248. An Unknown Future

I’m Jody Moore, and this is Better Than Happy episode 248: An Unknown Future.

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 everyone. Welcome to episode 248. Holy cow, that’s a lot of podcasts. My kindergartner is really into numbers right now. He’s always asking us questions like, “What’s the highest number? What’s the lowest number? What’s the biggest dollar amount there is?” He can’t wrap his head around that idea of infinity, which I can’t really wrap my head around either.

But the other day he asked us, “How many minutes are there in the whole world?” These nonsensical questions that I can’t really answer. But at any rate, 248 is a lot of podcast episodes and we did some math. We’d find it’s been over four years that I’ve been showing up talking to you, and over four years you’ve been here listening. Thank you so much for that.

I’m just getting warmed up. I got a lot to say so I’m not going anywhere. As long as you’re going to listen, I’m going to keep talking. Thank you for sharing it. Thank you for your feedback. Here’s what I want to talk about today. I keep hearing people say how nervous and unsettled they feel because of how unknown the future is.

They say, “I don’t know what’s going to happen next month, or we don’t know how long we’re going to be under social distancing protocol and quarantine, and we don’t know how much worse the virus is going to get before it gets better and we get a handle on it, and we don’t know what’s going to happen to the economy, and we just don’t know the future.”

And people are telling me how nervous and scared and unsettled they feel because they don’t know the future. Here’s what I want to offer to you, my friends. We didn’t know the future ever. We’ve never known the future. We cannot predict the future.

My kids and I like to look at the weather, what the weather is going to be, and we noticed that in Spokane, it’s super hard to predict the weather. The Siri app on our phone is not good at it at all. It’s very rare that the weather turns out the way the app tells us it’s going to, but we still look at it and we still wonder because we think it gives us some idea of what’s going to happen in the future.

But you know what, we’ve never known the future. So last year, when my husband and I were thinking about spring break, we decided we would take our family and go to Hawaii for spring break. And spring break was supposed to start on I think April 6th or something like that.

And so we thought that we were going to go to Hawaii. We bought plane tickets. We reserved hotel rooms. We made all kinds of arrangements and told the kids and told people that we were going to go to Hawaii. But we were wrong about that. We were never going to go to Hawaii on April 6th of 2020.

We thought we were, but we were completely wrong. And that’s okay. But I want you to know this about the future. The future is always unknown, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to think about our future. It doesn’t mean we don’t want to make plans for the future. It doesn’t mean that we should stop thinking about what we want and working to create what we want in the future.

I’m seeing a lot of people right now feel discouraged and want to give up on thinking about their future or planning for their future because what they had planned for originally isn’t happening now. So let’s talk about disappointment for just a minute. Disappointment is an emotion that we create when we think, “Oh, something’s gone wrong. This thing was supposed to happen and now it’s not going to happen and I’m very disappointed.”

And it’s okay to think that and it’s okay to feel disappointed. What’s so terrible about disappointment? I want to know. Tell me. The reason I’m asking you is because I’ve been thinking about this a lot for the last six years. When I first started building my business, I had to really watch my brain and understand my brain.

And one of the things I discovered about myself was that I was really afraid of disappointment. I was doing all kinds of things to try to avoid it. I didn’t want to set big goals because I was afraid that if I didn’t meet those goals then I would feel disappointed.

I also noticed that I was constantly trying to protect my kids from disappointment. I was trying to make sure that I got them the right birthday presents and Christmas presents, and that the tooth fairy came on time, and that other kids at school were treating them nicely, and that they were getting the kinds of grades they thought they should get. All the things I was trying to control to try to prevent them from feeling disappointed.

And then one day I paused and asked myself, wait a second, what’s so terrible about disappointment? Why am I going to so much extensive length to avoid it myself and to try to prevent it from anyone that I love? It’s not really that big of a deal. It feels kind of heavy in your chest.

I know this because I just decided, let’s just do disappointment. Let’s just get better at it. Let’s just get comfortable and familiar with it. If that’s the thing that’s causing me to do all these crazy things in my life and to not show up and not set big goals, then maybe I should just get comfortable with disappointment.

So I did that and I discovered that it’s a heaviness on my chest and it’s sort of like a rock in the bottom of my stomach. That’s what it feels like. It doesn’t feel great. I don’t love it, I’ll be honest, but I can do it. It’s not that big a deal. It’s not like I’m being tortured. It’s not like someone is pulling my fingernails out one at a time. It’s just a heaviness.

It’s got like, a low grade feeling to it. It sort of zaps your energy. Now, here’s the thing; disappointment points us in a certain direction. It puts me on a trajectory of hopelessness and despair. That’s available down the road from disappointment. For some people, it puts them on a trajectory of anger.

Disappointment is a primary emotion, meaning it’s a natural, normal, human way to feel, and it’s tolerable, it’s not that big of a deal. But there are secondary escalated emotions available if we resist disappointment. If we’re disappointed about feeling disappointment, if we’re upset about feeling disappointment, it can easily turn into despair or anger or anxiety or something more heightened.

So there’s nothing wrong with any emotion. You can do all of them but I want you to just acknowledge, this is really just disappointment. If I just pause here and be with disappointment, it will pass through me. My body eventually will stop releasing that chemical if I stop focusing on the thoughts causing it and I’ll move on, and it’s not a big deal. I can just be disappointed.

So that’s the first thing I want you to understand. The second thing I want you to understand is that there is a way to never feel disappointed if you want to, and it’s to never think about things in a way that generates disappointment.

Now, I haven’t been able to do this 100% in my life. I’ve not been successful at never being disappointed. But I can do it at times in certain areas. So for example, if I want to make plans of some sort, or set some kind of a goal, and I find myself being worried that what if I don’t achieve it, what if the plans fall through, I’m probably going to be disappointed.

Then I tell myself, “No, I decided right now, I’m not going to be disappointed no matter what.” Because these are my options; I can make the plan, set the goal, think about the future, and possibly it doesn’t go the way I thought. And then I can think disappointing thoughts then, or I can think no, this is not disappointing. What would be even more disappointing is if I never tried, if I never made plans, if I never set goals, if I wasn’t showing up in my life and striving to create the things I want in my life and striving to show up and achieve goals in my life. That would be much more disappointing. I would much rather think disappointing thoughts about myself for not trying than for trying.

So I just decide ahead of time that no matter what, I will choose to be proud of me, I will choose to be grateful that I gave it a shot, I will choose to acknowledge the effort and to acknowledge the learning and growth that came from all of that. And I will not choose disappointment.

So again, I haven’t been able to do that in all areas of my life, but it certainty, with certain goals and things, I absolutely can. If I get to the other side of it and say, “I’m so proud of you for showing up and trying, I’m so grateful for the learning that occurred along the way, I’m so grateful for the knowledge that we’ve gained that we could not have gained by sitting home, playing it safe, never being up for disappointment. Thank you for doing that.”

So that is available to you. So let’s go back to this idea that we cannot predict the future. We don’t know what’s going to happen down the road. It’s kind of a disappointing thing at times, and on the other hand, it’s amazing. So my kids, in their boredom, have discovered that on YouTube, you can watch videos of Disneyland rides.

So they’ve been spending a lot of time watching YouTube videos of Disneyland rides. Sort of feels almost like you’re at Disneyland, except not. So one of the videos they’ve been watching is of Space Mountain. And I keep laughing because if you’ve been to Disneyland and you’ve been on Space Mountain, then you know Space Mountain is a dark ride.

Somebody took their phone in there and they took video but you can’t really see much. You can see the lights at the beginning and a few flashes of light here and there and that’s about it. You really don’t, from watching that video, have any idea what it’s like to ride Space Mountain, because Space Mountain is dark, which is what makes Space Mountain kind of awesome.

It’s because you can’t see. So Space Mountain is not actually a very big rollercoaster. It doesn’t have very big drops or climbs. It’s a relatively small rollercoaster. But it feels exciting. It feels pretty intense. It can even feel a bit scary because you can’t see what’s next.

You can’t see that you’re about to go down a big hill or turn a corner in a certain way. And so because you’re not prepared for it, your body isn’t bracing for it in the right way. It sort of creates a different sensation than a roller coaster where you can see everything that’s coming. And this is kind of how I like to think about life.

We’re on Space Mountain, you guys. We are. And we could get the lights turned on. Actually, I don’t know how to turn the lights on, but if the lights did get turned on and we could see exactly what was coming and we knew the future, and we knew when things were going to be great and we knew when things were going to be hard, we would not be having the same experience we’re having right now.

Now, we might think, “Well, that would be better. That would be a relief.” But my guess is that it actually wouldn’t. In some ways, it would, but in many ways, it would take away from the experience that this life is. Space Mountain is Space Mountain because it’s dark. It’s super fun and a little scary because it’s dark.

And this life is the experience that it’s supposed to be. It allows us to evolve, and it allows us to experience not only negative emotion but all the positive ones too because we can’t see what’s coming, because we don’t know the future. It requires a certain amount of faith. It requires getting still and trusting in the spirit and trusting in the Lord.

It requires so much more of us that serves us because we don’t know the future. But it’s not any more unknown today than it was three months ago. You think that it’s different. You operated differently three months ago because you thought you knew what to expect, but you were wrong. I was wrong. We were all wrong.

We never really know the future and we really don’t need to. So I want you to remember that the future is yours to create. Here’s how I’m thinking about the future right now. I have certain areas of my life where I can’t get myself to even paint a picture of the future because of what’s going on.

So I’m not perfect at this either, but I do think that it’s possible that we come out of this as a species, as a culture, as a global community better than we went into it. Yes, there is a lot of tragedy, yes, there is a lot of stress, yes, there is a lot of loss and hardship. But that is sometimes required for our evolution and our growth.

And that we could come out of it kinder, we could come out of it with our priorities more aligned. Maybe we come out of it smarter in many ways, safer in many ways. We could improve systems and institutions and processes and procedures. We could come out of it better at things that we never would have explored had we not gone through what we’re going through now.

We’re going to come out of this an awakened culture, an awakened body of individuals in many ways. That is available to us. We might be more environmentally responsible; we might be globally more connected. We might be in some ways more independent than we were in other areas.

So better is available. That is the picture that I have of my future and that’s the picture I choose to focus on. It is of course unknown, but it’s always been unknown. It’s not any more unknown today than it was last year at the same time.

So let’s relax into that. Let’s decide that we don’t need to know any more than we know right now, and that we still have the ability to create an amazing future. Alright you guys, I love you. Thanks for being here today. Don’t forget to grab the podcast roadmap if you don’t have it yet. It will walk you through the episodes that will get you up to speed on everything that I teach here. Go to jodymoore.com/map to grab it and I’ll see you next week on another episode. Be safe, take care.

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 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.