wanted to thank you because it actually makes my job a little bit easier to know what’s happening in your head and be able to address it than to just talk and try to figure that out here on the mic. So that’s what we’re doing today. So if you missed it and you’re thinking, oh, no, I have a question I want to submit. Then you can always DM me on Instagram. I try to keep an eye on that and I try to answer actually as many on there as I can, but a lot easier to do here on the podcast.

Just make sure you’re following me, is what I would say. Make sure you’re following Jody Moore Coaching on Instagram and Facebook. And more importantly, that you’re getting our emails because that’s where the real magic happens. That’s where we let you know about opportunities, what’s going on here at Jody Moore Coaching and give you kind of that insider first go at opportunities and things that come along. So with that I have taken the questions that came in.

I have tried to combine them in a way that would be useful, but I do want to read specific questions. We’re going to keep them all anonymous. But I want to read your specific words and the way that you ask questions because one of the things I realized after reading through a lot of your questions is that the questions that we ask ourselves matter. So any question you asked me is the right question. But the question that you ask yourself, which is often, if we say it out loud, it means we’ve been asking ourselves.

The quality of a question matters a lot. And am I asking a question that’s going to give me useful information is something I want to kind of teach you as we address the questions today. But like I said, I tried to group them into similar types of questions so that we can cover as many as possible. So that’s how we’re going to roll today. Okay, so I’m going to read a handful of questions here all together. And then I’m going to tell you, it’ll be obvious in some ways why I lumped these together, but in other ways. I’ll tell you why. And then I’m going to answer them.

So somebody says, “How to best cope when dealing with parents with cancer, both single, both rely on me.” Somebody else says, “Need help feeling peace when things aren’t going well. My state of mind is tied to external.” Then here’s another one, “Staying in that positive mindset as I maneuver through taking care of aging parents.” Another one says, “Emotionally immature parents and how to help get out of being emotionally immature myself.” And then the final one in this grouping says, “Living with a husband and 20 year old son with ADHD, being their scaffolding is exhausting.”

Okay, so you can see where, notice that there’s a couple of questions here dealing with helping aging parents or ill parents. Another one about, again, someone said they have emotionally immature parents and how do I not fall into that trap of emotional immaturity? And then just overall, how do I feel peaceful when things are difficult or not at peace outside of me? So that’s why I lumped these together. And here’s what I want to say in answer to these questions, to all of these questions, all five of these that came in.

The first step is to be where you are and embrace where you are. And what I mean by be where you are in this situation is be with whatever emotional state you are in. Allow yourself to feel whatever you’re feeling. Are you overwhelmed? Are you resentful? Are you afraid? Are you worried? Are you conflicted? Are you exhausted? Wherever you are emotionally, mentally, we have to begin by allowing ourselves to be where we are. What do I mean by that?

What I mean is, stop judging yourself for it. Stop telling yourself that you shouldn’t be feeling that way. Stop being in a hurry to get out of it and solve it. Only reason I say that is because it doesn’t work. Being in a hurry to get out of it and solve it doesn’t get us out of it faster. It doesn’t solve it faster. It just adds layers. So now we have maybe some overwhelm with that, maybe some stress. And then we also have frustration about being overwhelmed and stressed or we have guilt about being overwhelmed and stressed.

See how it doesn’t make the overwhelm and stress better? It just adds another layer of negativity on top of it. So this person that said, “How do I stay in that positive mindset as I maneuver through taking care of aging parents?” Well, at times, you don’t. At times you let yourself not be in a positive mindset. You let yourself be negative and you just notice, oh, gosh, I’m feeling really negative today. I’m having a lot of negative thoughts and I’m having a lot of negative emotions and that’s okay. That’s part of it. That’s part of being a human. It’s part of the deal, alright.

I guess this is what we’ve got today. Some days I have positive thoughts, positive feelings. Some days I feel really committed. Some days I feel negative. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed. Sometimes I feel stressed or resentful. We’ve got that, don’t try to stay in a positive mindset, try to just stay somewhat aware or the way I like to think about it is I like to stay empowered. I like to own, I guess, today this is what I’m going to be creating for myself is negativity, alright, let’s just do that for a little while. It’s alright. It really, genuinely is okay.

Why do you think we call this podcast Better Than Happy? There’s no such thing as being positive all the time. It’s weird, it’s not natural. It’s not necessary for sure. So notice how these questions, how do I stay in that positive mind? How do I feel peace when things aren’t going well? Well, I mean, the truth is we can, but you don’t have to. It’s the wrong question. Remember I said, we’ve got to pay attention to the questions we’re asking. I want you to stop asking yourself, how do I stay positive? How do I cope? How do I get to peace? Even, how do I stay emotionally mature and just try this?

I wonder why I’m having so many negative thoughts. I wonder why I’m not at peace. I wonder why I’m struggling to cope. Genuinely wonder why. Don’t wonder why as a rhetorical question, meaning that you shouldn’t. Genuinely wonder why, if you’re going to ask a question that is. Here’s the interesting thing about when you just allow yourself to be where you are emotionally.

Think of it as like today I guess I’m wearing this outfit. I thought I was going to wear that other outfit today. I like the other outfit better, but I guess not. I guess today is kind of a sweatpants and a t-shirt day and that’s the outfit I’m wearing today and that’s okay. When you allow that, a lot of times you don’t even have to answer questions about why. You don’t have to go in and do thought work and run a model and all the other things that I’ve taught you here on the podcast.

If you just genuinely allow it, be very compassionate with yourself, embrace yourself where you are, acknowledge that what you’re doing is challenging and your brain is giving you lots of negative thoughts as a result, and that’s okay, it actually makes perfectly logical sense. Then you will oftentimes naturally move through it on your own. You won’t have to get out a piece of paper and write down your thoughts or get coached or any of that.

Your spirit or your brain or whatever we want to call it, is really, really good at trying to adapt and get back to whatever’s your normal natural state of being emotionally, it is. It’s constantly trying to get back there and it will do that naturally. It will seek ways to feel better if you’re feeling too low. And if you’re feeling too high it will actually self-sabotage and bring you back down to what you’re used to as well. That’s a whole another podcast for another day.

But my point is that you don’t even have to force it if you genuinely allow it. If you go, “Okay, I guess today it’s going to be overwhelm. That’s what we’re going to do today, alright.” We’ll just allow it. I’ll just take deep breaths. I won’t judge myself. Then your mind and your body will work together to try to get you back to feeling better as fast as it can.

So the other day we went out on a boat, my husband and kids and I and we had a friend with us. She decided she wanted to try wake surfing, and she’d never tried wake surfing before. And my husband’s a really amazing teacher. So he gave her some tips and pointers and explained to her what it would feel like when the boat pulled her up out of the water. And then she got in the water and she started trying. And of course she tried and the first time she didn’t get even close to standing up. And we circle back around on the boat and we pick her up again. And the second time, same thing.

And I think it took about three or four tries, but meanwhile the water was pretty cold because it’s early in the summer and the lakes haven’t really warmed up here and she was getting cold, and she was thinking, I don’t know if I can do this. And I said to her, “No, you can, your body is, every time you try to get up your body gets more information about how to get up on a surfboard behind the boat. Your body is learning right now, this is the learning process and it’s making the tiniest, little adjustments.”

Meanwhile, my husband is still giving advice about straighten your arms or lean back or lean forward or whatever, he’s giving advice. But your body is actually learning by what happened the last time, what needs to happen next time in order to help you achieve your goal. And this is the same thing that your brain does when you’re feeling down. It’s constantly learning okay, how do I get back to where I’m used to feeling my normal happiness set point? It will make natural adjustments just like her body made natural adjustments that she wouldn’t even be able to describe.

All she knows is by the fourth time she got up and she couldn’t even exactly tell you why, she couldn’t say, “I put more weight on this foot or I waited a little longer or I stood up a little earlier.” She logically doesn’t even know that, her body just knows it. Her brain knows it, and that’s what happens for us when we’re feeling down is our bodies will try to get us back to our normal state of being. This is why if our normal state of being is to be really down and low then we want to work on that because our brain will try to stay there.

So anyway, my point is be where you are, just allow it and embrace it and many times it’ll sort itself out on its own. Now, sometimes, though, especially if this is an ongoing situation. Several of these questions describe an ongoing situation where we’re continuing to take care of these aging parents or people in our lives who need extra help and support, and we’re feeling overwhelmed or resentful. Or even a situation that resolves itself, unfortunately, another one will probably come along at some point.

So this is where then you can after you allow it and you get to a more useful state, go in and write down all your thoughts and look at them and notice that they are just thoughts and choose what you want to believe instead. What do you want to believe about yourself? What do you want to believe about these people that you’re taking care of? What do you want to believe about what’s appropriate, what is necessary, what you have to do, what you choose to do? Choose it a little bit more intentionally.

So I want to show you in some of these questions where you have thoughts that you may not realize are thoughts. What we’re trying to do is realize these are just thoughts. We’re not just describing truths. We’re describing our thoughts about the situations in our lives. So, for example, this question that says, “Living with a husband and 20 year old son with ADHD, being their scaffolding is exhausting.”

So scaffolding is the metaphor that your brain came up with that describes what’s going on. And it’s making you feel exhausted to think that it’s up to you to hold up this building and that if you’re not there, it’s going to collapse. That’s what scaffolding basically does. So I would just take a look at that, wait a second, thinking that I’m the scaffolding is exhausting me. So how do we reframe this in a way that still feels believable and genuine and like you being who you want to be but isn’t so exhausting because it is exhausting being human scaffolding. I feel tired just hearing that.

But what if you’re not the scaffolding at all? Or what if at least it’s not your job to be scaffolding? How do you want to reframe this? How about, I love them and I’m going to take care of them when I want to but I also need a lot of care and I’m going to make sure I get the care that I need. Stop even just using that metaphor in your mind and you don’t even have to replace it with another metaphor. Just stop calling yourself scaffolding, you see what I’m saying?

This other one that says, “Emotionally immature parents.” You realize that’s your thought. My parents are emotionally immature, is your thought. It feels like a fact. I bet you could give me 57 stories that would prove it true. It doesn’t matter, it’s still just a story that makes you feel what? Makes you slip into emotional immaturity, I bet when you think that. So how do we want to reframe it? Do we want to stop using that phrase, emotionally immature? You can, and maybe you don’t want to.

Maybe that actually makes you feel a lot of relief because it makes you understand what’s going on and then you’re able to be kinder to yourself. Okay, great then, keep it. But we just want to question, what’s the most empowering way I can think about this that will create however, I want to feel?

This one that says, “How to best cope with parents both with cancer, both single, both rely on me.” Did you know this? Both rely on me is a thought. It’s not a fact, it’s a thought. It’s a thought that you believe and then you’re contributing to making it true and that’s the result that you’re creating as they do rely on you probably but only because you’ve created that. And maybe you want that. Maybe you want to take care of your parents, but thinking both of them rely on me is probably creating some exhaustion and overwhelm and maybe resentment. I don’t know.

How do we want to think about this instead? We have to reframe, you guys, the way we even talk about and think about these situations in our lives. Alright, thank you for that set of questions. Let’s go to the next grouping. I’m going to read them and then we will address them again.

So this one says, “How do I teach my children to enjoy working? How do I love my spouse where he is and still honor the change and growth in experiencing personally. Help with supporting a husband who’s not doing ‘the work’ with his own emotions. I would love advice on how to help my kids get along with each other. Thank you. How do I help my husband to see how to turn his negative attitude into looking at the positive? How do you help a teenage daughter truly feel her value when struggling with self-image?”

Now, the reason I lumped all of these questions together, they all have to do with how to help either our kids or in this case, husbands, it sounds like spouses, with understanding what we’re doing here. Even sometimes some of them are about teaching children to work, teaching them to get along, things like that. It’s all a focus on trying to control the people around us, which is my favorite thing to try to do and also the thing I’m the least successful at. And that’s probably true of you as well, my friend.

Listen, we don’t need to teach your children to enjoy working. We don’t need to teach them to get along. We can try. I’m all for you offering them advice and strategies and knowledge and even holding your children accountable because you have some authority over them, some responsibility. I’m all for you having systems of accountability and discussions and sharing stories and examples and talking to them about these things but in the end, we can’t control them. They may not enjoy working, they may not get along.

So I guess what I’m saying is when we put our focus on controlling the external, we set ourselves up for potential loss. So how do you teach your children to enjoy working? I really don’t know. You can try demonstrating it. You can try enjoying working yourself. You can talk to them about work and why you enjoy it. Or you can just come to peace with them not enjoying working and you can require them to do chores anyway or you can decide not to make them do chores. I don’t know. That’s entirely up to you.

And you’ve got to read your family and access your own wisdom and inspiration about the best way to raise those kids. My question for you is, why do you need them to enjoy working? Why do you need them to get along for you to feel better? I’m all for you trying to teach them but I don’t want you waiting around for them to change before you feel better.

I will say that I do pay close attention to my kids, even to my nieces and nephews, the ones that I get to spend a lot of time with, that I feel like I have a little bit of influence over. And I constantly ask myself, is there a story I could tell, is there something I could share? And especially with my own kids, do I need to be holding them more accountable to certain things? Do I need to expect certain things? Do I need to have certain more discussions? All of that’s valid, but the answer is always. I don’t know. It’s different for different people and it’s different for me, even with different kids in my own family.

But what I know is the most important part of all of this is what work am I doing on my own self to feel how I want to feel regardless? Because your kids don’t like working and you may or may not, you didn’t say this in your question, so I don’t know. But usually when people ask me this question, “How do I get them to enjoy working?” It’s because we don’t enjoy parenting them when they don’t enjoy working. We have to just simply apply it to ourselves.

Same with all of these questions about your spouse. Your spouse not doing his own work with his emotions, your spouse being negative, your teenage daughter not seeing her value and struggling with self-image. None of that is your task. I listened to this book recently called Having the Courage to be Disliked. It’s a pretty cool book. And he talks about whose task is this? Whose task is this for your husband who’s unhappy, your husband who has a lot of emotions and he’s not doing his own work, your daughter, who struggles with her self-image, whose task is that? It is theirs. It is your husband’s or your daughters. It is not your task.

So how do you feel okay anyway? How do you feel at peace even when they don’t? How do you be calm and confident, even if your spouse thinks that it’s your fault that he or she is struggling? That’s a good question to ask yourself. How am I going to be at peace even when my daughter’s not? And again, I’m all for you making yourself available to these people. I’m all for you saying, “Hey, daughter of mine, just so you know, I think you’re amazing beyond compare. And if you want to know why, let me know. I’m right here and I will teach you.

And loving yourself is a tough thing to do. It’s tough for me to do. And I see that it can be tough for you to do and if you want to know how I sometimes try, let me know, I’ve got lots of ideas.” But overall, it is her task. And if she doesn’t want to see it or she’s not ready to see it, it’s okay. We have to go through journeys in this life of feeling bad, of feeling insecure. Until we decide we’re ready to feel confident we’re never going to believe anyone who tells us how great we are and so you can’t. You can’t make her see her value. You can’t make your husband feel better. You can’t get him to manage his own emotions.

The other alternative is to think that something’s gone wrong, that he or she shouldn’t be where they are. That doesn’t work, my friends. You have to prove to your brain, listen, when I resist reality, I only make myself miserable. I don’t control reality. But that’s what our brains think. If I just get upset enough about it or worried enough about it or freak out enough about it, then it’ll probably make a positive impact. Just ridiculous when we say it out loud. That will not make a positive impact.

Embracing reality, okay, this is where my spouse is. This is where my daughter is. This is what we’ve got and I love them. And how am I going to just get myself feeling more peaceful? It comes from simple thoughts like they’re right on track. Nothing has gone wrong. It’s okay for him or her to be struggling the way that they are. It is not my task to solve. I’ll be right here loving them, making sure they know that I’ve got lots of ideas, if they ever want to hear them, but in the meanwhile, none of my business. Literally you guys, it sets you free when you recognize this.

It is not your job to control the people around you and it’s tempting to take what I teach you here on the podcast and think that’s so good. I’m going to tell my husband or my daughter or my wife or my sister or my mother that they should listen. I appreciate that you tell people to listen, but if they’re not ready to feel better, it won’t matter, it won’t matter. So let people be on the journey that they’re on. Keep responsibility for your tasks, your tasks are how you feel, who you’re being, that is challenging enough.

It may require boundaries. It may require that you get better at telling the whole truth. It may require that you find ways to meet your needs. It may require that you separate yourself at times from people when they are feeling really down and it’s hard for you to stay in the head space you want to be. It may require all of those things. But that is your job to take care of you, not to solve for their negative attitudes or feelings.

Alright, let’s go to the next set of questions, are you ready? Okay, I’m going to read, this is just one question, it’s a two-part question, but I think it’s such a great question. I appreciate the person that wrote in this question. And my thought was, I bet there are a lot of other people who have this same thought or question, so I wanted to read it here. It says, “Do you think that triggers are real, triggers? I believe in your work, except I think our childhood shaped our beliefs pretty strongly, along with trauma, and there are triggers that take more than just changing thoughts.

Okay, so for those of you that have heard me coach before, sometimes when someone uses the word ‘trigger’, we will stop and question it because the word trigger in and of itself is just a word and it implies it literally comes from the metaphor of the trigger of a gun. If you push the button on the gun, then the bullet fires and something happens.

And so the idea when we use this word trigger and it comes from the world of therapy because it can be a really useful way to describe, hey, the reason that you’re getting really upset in that situation or that you’re feeling whatever you’re feeling in that situation is because it’s a trigger situation for you. Your brain has been wired in such a way to believe that certain situations are dangerous. And triggers actually don’t even have to always be negative.

Have you ever noticed you can smell a certain smell and it might bring back certain thoughts and emotions from maybe even a really happy time of your life? So the idea behind a trigger is that the brain has memorized ideas about the world. And then when we take in a situation through one of our senses, something that we see, taste, touch, or smell or hear, when we take in one of those things, or multiple, especially that it brings back the same feelings that we had in a similar situation.

It’s often talked about with regards to trauma and negative emotion because that gets so hardwired into our brains as they try to protect us. Do I think that is real? Yes, I definitely do. But the way I frame it in my own mind is simply that I have unconscious thoughts but there is, in my opinion, a lot of subconscious thinking that we’re just not aware of, that happened so quickly that is the reason we feel those feelings.

But all of the experiences that we have growing up in our lives, especially traumatic experiences, most definitely have created the brains that we have today that view the world the way that we do. I do believe all of that is real. And I love the work that happens in therapy of really going through and processing pain from the past and reframing it. I think there’s a lot of healing that can happen that way. And I also find that in coaching there’s a lot of healing that can happen in that way.

And I get messages weekly from people who tell me that sometimes they stalled out in therapy at a certain point or that therapy didn’t do for them what coaching has done. So this isn’t to sell you on coaching. It’s simply to say that what you’re describing here isn’t in opposition to what I believe and what I teach when it comes to how to reprogram the brain. They definitely go hand in hand.

Although there are times, I had a client just last week that I said, “Hey, you need to go see a therapist and do some healing therapy work on this part of your past and then come back to me.” There are situations on occasion where I will refer someone to a therapist because there is work to be done sometimes that is outside of what I’m trained to do. All of it’s real.

Now, to circle back around, the reason why sometimes when I’m coaching someone and they say, “Well, that just triggers me”, we will pause and question it is because that triggers me, is a thought. It’s a thought. It’s not a fact. And thoughts are both true and not true. We can keep them and we can prove them true if they’re serving you. If saying, “Hey, that triggers me”, helps you to feel more empowered so that you go, “No, I’m not getting myself in that situation or I’m not going to be around that person”, then I’m in.

But if it disempowers you to feel like you are at the effect of something in your life that you don’t want to cut out or you can’t cut out then we reframe it into, no, I don’t have to be triggered by anything. I don’t actually have a trigger button on my body. Human beings are not guns, we don’t have triggers. And then we reframe it to when I’m in that situation, here’s what I tend to think and feel. And do I want to think and feel something different instead? And if so, that is 100% available to me. I will have to practice it. It will feel strange at first, but I can reprogram my brain if I want to, if I need to.

And sometimes you don’t need to and sometimes you may not want to. And so I’m all for you just avoiding circumstances that ‘trigger you’. But if you want to or you need to we can do that work as well. Thank you for that question.

Okay, here’s the next few I want to lump together. One of them says, “Why do I rebel against my own goal to go to bed on time so I can get enough sleep?” Another one says, “Why do you think we self-sabotage? Why do we stop ourselves, for example, from losing weight or pre reject relationships?” Another one says, “How do you know what fitness and health choices to make when there are so many options?” And then I’m going to add this one in too and answer it at the same time.

It says, “How often do you get coached for your personal life? Do you have different coaches for different topics?” Okay, so we have several questions as you can see here around goals. These people happen to speak specifically to health and fitness goals, and one of them being a going to bed goal, which I would also consider to be a health goal. Here’s the truth. We have this primitive part of our brains, it’s super strong as it needs to be. It’s concerned with making sure we stay alive. But it’s also the most immature part of the brain you might say. It’s like a toddler.

It wants to, number one, seek pleasure, number two, avoid pain and number three, save energy. And it saves energy typically by just rinsing and repeating anything we already do, because anything we already do has kept us alive so far. We’re still alive, so there’s no reason to do anything above the bare minimum, survival. We don’t need to do anything harder because this easy way we’ve been doing it is keeping us alive just fine.

And then again, seek pleasure, avoid pain like a child, I just want to eat candy right now. I don’t want to do chores. I don’t want to go to school. I just want to zone out on my iPad and eat candy. And when we say, “Let’s not do that, let’s do something different.” “I’m bored. I don’t want to think of what to do, that’s hard. Why would I think of what to do when there’s an iPad right here and I haven’t died yet and we should just eat candy because it tastes so delicious. And we haven’t died yet, so clearly no problem eating candy.”

So that’s that part of our brains that we all have, even as adults, all the way until we die. That part of our brain is never going to grow up, it’s not supposed to. It’s supposed to keep operating as a toddler forever. That does have a purpose actually in our lives. It’s not a bad part of our brains. It’s just that part of our job, part of the challenge of being an adult is learning to manage that part of your brain with the prefrontal cortex.

The more highly developed part of your brain that doesn’t just care about basic survival and pleasure and pain immediately. It cares about the long term. It’s able to think longer term. It’s able to make more rational decisions, we might say because it can consider things like the past and the future. And it understands that sacrificing and enduring a little bit of discomfort in the present or foregoing some pleasure in the present is worthwhile because of what it might create for us in the future.

But that part of your brain is weaker for all of us. It’s weaker than the primitive brain so our goal is to strengthen that prefrontal and use it to manage the primitive brain. This is challenging to do for every one of us. It’s challenging to do, it really is. But just like any skill we want to develop or any muscle we want to strengthen, the skill or muscle of the prefrontal cortex can be strengthened and you will get better at it over time, the more you do it, the better you get at it.

So this is why I love coaching people on what in my world, anyway, are the two areas where this comes up the most. There’s actually three areas I’m going to say where this comes up the most and these happen to be the areas I coach on the most. So one of them is around food and nutrition and weight loss, if weight loss is your goal or getting more sleep, if getting more sleep is your goal, or drinking more water and being more hydrated if that’s your goal.

Setting a goal of drinking a lot of water, or let’s just use one that you guys gave us here, going to bed on time is a tough habit to develop because when it is 11:30 at night or whatever, I don’t know. I go to bed at 9:30 or 10:00, honestly, but I’m not bragging. I’m actually just, I need so much sleep and that’s what I’m in the habit of. So for those of you that are trying to go to bed on time, what is the time you want to go to bed? When that time comes, when it shows up on the clock, what does your brain say?

“No, I don’t want to go to bed. I’ve got all these other things I need to get done. I really want to watch this show. I had such a hard day, I deserve it. This is my time. The kids are in bed. This is the only time I get to myself to do something I like.” This is the primitive brain. This is the toddler brain that wants to just have fun right now. It doesn’t care about how you’re going to feel tomorrow. This is why we self-sabotage because the primitive brain, we let the primitive brain run the show. We let the toddler decide what we’re going to eat and drink and sleep and when we’re going to go to bed.

So the way out of that is to strengthen your prefrontal. And this brings me to why I included this question where somebody said, “How often do you get coached?” Because I’ll tell you that for me coaching has helped me to strengthen my prefrontal cortex by simply having an answer, you might say. So when the primitive brain says, “But we have so much to get done. We’ve got to get this all done.” And we take a look at that in a coaching situation, which is not going to happen at 10:30 at night or 11:00 when I’m trying to go to bed.

We’re going to look at it. We’re going to say, “Hey, here’s what I notice every night when it’s time to go to bed, my brain thinks I’ve got to get all this stuff done. So let’s look at that. Is that really true? What if we don’t get it done? What is this stuff anyway that we have to get done and do we really? And is getting enough sleep going to make it easier or harder to get more done? Does staying up late really make me more productive in my life or is it actually doing the opposite?”

And we just simply pick it apart and we question it. We make it not such a valid excuse anymore until we have proven not only to the prefrontal, but even to the primitive brain a little bit, that excuse doesn’t really hold weight. And then it will come up with 10 more and we’ll just do it all over again until we eventually find a story that is strong enough that it overrides the primitive brain. It’s a thought that you go to. I’ll tell you, let me give you one example of this.

So I love peanut butter and I love dessert, and so I love desserts that has peanut butter in it, peanut butter and chocolate, like a Reese’s Cup or something. So I was telling one of my coaches and the answer to how often do you get coached is all the time. I’ll tell you in more detail. But at one point I was working with a coach who was trying to help me change some of my eating habits. And I told her, “Gosh, here’s what happened. I was at my brother’s house, he made peanut butter cookies and he took them out of the oven and I could smell them and it was such an amazing smell.

I could not help myself. And I told myself I wasn’t going to eat them but of course, telling myself that just built up even more resistance. And so instead of eating one or two, I probably ate five and then I felt totally sick after.” So we’re just looking at the situation, okay, what’s gone on here? So it was the smell for me. I remember being like, “They smell so amazing, I have to eat them.” And then trying not to eat them. And so we just took a look at it.

And after lots of discussion and sort of dissecting it and playing with it. She asked me, “How did they taste?” I’m like, “They were so good.” She’s like, “Were they, all five of them? Tell me, describe?” Like, “Well, the first bite I know was amazing and the second bite, even, maybe even the whole first cookie. But by the end I couldn’t even tell you what they tasted like because I just sort of unconsciously ate them.” And she’s like, “What was better, the taste or the smell? What was more pleasurable?” And after we slowed it down, I realized the smell was more pleasurable than the taste.

Are you like me when you walk into the mall and there’s a Cinnabon and you smell the Cinnabon and you think, oh my gosh, this Cinnabon smells so amazing? Well, what I learned after experimenting with it is that it does smell amazing. It smells even more amazing than it tastes, which means I’m getting all the pleasure I need by smelling it at times. And if I want to eat one, that’s fine too. But I do so now with the calm of knowing that the smell is the best part.

Okay, so that’s just one example and you might be like, “That doesn’t work for me.” That’s totally fine. It’s not a one-size-fits-all in coaching. It’s a totally slowing it down. That has really empowered me to be able to not go to this extreme when it comes to eating treats, the all or nothing, the deprivation and the binging and the whatever. So it’s totally understandable that we self-sabotage, we all do it, it’s okay. We can keep working on it though.

Okay, so for this last set of questions, I got several questions of this variety and I think it’s because I posted a picture on Instagram of a little pin I ordered from an organization called Lift and Love that has Christ in the middle with a rainbow around him. And I posted it in support of Gay Pride. It was the end of June and I hadn’t posted anything in support of the LGBTQ+ community, which is a community I love, and so I posted that. And people got kind of upset about that, most people actually loved it and were very supportive and appreciative.

And then a handful of people got upset about it and had some things to say about it. And so I got several questions of this variety, things like, “How do you keep positive and confident when receiving backlash?” Another one that says, “Why are people in the church so slow to change when old ideas are retired for new ones?” And with this, they specifically reference For The Strength of Youth. So that’s a little bit different topic I realize, but I’m just going to add it in here. And another one that says, “How can I best support the LGBTQ+ community when people think that doing so is condoning sin?” And a lot of others of that variety.

And so here’s what I want to say about this topic. What I want you to do is to decide what you want to think and believe about any topic. An LGBTQ one is one that you’ll get lots of people telling you how you should think and feel about it. And people have really strong opinions about it. And there are a handful of other topics like that in our world as well that people have lots of opinions on.

And if you belong to a community like the church community that many of us on this podcast belong to or whatever other communities you belong to. The closer knit we are and the more we have lots of overlapping values and belief systems, then the more opinionated people come and the more difficult it becomes to be able to find what’s true for you amongst everyone trying to tell you what’s true. And so here’s the work to do in an area like this.

The work to do is, I think, what our church is actually about, which is a term I learned from Jennifer Finlayson-Fife, one of my good friends, which she calls spiritual maturity. Spiritual maturity means that you have a relationship with God and you listen to what he wants to tell you. And you open yourself up to your own personal revelation and inspiration about how you should think about a certain topic, how you should show up for it, whether or not you should at all, whether or not you should say something. What is the best way to behave? What is the best way to love and support, etc.?

And that is a personal decision. And when people are out there accusing you of doing it wrong, it’s always coming from fear, it is. And I can tell you, I have operated from fear as well and pointed fingers at people at times. I try not to do that, but even if I don’t do it publicly, I certainly do it at times in my mind and think that person shouldn’t be saying that or doing that or that’s wrong. I’m just as guilty of it. And so it’s okay for people to have their own opinions and people are going to sometimes feel threatened. Change is difficult for people.

Fear drives us to sometimes judge in a way that is, I don’t find to be useful, but that’s okay. We don’t have to convince anyone outside of us. We just choose who we want to be. I wanted to share that picture on Instagram because I have family members, I have close friends, I have people that I don’t know, but I follow their stories really closely online who are in the thick of this struggle. Of wanting to be active members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints who are gay.

And I feel strongly that I want to show those people that I support them and I love them and there’s a place for them at my church. I do not do that to try to convince anyone else that they should feel that way. I’m talking to the individuals who are feeling like they don’t belong at my church. And what I’m trying to do is say, “Hey, you belong at my church. You’re welcome with me. I don’t know about the other people that I go to church with. I don’t know how they’re going to feel about it, frankly, I can’t control them, but I want you to know that I love you. I support you and you are welcome at my church.”

So notice how what I’m doing is I’m managing how I want to think and feel. Now, I also have to manage how I’m going to think and feel about the people who disagree with me, the people who are mad at me, the people who are accusing me of doing something wrong. That is also my job to manage. How am I going to think and feel about them, not, am I going to convince them? Am I going to change their minds, or am I going to shun them or am I going to block them or any of that? I don’t get in the weeds of any of that, to be honest. I just try to manage my head around it.

I just remember all of us want what’s best for humanity in the end. And we all have strong opinions about what that is and we all fear change sometimes and we all think that we’re right about this particular issue and we all feel strongly about it and that’s it. We’re actually more alike than we are different and it’s okay. My job isn’t to convince anyone else. I’m not for everyone. My business isn’t for everyone. My coaching isn’t for everyone. My Instagram page isn’t for everyone. It’s okay. That is how I manage it.

And also I don’t dive in and read all of the comments you guys, I just don’t. I don’t read all the criticism that comes to me. I hear about a little bit of it especially if there’s a pattern and it’s consistent and it’s with my clients who are paying me money. I want to know about that. But a random person that comes along on the internet thinks, really, frankly, none of my business. So I don’t pay that close of attention to it, which makes it easier to keep my head in the right spot.

I apologize because there are honestly a lot of other questions here that I wasn’t able to get to today. As you can see, we’re totally out of time. I want to, again thank you if you did send in a question and if I didn’t answer it, if you’re in, Be Bold, you guys know we have Ask A Coach. I want to encourage you to send it in there because we answer 100% of the questions that come in there. And there’s a whole great library of resources in there for you of questions that other people have asked. But in the meanwhile, thank you for joining me today, everyone. I will see you next time. Have a great one.

Coaching changed my life and I’ve watched it change the lives of thousands of men and women since, but is it right for you? You’ll only know by giving it a try. Try it out today at jodymoore.com/trial.