298. How to Believe a New Thought

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, episode 298: How to Believe a New Thought.

Did you know that you can live a life that’s even better than happy? My name is Jody Moore. I’m a master certified life coach and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And if you’re willing to go with me I can show you how. Let’s go.

What’s up everybody? Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining me today. I want you to know how much I take seriously that you give me your time, and your attention, and your ear. And I think I have something to teach you today that will be really useful in so many different ways in your life. So if you’ve been listening to me for very long or you’ve listened to really anything from me then you know that a big part of what I teach is that our thoughts are creating all of the results in our lives, our thoughts are the thing that we have control over that impacts us more than anything else.

And when you learn to understand the difference between thoughts and facts and to be able to observe your thinking and sort of put some space between your thoughts and yourself then you get a lot of leverage over them. That’s a first step. And the second step is to then choose to believe thoughts that serve you, to think more often the kinds of thoughts that are going to create the result that you want and to less often think the kind of thoughts that are creating problems for you, in a nutshell.

So what I want to teach you today is something that people come to me with a lot. First of all they say, “I need a new thought to think.” But even if they already have a new thought they’re trying to think, one of the biggest challenges is how do I get myself to believe that thought, or to think that thought more often when the other thought is coming up more frequently. That’s what our default unconscious brain offers is maybe the problematic thought. And so that’s what I want to teach you today. You might think of this as developing a new belief.

Maybe you want to believe in something that a part of you believes on some level but you don’t believe it to the extent that you want to. So a belief we like to say in the world of coaching, a belief is just a thought that you keep on thinking. It’s a thought that feels relevant to your brain. And once it’s a relevant thought then your brain will start collecting lots of evidence that it’s true and so it becomes easy to believe.

And eventually you’ll start interpreting the world actually through that thought or through that belief, which is what we all do on default anyway. We just don’t always choose consciously the beliefs that we’re interpreting the world through. So I think it’s really fascinating in the world of neural science and psychology to learn about how much of our interpretation of the world is just a reflection of the lens through which we’re viewing it, just a reflection of what we’re looking for.

Our experience of the world, our interpretation of the world is they say according to the experts, so inaccurate, it really is. We just simply filter out things that don’t align with what we’re thinking and believing and we include details that do align with what we’re thinking and believing and we interpret the world through that lens.

So I was watching a TV show recently and I like TV, I like to watch TV. And I always hesitate to talk about a TV show because whenever I recommend or even just mention a TV show, or a book, or a movie, or something. Inevitably there’s a portion of that shows that somebody takes offence to and then they’re really mad at me for recommending it. So I’m not recommending this TV show but in case you’re curious it was called Mr. Robot. And it’s six or seven years old and my husband and I just watched it on – I don’t remember if it was Hulu or Netflix, one of those.

At any rate I thought it was pretty interesting but it does have some kind of dark moments. So be warned, there you go. But this is sort of a spoiler alert, so if you’re planning to watch the show, this happens about six episodes in that you learn this thing. So just fast forward the next 30 seconds to a minute if you don’t want to hear the spoiler alert I’m about to give.

But essentially the main character, Elliot in the show we get introduced to right away. And it’s clear that he has some mental challenges let’s just say. He deals with pretty heavy anxiety. And he takes drugs sometimes to compensate for that and the whole premise of the show is we get to hear Elliot’s thoughts. He talks to us in his head. And so it’s pretty clear that there’s some stuff going on for him.

At any rate by about the second or third episode in we get introduced to another character named Darlene. And Darlene appears to be pretty crazy. We’re not sure if she has true mental illness but she’s clearly a wild character let’s just say. So the way she speaks is pretty extreme and dramatic. And her appearance even is pretty dramatic. And she’s a character who’s really, really smart but sort of in your face. And my overall assessment was I like her but she’s pretty crazy, she’s a nut job.

So for example the first time Elliot meets her she says, “Okay, well, I’m going to come with you. So let’s go. I’m coming with you to your apartment.” And she just follows him onto the train and follows him to his place. And you’re sort of like, “Huh, that’s pretty invasive.” Not too long after that Elliot gets home and she’s just sitting there in his apartment. And he’s sort of taken back and says, “What’s going on? What are you doing here?” And she’s like, “What, I broke in, it wasn’t that hard. Your door isn’t that secure and I’m just waiting for you.”

And so the whole time you’re thinking, gosh, this girl, she’s so in your space. She’s kind of crazy. She’s kind of out there. You don’t just do that to someone you just met. You don’t just break into their apartment and then wait for them because you feel like it. And she can’t understand why Elliot’s acting so annoyed. She’s like, “Come on dude, get over it, geez, relax, just waiting for you.” So we have this experience of Darlene based on what we believe which is she’s this girl that he just met and she’s kind of extreme and she’s kind of dramatic.

Well, about six or so episodes in something happens that suddenly reveals to us that Darlene is actually Elliot’s sister. And because of his mental illness and some of the challenges he has he sometimes forgets things like that. And it totally blew my mind because I was like, wait a second, she’s not really crazy actually. It’s not that intrusive to tag along with your brother like that or to break into your brother’s place maybe. I mean maybe that’s inappropriate but certainly not to the level that I would have thought, thinking that she was someone he had just met.

She’s his sister. He’s known her his whole life. She’s known him his whole life. She’s been to his place many times before. Suddenly the way I interpreted that character totally changed in all the things that I thought were pretty out there and pretty crazy, I realized no, pretty understandable actually. It makes perfect sense that you’d behave that way. So that’s just one example of the power of we think we’re observing reality. We’re not.

We’re making meaning out of our limited understanding of reality. Our reality that is filtered through what we think we already know, what we think is true at the foundation of what we’re experiencing. And this matters, not just for a random example like the one I just gave you, not just because of the way that you’re going to interpret and experience other people. But if you have goals you’re trying to achieve this matters a tremendous amount.

What you believe will change your experience and it will change your results. And this is true whether you’re trying to be more confident, you’re trying to be a better parent. You’re trying to grow a business. You’re trying to lose weight. You’re just trying to feel better on a day-to-day basis. What you’re believing is creating your experience in the end. And so if this is true, and it is then your ability to believe something on purpose will determine your level of success in life. It will determine your ability to regulate your emotions even if we call success more peace.

So here’s how you believe a new thought. First of all you have to know that your current thought is just a thought. You have to not just know it on the surface level, not just that you could put it in the T-line of the model because you know it goes in the T-line. But you have to really loosen up that thought in your mind. This is one of the things that we do as coaches. We have lots of tools and skills. I know this because I teach coaches on the regular, and I’m always teaching them, “Here’s a really good tool that helps loosen up that model in your client’s mind.”

And it takes some careful crafting sometimes. It takes some being delicate with it because if you think I’m trying to take that thought away from you, you might hold onto it even tighter. I do the same thing when I’m getting coached. If someone tries to tell me that that’s just a thought, it’s not true. And I’ve lots of evidence for it, I might hold even tighter going, “They just don’t understand. They don’t get it.” So you have to be really delicate about it.

So if you’re going to do this for yourself you have to just be open a little bit, a little bit open-minded. It’s possible that this is just a thought. It’s possible that it’s not actually true. Even if you’ve been believing it your whole life, maybe for the last 20 years you’ve been thinking that your sister-in-law hates you. That’s just a thought my sister-in-law hates me. So can you just loosen your grip on it a little bit and recognize that it’s not a fact, it’s a thought because we can’t prove it. Everyone wouldn’t agree.

We don’t even know what that means, she hates me. She might be hating you one minute and she might not even be thinking about you the next minute. So that’s not something, we can’t give her a blood test and say, “Yeah, she’s positive for hating you.” So we’re not going to make it a fact. It’s a thought. But you might have lots of stories and examples of why you think that’s true. So we’re just holding it in our hands without gripping so tightly to it so we can take a look at it. I could be wrong.

It’s possible I’m wrong. It’s possible that that’s not even something that we could ever prove. She’s just a person who has emotions. So you have to make space for being possibly wrong. And then you do have to decide what you want to think and believe instead. And my recommendation is that you choose something that you already believe on some level. Don’t try to believe something that you completely reject like she adores me. You probably don’t believe that.

So let’s find a redirect thought that feels a little better. That creates a better result for you that isn’t impossible for you to believe right now. It’s just not the one that your default brain is sending up the elevator. So it might be a thought like I love her. Now, maybe you don’t love her, then that’s not going to work. But if you do, I understand why she’s struggling. I understand that she struggles and so she behaves badly sometimes. Could that be a thought that you could believe? I don’t know. So you have to find a more believable thought.

Now, I want to give another example outside of a sister-in-law example. I want to talk about a goal. Let’s say you have this thought, I don’t know how to grow my business. Maybe you have a business, you want to grow it and your thought is I don’t know how. I don’t know how, is not a fact, you guys, newsflash, it’s always a lie, it’s just a thought. But you might believe that’s true. So what we want to do is recognize it’s just a thought, hold it in our hands, decide that we could be wrong. And then find a thought that we want to believe.

For example everything is figure out-able. Everything I want to know is on Google or YouTube. Do you see how that could be believable? You don’t have to go all the way to I know exactly how. Let’s just try everything I want to know is figure out-able. I’m capable of learning. I can figure it out as I go. I only need to know the next step. I just need to take a step and I will figure out how as I go. See how all these thoughts still feel believable? Because we don’t have to discount the, I don’t know how thought. We just don’t want I don’t know how to be driving us if I’m building a business.

So you find that new thought, you hold space for it, you be open to the idea that it could be true and then you start looking for evidence that it’s true. Your brain will naturally do this. You won’t even have to tell it to. If you just decide every day to think the thought, somebody will teach me how to build my business, there are answers about how to build my business. Everything I want to know about building my business is available on YouTube, something like this. If that’s your thought you will start finding evidence that it’s true.

Other useful thoughts are, other people like me have figured out how to do it, if they can I bet I can. And then you’re going to start noticing all the people like you who have figured out how to do it. See what I’m saying? Your brain will just bring in the evidence that it thinks is relevant like when I thought Darlene was a crazy chic, I found lots of evidence for that. And once I realized she’s not crazy, she’s his sister I started noticing that she didn’t seem very crazy at all anymore. That’s just my brain, that’s not the character changing necessarily.

Now, you have to be patient with yourself because it might take some time. If for the last 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 years you’ve been thinking something different then it’s probably not going to just change overnight, it’s going to take some time. And you’re going to have to practice believing the new belief and the new thought. The word practice implies that we’re not always going to be good at it.

I’ve been taking piano lessons. I’m kind of obsessed with playing the piano right now. My family’s like, “Where’s mom? She’s on the piano again of course.” But anyway I’m having so much fun playing the piano. And I go down to practice my song. I have to practice it because I make tons of mistakes. I don’t play it very well. I hit tons of wrong notes. And I have to stop and go back. And it doesn’t sound very good while I’m practicing it.

And that’s how it’s going to be with believing a new thought. You’re going to have to practice it. Your brain’s going to go back to the old one, sometimes you’re going to be able to interrupt it but sometimes you won’t, but you’re practicing the new one. So you gently redirect yourself, don’t be mad at yourself when you get it wrong, just nurture it with practice.

Now, here’s the last piece of advice I want to give you with believing a new story. And this is especially useful if you’re trying to believe something that you have very, very little to no belief in yet. Maybe you want to believe that you’re going to make a million dollars in your business. And maybe you don’t even have a business yet.

Maybe you want to believe that you’re going to go on the Oprah show. Well, on Oprah’s network, however you meet with Oprah nowadays. You’re going to get interviewed by Oprah. Or you’re going to – I don’t know, whatever it is you want to do. I want you to take that belief, that big giant belief that feels impossible to you and I want you to protect it because it’s just a baby belief right now. If you’re not able to believe it with much confidence then we don’t want to put it out there for the world to step on and squish because it’s super fragile right now.

I was listening to Sara Blakely’s masterclass, Sara Blakely who is the inventor of Spanx. What is the stat? She’s the youngest female self-made billionaire ever. Very successful young woman entrepreneur, I love Sara Blakely. So her masterclass is about being a self-made entrepreneur. And she talked about this. She said when she first had the idea for Spanx, she kept it to herself. She didn’t tell people. She didn’t tell her family or her close friends.

She just kept it to herself because she knew if she told other people then with best of intentions, in an effort to protect her they might say things like, “Oh honey, that’s not really going to work. You want to be realistic.” So people mean well but if you already have doubt in the belief you’re trying to believe in then you don’t want to put it out there for other people because it’s going to make it that much harder for you to believe in yourself. So she said for a whole year she just worked on it in secret.

For those of you maybe not familiar with Spanx, she wanted something to go underneath white pants so she wouldn’t have a panty line. So she wanted to create footless pantyhose is what she called them. And she just kept working on it, working on prototypes, working on ideas, trying to figure out names, trying to find manufacturers. So she said she only told for a whole year people that she had to tell, like potential manufacturers and attorneys and things like that, that she needed to tell in order to do the research.

But after a year she just told her family, “I’m just working on an idea. I just have an idea I’m working on.” After a year she finally had nurtured the belief within herself enough that she knew she could tell other people. And if they didn’t believe in her it didn’t matter because she believed in herself enough.

And when she shared it with people, again, with best of intentions they said, “What, that sounds kind of crazy. If it’s such a good idea someone would have done it by now. You don’t have the resources. You don’t have the knowledge. You don’t have the money. And this is probably not going to work.” They said all those things but she’d given herself a year to believe in it enough that she didn’t need other people to believe in it for her, seems like it worked out pretty well for Sara Blakely.

So I do this too. When I have a goal or a belief that is fragile I protect it. I don’t share it with people that I know might make it harder for me to believe in because of what they might say, with best of intentions usually. So protect those really fragile beliefs, keep them to yourself. But practice thinking about them. Nurture a relationship with them.

Another thing she said that I thought was interesting was she said, “When I have a new product idea, one of the first things I do is try to come up with a name for it because as soon as I have the name for it, it sort of changes things.” And my thought about that is because you have a relationship with your idea. You have a relationship with your goal. You have a relationship with, in Sara Blakely’s case, the product. And as soon as you give it a name it sort of creates a little bit more intimacy with that idea. And that’s a good thing.

We want to cultivate healthy relationships, in other words, healthy stories, healthy beliefs about our ideas. Alright you guys, so who’s with me? Who wants to practice believing things that will serve you better? I hope that you will because that is how you will create the most extraordinary results for yourself, starting from just feeling better, improving your day-to-day life, but going all the way to achieving goals that you might have never dreamed possible. It all starts with your thoughts.

Alright, thanks for joining me today you guys, have an amazing day. I’ll talk to you next time.

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.