439. Determination vs. Scarcity

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, episode 439, Determination vs. Scarcity.

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 have a concept that I think you’re going to find very valuable today. I try to only give you concepts that I think you’ll find valuable but this is one that just came up, for the other day as I was on my walk listening to, I don’t know, what was I listening to? I listen to a lot of things on my walks, I listen to audiobooks, I listen to other podcasts, I listen to coaching. I listen to stories. I love to go to The Moth Podcast and listen to stories.

I listen to a variety of things that, either just sort of help me recover from life, just from being a human being, a mom, being a business owner, being a wife, being all the things and then also just fill me up. And as I listen to things like that, a lot of times I get ideas and I hurry and whip out my phone and I put it in my podcast notes section of my phone. And then here I am doing a podcast for you.

I have a couple of announcements, actually three announcements. Sorry to give you so many announcements, but what are you going to do? Number one, get your $59 masterclass, either buy it for yourself or get it as a gift to give to somebody else. We’ve created it to be the perfect Christmas gift. I was walking around the mall the other day looking at all this stuff, trying to find some gifts for people and thinking to myself, man, this is all junk. I mean, it’s not junk. There’s nice stuff there and I’m all for you having nice stuff and giving away nice stuff.

But how much stuff do we really need? I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a home full of stuff that just creates chaos and clutter. I don’t really need much. Nobody in my life needs, maybe they need some new socks because there are the socks, that we lose pairs of socks. There’s some things that we need. And I’m even okay with people getting some things they want.

But what we all really want is to be more confident, more successful at our goals, feel better about ourselves, have our relationships come easier, get excited about the future, be able to navigate conflict and challenges. And I have some exciting things in store for The Lab this next year. I really want to up-level everything we’re doing. I actually, I haven’t announced this anywhere yet so you’re the first to know. But I’ve actually decided to step away from my business coaching program.

I will still help people with their business questions in The Lab when they bring them to me and we’re going to actually put some content in the library of The Lab to help you with your business. But I used to have, for the last couple of years I’ve had a program where I’m exclusively focused on coaching people on their businesses, especially coaches, teachers, healers. I have decided to step away from that so that I can put all my efforts into The Lab. I want to make it better. I want to make it more impactful.

It’s already awesome, I know this because a lot of our members have been there for years and years and they love it. But I want to make it even better. I want to take everything next level. And I have some ideas of what that will look like and a lot of it I don’t even know yet. But anyway, my whole point is that this masterclass will give people a taste of what it’s like to work with a life coach like myself. And to learn the concepts that I teach and to have somebody there to guide you on how to apply them in your real life. That’s what we do in The Lab, we experiment.

We move away from just the passive learning into the application and experimentation and hands on learning. And that’s what we’ll be doing in the Better Than Happy Masterclass. So give it as a gift instead of giving another scarf or candle or whatever nonsense that people don’t need and get one for yourself too at jodymoore.com/gift. So that’s a couple of announcements actually. I hadn’t even intended to make all of those.

But the next thing is I’m so excited about this. My daughter Macy Moore, some of you know this, she’s a really good artist. She’s a junior in high school. She’s always had a love of art and she has a good eye for it and a lot of natural skill. And then she also does a lot of art. So she’s developing that skill. And I said, “Macy, we should do a children’s book because I want to write a story that explains some of these concepts to kids in story format. And I think you should do all the illustrations.”

And so we dove in the beginning of the year. And I will say Macy’s had the hard part. I wrote the story relatively quickly and then Macy had a lot of art she had to create for this book. And I’m so delighted with how it turned out. And you can get it now. It’s available on Amazon, and it’s called Carl and Sophia and Your Amazing Brain. And I’m just proud of Macy and excited to get this out there into the hands of parents and grandparents and children everywhere.

Last but not least, for those of you who are in The Lab, if you are an elite member, meaning you’ve been there a year or more or you’re on the annual plan, so you’ve committed yourself to a year. Then I want to hang out with you live for a day in Salt Lake City, Utah. And we’re going to do a full day of this work in person. And for those of you that haven’t been to a live event, get ready to have everything explode in terms of the application and your understanding of it.

We’re calling that day Better Than Happy Live and it’s happening in January. And you have to be in The Lab to be able to come to that. But you can buy two tickets. They’re very low priced because we want to make it really accessible for all of you in The Lab, so one for you and a guest. And this is so exciting, I’m bringing in as a guest speaker on that day, Dr. John Delony of the Dr. John Delony Show. He is an author. He is a psychologist. He is just a fun, smart guy and I want to mix up a little bit.

I want to incorporate some other people’s teachings with what I’m teaching. And so Dr. John Delony will be there. And I don’t think that you can get a ticket to hear from him for less money than what we’re charging for this event. So again, members of The Lab, go to your elite page or if you’re an annual plan and you didn’t get it, we’ve emailed out the link to you. But you can always reach out to us and we can help you if you need help finding that. If you’re not in The Lab and you want to join us for that day you better hurry and get into The Lab jodymoore.com/thelab.

Again, you must be an annual member to purchase those tickets. And we have very limited seating because I like to keep that event small. Okay, that was a lot of announcements.

Let’s talk about today’s topic, which is determination versus scarcity. So as a coach, one of the things that I get to help people with, that is one of my favorite things to help people with is their goals. Helping them take more action in their lives towards the things that they want to be successful at and getting more done, you might say. And part of the way we do that is we take a look at how to get you moving. How do we get ourselves, this is a lifelong challenge from all humans.

How do we get ourselves to do the things that we want to be doing that we believe will lead to the results we want to have when the truth is in reality, half the time we don’t want to do those things? Which, by the way, my children’s book touches on this very theme, so you should get the book. But how do we get ourselves moving when in the moment we don’t feel like it or it feels like there are other distractions and things that get in the way or it’s just so overwhelming we don’t even know where to begin?

There’s all kinds of reasons why we don’t take the action towards what we want to be taking action towards. They’re all valid reasons too. They’re all very natural human reasons. They’re not that anything’s wrong with you. It’s not that you’re weak. It’s not any of the judgment you might be tempted to have of yourself. That’s not the reason. The reason is because you’re a human being with a human brain, like Carl and Sophia in the children’s book. So if that’s true then, how do we overcome that?

Well, a lot of times people are trying to get to positive emotions, especially if you take what I teach here on the podcast. We talk about how our thoughts create our feelings. Those feelings are driving all of our action and that together is creating our results. So it seems like in a simplified version, we should think positively. We want to feel positive. We want to feel good. And then we’re going to be able to achieve our results. And I say, “Well, maybe but let’s question it. Let’s just take a look at it.”

Sometimes feeling relaxed and peaceful and calm doesn’t get us closer to taking the action we want and achieving the results we want. Sometimes if I’m too laid back and I’m too relaxed and I’m too calm then, I’ll tell you, I’ve had a week like this actually, now that I’m saying it out loud. I’ve had the best week ever and also not the kind of week I want to have every week.

Because I just sort of as I’ve made some changes in our business and some decisions and we’ve sort of, like I said, letting go of the business program. And really dialing in on where we want to make an impact and what we’re going to focus on over the next one to five years. It’s suddenly freed up a bunch of literal time and to-do list things got just crossed off, entire to-do lists got thrown away. And also a lot of not even stress in a bad way but just a lot of things to think about that no longer need to be thought through.

A lot of decisions I was making that I no longer have to make decisions about anymore. It just freed up a lot of headspace. And I noticed myself take a breath and a sigh and realize, that feels good. And so normally I’m very regimented about being in my office and working on my workdays, but this week I went and walked around the mall. I do not go walk around the mall ever anymore.

But I was like, it’s the holidays and there’s holiday music and there’s lots of people out shopping and I kind of want to just wander around the mall and run a few errands that I just hadn’t gotten to and go on longer walks than I normally would and talk to my sisters on the phone. And I just sort of had more kind of leisure time, I guess you’d say than what I normally do right in the middle of my work days anyway. So this is awesome and amazing but at some point I’m going to want to focus again, you know what I mean? Get focused.

I don’t mean to have to hustle. I think we should have plenty of leisure time all the time but I’m going to need to decide more intentionally how I’m going to spend my day, how I’m going to spend my time. And I’m going to need to set some, along with having these longer term, really big goals. I’m going to need to set some shorter term goals and project based goals that I can go to work on. So my point is that that feeling of ease and relaxation and relief and rest and peace is great. I want you to have it in moments. And I want you to have it, even every week you could have some days of that.

But ultimately, if I stay in that space, I’m not going to create what I want. I get tempted to move into consumption in that space, I’m just going to listen to a couple of more audiobooks this week, and I’m going to whatever. I’m going to start consuming more and I’m going to stop creating. It’s so much easier to consume than create. And I’m consuming stuff that has to do with what I have set my goals around.

I consume, like I said a lot about human beings and human interest stories and even business things and personal development things. And all of that does sort of correlate with my long term goals, but it’s not creating anything. It’s not actually producing my own work in the world. So how do I get myself creating and producing? Well, many times for me I have to be moving myself into emotions that are less comfortable, emotions that don’t even feel good, I wouldn’t say a lot of the time, like determination.

Here’s where determination comes in. When I’m determined, when I’m really focused on something, maybe you want to call it commitment. Let’s think about these emotions. What does determination feel like in your body? How does it feel? Well, think about a time when you’ve been determined, when there was something that you were determined to figure out for some reason. Why do we become determined? Because our reason for achieving it is so strong, the stakes are so high.

Think about, I remember being in the hospital giving birth to my first child. And I pushed and pushed for a really long time. Now, I had an epidural, so I wasn’t in a tremendous amount of pain, but still, it’s not the most comfortable or easy or stress free situation being in the hospital trying to push a child out of your body and the doctor trying to tell you what to do. And I was pushing for long enough that at one point the doctor said, “Okay, Jody, I need you to give me everything you’ve got, because if we don’t get this baby out this time, we’re going to have to start talking about a C-Section.”

And I was like, “Oh, no, we are not doing that.” And I was determined. I pushed as hard as I possibly could to get that baby out. Now, there’s a chance that it wouldn’t have worked and the doctor would have said, “We’ve got to do a C-Section.” But I was determined enough that I was able to access an extra amount of strength or energy or something and I was able to get that baby out. Turns out he was face up, and that was the problem. And that’s a whole another podcast for a whole another day.

But my point is, determination doesn’t feel good because we don’t have to be determined when everything’s going easily. When I had my second baby, that baby just came out almost before the doctor got to the room. They were like, “Wait a second, the Doctor’s not here.” I’m like, “No, she isn’t waiting. She’s coming right now.” So I didn’t have to be determined that time because it was just easy, it was just happening automatically.

So determination is a really useful emotion because if I’m determined, I really hyper focus and I’m willing to temporarily work extra hard or take some bigger risks or really get creative about figuring out the way. I’m not giving up. I’m trying and trying and trying as many times as necessary because I’m determined. This is a very useful emotion when it comes to achieving what you’re trying to in your life. But it doesn’t really feel great because the fact that it’s necessary means there’s some negative resistance there. Are you with me?

Determination, commitment, all of them feel similar, all of these useful emotions. So now, once we recognize that and I teach people that, then they start saying things like, “Well, I guess what I should do then is”, I don’t want to use business examples all the time but that’s where this happens a lot is people say, “I guess I should quit my job so that I will be forced to be determined and committed to make my business work.” And sometimes we have to check it out. Sometimes that’s the right move. That might be the right move for you but not always.

And here’s how I check it out with people. I am looking for things that are going to put you into scarcity and I vote that we avoid scarcity. Now, scarcity is a mindset. It is not created by quitting your job. It’s not created by anything outside of you. But we want to make it as easy as possible on ourselves to be operating from the mindset that we want. So if quitting your job is going to get you determined and committed and it’s that, it doesn’t feel great but it feels powerful, it feels emboldened by it.

You feel even this kind of we might call it ego, but for me it’s the sense of oh, yeah, just watch what I can do. I’m going to figure this out. It doesn’t feel great, but it feels strong and it feels useful whereas scarcity, to me doesn’t feel strong, it feels weak. Scarcity makes me so afraid that I want to kind of hide. Instead of trying extra hard or being extra creative or extra resourceful or really emboldened I feel sort of shut down because it’s too much. It’s too much pressure. It’s too much stress.

There’s too much doubt and fear, the doubt and fear is stronger than my belief that I could do it. I think that’s the main difference and I didn’t think about it until just now when I said that out loud. But with determination and commitment, it’s hard and I don’t fully believe I can do it yet because I haven’t done it. But my belief that I could do it is stronger than my doubt, which keeps me going.

In scarcity, the fear and the doubt is stronger than my belief, which shuts me down. It causes me to get desperate and clingy and needy or to be so overwhelmed I don’t even know where to begin. It usually triggers any of our shame stories that we haven’t gotten rid of yet, which we all have some of. And I don’t find it to be useful. I find that we are even tempted to be less than honest and operate from less than our highest integrity when we move into scarcity.

Maybe you do give in to that temptation or maybe you don’t, but there’s the temptation to be a little bit more sneaky or downright dishonest in your tactics and your methods when you’re in scarcity. So I want to be clear that these are not the same things. Determination and commitment, and I’m all in, even though this is hard, I’m going to figure it out and scarcity of, oh, my goodness, if this doesn’t work I’m in big trouble. I’m going to really suffer or my family’s going to suffer or I have to prove this thing or I have to achieve this thing. And I’ve got to do it quickly or else…

That scarcity the way I’m using it here today is not the same as determination and commitment. So how do you know the difference? You’ll know, because again, you’ll either feel emboldened, you’ll start having amazingly creative ideas if you’re in commitment and determination. Now, by the way, don’t be in a rush for them. Where did I hear this saying? Again, I’ve listened to so many things, you guys, that I always forget who to credit it to.

But somebody was talking about visiting with a monk or someone like this, who we would call really spiritually enlightened and they asked him a question. And he said, “I don’t know. I won’t know the answer to that until I know.” And I love that. I know the answer’s out there, I know it’s coming to me but I won’t know until I know. So it’s okay if you don’t have answers right away and you don’t know what to do. That’s not what I’m talking about in determination, commitment.

But a lot of times you do have a bunch of ideas and you’re willing to try things and you’re not going to give up until you figure it out. Versus scarcity, you’ll find you have no ideas or you have very few ideas. You just can’t even, even things that when somebody points them out to you, you’re like, “That makes sense. Why didn’t I think of that?” It’s because you’re in too far past commitment and determination into scarcity. So how do you keep your head out of that space?

Well, you do that work first of all. You pay attention to what you’re thinking and believing. But you also make decisions in your life that will make it easier for you to stay in the headspace you want to stay in. So maybe you keep your job while you are building your business or maybe you, I don’t know, figure out something else. Figure out a way that you won’t have to put too much effort and energy into staying out of scarcity. What is that way going to be? I don’t know the answer, But I’m a fan of you being determined and committed, not scarce, and they’re different. They’re different.

So I’d love to hear from you about any other insight you have on this topic. We are actually working on, I’m just going to put this out there, even though we’ve barely started on it. But we’re working on putting together a podcast hotline so that you can call in with comments or questions. And we will play little clips of some of your useful comments, insight, feedback or questions on future podcasts. Because the downside to podcasting is I get to talk to you, but I don’t get to hear what you have to say. And I know you have really valuable insight to add.

Your questions help us all think through it on a different level. So we’re working on adding that in the coming year here at the podcast. Along with up-leveling everything we’re doing in The Lab, we’re going to up-level the podcast as well so stay tuned for that. Thanks again for joining me today. I hope you’re having a beautiful day and I’ll see you soon. Take care. Bye.

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.