399. The Comfort-Discomfort Cycle

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, episode 399, The Comfort-Discomfort Cycle.

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.

Hey there everybody, how’s it going today? I want to talk to you about comfort and discomfort. And the reason that this episode was something I wanted to record is because sometimes I notice myself coaching people in what feel like contradictory ways or I notice myself agreeing with someone who says one thing that feels contradictory to another thing I also agree with. I’ve had that come up a couple of times in the last couple of weeks around this topic of comfort and discomfort and fun and pleasure and ease and challenge.

So I want to dive into it and tell you what I think is the way I think about this. But lately a lot of these podcasts, I appreciate you humoring me because a lot of these podcasts are me fleshing out some of my ideas. And it seems like they really resonate with all of you. I did one recently on pride and shame and confidence and humility which has been so well received. If you didn’t listen to that episode go back. It’s just a few episodes ago. And so many people are saying how they loved that episode.

So this is going to be another one of those kind of, I’ve formulated my ideas in an outline here but I hope it makes sense. That’s how I talk about it. I do want to make sure before we dive in that you’re registered for Wellness Week because I’m so excited for Wellness Week this time. I’m really putting a lot of preparation into how I want to really blow your minds at Wellness Week in a way that I’ve never done before. And it’s $19.

So even if you have a full schedule and don’t think you’re going to be able to come to the 90 minutes a day five days a week you’ll get replays that you can watch later on. If it doesn’t fit in your schedule, watch them that evening or something. I do want you to participate with me throughout the week. This isn’t something to add to your library of online content. I don’t want to clutter up, I think even our digital lives cluttered is not a useful thing.

But I’m talking, if you want to go through a transformative process and see how coaching can transform yourself even and justify the experience come to Wellness Week. So you can head to jodymoore.com and you’ll see a link right there to register for that.

So let me begin by describing like I said, these two seemingly contradictory philosophies that I love and that I live by actually. I’ve used both of these philosophies to achieve some success in certain areas of my life, what to me is kind of extraordinary success that I never thought I would be able to achieve. And then I’m still using both of these philosophies to achieve additional success sometimes in the same areas, sometimes in other areas of my life where it’s struggled.

And the first one is that we should enjoy life. It’s not meant to always be challenging and overwhelming. And sometimes it will be challenging and overwhelming. But that we can enjoy life and that we can have fun. You guys know I’m big on fun. We just had Be Bold live which was super fun and we gave everyone t-shirts that say, ‘This is going to be fun’. Because that philosophy of having fun while you achieve big things, for example building my business and choosing to have fun along the way served me really well.

And part of having fun is being playful with it, not getting too serious, not taking it too seriously or becoming too heavy with it. But it’s also sometimes finding the easiest way, discovering what is your way to do things. And the way that is the easiest and most natural and most fun for you will probably be the way that is most effective for you. And that’s probably the ‘right way’ for you to do it. Sometimes we even say things like, “If it’s not fun I’m not doing it.”

Sometimes when I’m coaching people, I’ll just use business as the example because in my business coaching program I see this from time to time. We’re coaching someone on how to achieve the next milestone in their business. And when there’s a lot of pressure and heaviness or emotion, not that there’s anything wrong with that but sometimes the way I coach them is like, “What if we just decided to lighten up around this?”

I do this actually with not just my entrepreneur clients, my clients who I’m coaching on life situations. I had this realization one day that I coach a lot of moms. And there’s sometimes so much heaviness and seriousness around wanting to be good moms and wanting to do it right and raise our kids because it feels so important. But I would point out, “Remember when we were little girls and we would play house and we’d say, “I get to be the mom” because we thought that would be fun?

And now we are the mom in real life and  it doesn’t seem in this moment right now that you’re having a lot of fun. What if you let it be fun? What if you ease up a little bit on the pressure and the perfectionism and the people pleasing and all of that in business, in life, in your parenting, in your relationships, in your weight loss, whatever it is you’re trying to do. And you just let yourself have fun and be playful and not be perfect at it and make it as easy and simple as possible. What if you were up for doing it the slow way?

That’s what I was telling my friend the other day. I was like, “I feel like I should start a program where people can join me on this journey that I’m calling for myself, weight loss the slow way.” Because I’ve done it before, I’ve lost weight before. I know how to lose weight. And I’m so grateful to coaches and courses and programs and people that I’ve learned from that helped me learn how to lose weight. And I’m grateful that I lost weight because now I know that I can lose weight and I know how to do it for myself in a way that I like.

What I don’t know is how to keep that weight off permanently and how to become a person who just weighs what I think is my ideal body weight. And I’m pretty sure that that next step for me is going to require that I lose weight on my own, that I learn to be accountable to myself and that I do it in a slow way. And I am, I’m losing weight slowly. And that’s kind of cool because that slow way is the way that I can maintain forever. It’s the way that I can live forever.

I’m not going to be able to be on a diet forever. But I can slowly adjust my eating habits in a way that serves my body so that I forever remain as healthy as I possibly can when it comes to my weight and my body composition.

So anyway that whole philosophy of let’s have fun, let’s let it be slow and easy because the slow way is the easier way. The fast way is usually hard and stressful for anything, for weight loss, for building a business, for making money, for getting through school or college. The fast way is the hard way. That’s why I’m a fan of the slow easy way that you can just become that version of you forever. So that’s the first philosophy that I’m a huge believer in. I talk about it all the time. I coach people around this at times if I think it would serve them. And I’ve offered it to you here on the podcast.

But then there’s this other equally important philosophy of being comfortable being uncomfortable. The idea that discomfort is necessary and useful. And that if you’re willing to be uncomfortable you can achieve a lot in your life. And sometimes even people will say to me, “Well, I know I’m supposed to be doing this thing. Maybe I’m supposed to post on Instagram. I told myself I was going to post on Instagram every day for my business but I just don’t want to do it. It’s hard to do.”

And I say, “I’m sorry, I’m confused, what’s the question?” Because this presumes that in order to do it you have to want to do it and you don’t have to. You just have to do it. You don’t have to want to do it. And it’s okay if it’s hard you can just let it be hard and do it anyway. In fact last night we were getting the kids to bed and my two younger ones said, well, one of my younger ones I should say, said, “I don’t want to brush my teeth.” And my husband looked at me and we smiled and he said, “Good news, you don’t have to want to. You just have to brush your teeth.”

So you don’t have to want to. It’s okay that it’s hard. It’s okay that you’re uncomfortable. It’s okay that you’re freaked out when you go to first start a business especially, or put yourself out in some way and your brain’s afraid that people are going to judge you and you’re going to fail and you get all that stuff. That’s okay, just let it be there and get going anyway. And you don’t have to want to.

What was I listening to recently? I don’t remember. But this idea came to my mind that discomfort is like the goalie. Think about soccer or hockey. And I just apologize in advance if I say anything wrong because sports metaphors I probably shouldn’t say because I don’t know sports very well. But I think this is a useful way to think about it. So there is a goalie guarding the goal. And discomfort is that goalie. But when we’re playing soccer we’re not like, “Well, I can’t try to kick the ball into the goal because there’s a person in the way blocking it.”

We know there’s going to be a person there. We know there’s going to be a goalie there. And we’re actually running towards the goalie. We expect the goalie to be there and in fact getting the ball in the goal and getting it past the goalie is what makes it so extraordinary, past all the other people on the team defending the goal as well. But still that goalie and the other defenders we might say are discomfort and towards discomfort in order to achieve a goal, literally in sports a literal goal.

So these two things feel like they contradict each other. And I want to address that today and give some of my thoughts around why when I’m coaching people sometimes I go the route of what would make this easier and more fun? And sometimes I go the route, so what that it’s hard, let it be hard. And I don’t know that I always make the right choice when I’m coaching. I’m trying to read my client and offer what I think will serve them best. But my hope in this podcast is that you can assess for yourself what would serve you best.

And if you want help figuring that out come to Wellness Week and I’ll help you figure it out. But here’s the way I think about it. So if we’re going to go the second route, if we’re going to go, “Listen, soldier up, let’s go, let it be hard, let’s do it anyway. So what that it’s hard. We can do hard things.” This kind of let’s rally approach. You don’t have to want to. I find that approach for me in business and in other areas of life to be super fun. I get really fired up. I get motivated.

I love listening to motivational speakers who talk about doing hard things and pushing through and being willing to fail and committing and doing it no matter what. And that whole kind of talk I find to really motivate and inspire me in my business, you know why? Because when I fail in business I don’t take it personally. I don’t make it mean that I’m a failure. And even if I do really rally and try out a strategy that’s hard for me and it doesn’t work and I decide to change course then I do so with a lot of confidence.

I simply go, “That didn’t work. Thanks for the suggestion”, whoever was the teacher that taught it to me or the person that suggested it, “Thanks for the suggestion. I tried it out. I actually didn’t like it. It didn’t convert for me and I’m going to change course and try this other thing now.” And I have a lot of confidence around that. So I’m okay with not getting the ball in the goal because I have my shin guards on. So when that goalie kicks it back or if I’m up against a defender and they kick me in the shin, it doesn’t really hurt because I have shin guards on.

Or in hockey, don’t they wear a whole bunch of pads and a helmet and stuff? I’ve got my protective gear on which is my own relationship with myself, my connection with myself, my confidence, my belief that it’s okay if I don’t know how to do it. I’ll just try again. It doesn’t mean anything about myself as a person. It doesn’t even mean that I won’t be able to figure it out. It doesn’t mean something about my future. It just means that didn’t work, alright, let’s try something else. So proud of me for trying it.

I have that protective layer. And if you don’t have that protective layer in some area of your life, you can work on it, you can. But also if you don’t have it I don’t want you to run up and get kicked in the shins. I don’t want you to take a hockey puck to the head. That could actually do more harm than good. Achieving the goal isn’t necessary if it means you’re going to have serious injury in the process.

So if I sense that someone is taking it really personally or is overly emotional about something or is going to in some way not get their own back or it’s going to diminish their ability to believe in the future that they want. Then I take the opposite approach of, “Listen, let’s just have fun. Let’s just relax. Let’s slow it down. There’s no need to be in a rush. Why are we taking it so seriously? Why are we putting so much pressure on ourselves?”

So I’m going to go back to for me, this is with food. And I’ve made some progress on it but I look at myself when I first really started my journey with good and it’s so fascinating how I took it all so personally. If I failed at my health and nutrition goals then I made it mean something about my own willpower or strength or whether or not I was ever going to be able to live in a healthy way and eat and exercise in the way that I want to forever. And I still sometimes am tempted to do that. Or I start having all the obsessive thoughts about food and bodies. You know what I’m talking about.

And so for me with food when I notice my head go to that place, that is not a healthy place. I don’t want to go there. It’s not worth it. It’s fine to have whatever body you have or the body I have. I could live this way forever. It’s fine if I don’t score any goals. It’s not worth getting injured over. I would rather live this way forever than create more damage to myself in terms of my emotional and mental health and my relationship with myself, my relationship with food, my relationship with my body. It’s not worth doing harm over.

And so when that comes up, the heaviness, the emotional, the drama, it’s, hey, listen, this is all just for fun. We’re just playing soccer here. That’s it. It’s just a game. It’s not even World Cup soccer necessarily, even if it is World Cup soccer, it’s just a game. And yeah, it’s awesome if you win and it’s fine if you don’t. So it’s certainly not worth any kind of harm or damage that you might be doing to yourself to try to get the goal, it’s just not.

So that is why for me both of these philosophies are equally true and equally important and equally valuable in my life because my work to do is to connect with myself and learn to not use either my success or my failures as evidence of what kind of person I am. Let me say that one more time because I want to offer this to you as well. I think this is most of our work to do in our lifetime.

To not use the things that we achieve or the things that we overcome to mean that we are better people now just like I don’t want you using the things you don’t achieve or the struggles or challenges you have or any of your shortcomings to mean that you’re a less than person. It doesn’t mean any of that. It just tells us some things about the lens by which you view the world, what are probably some inherited strengths and weaknesses.

What are some strengths and weaknesses and hopefully some positive things but also some harm and trauma and damage that has happened as a result of the circumstances of your life. What wounds have been healed, what wounds are still not healed. That’s what it tells us. And none of that touches your worth. So if I can tell that you’re coming from a healthy place, you’ve got your shin guards on, you’ve got your helmet on, you’re geared up, you’re protected, I’m like, “Let’s go. Let’s make a goal.”

Who cares that there’s discomfort? Who cares that there’s a goalie in the way? Who cares that there are defenders all around the goal? Let’s see what we could do. Let’s see if we can push past them. Let’s see if we can get around them. Let’s see if we can score a goal anyway because it’s the fact that there is opposition that makes it so awesome when you do score the goal. And on the other hand, if you’re not geared up then that’s okay but our goal is to gear up.

Our goal is to get whatever protective mechanisms we need that means healing from trauma which might mean working with a clinical specialist or therapist. That means doing the ongoing necessary work of connecting with yourself and validating yourself and learning how to like yourself even before you make the changes you want to make in yourself, learning to like yourself. Learning to not take things so personally, to not make them means something so heavy. That’s what our work is to do.

And that doesn’t mean we have to sit back and do that before we work on goals, before we try to achieve whatever you want to achieve in your life. It just means that you might want to take a more fun, slow, easier approach because there’s no reason to speed it up anyway. Unless the reason is going to be, let’s see if I can get past the defense because that would be cool. It’s the only reason to speed it up.

But in the end you’re going to shoot that goal and then what happens after we score a goal? We celebrate for a minute, pretty cool. Maybe everybody cheers. That feels good. And then what? We start again. We start again. This is how it is my friends. You will score a lot of goals in your life and then it won’t seem like a big deal. The cheering will stop. You’ll stop feeling the high of it, the whatever positive emotion you feel because of it. For some people they say that that high doesn’t last long at all. In fact some of them wonder if they felt it all.

But even when you do, it’s not going to last forever because we’re designed to keep trying, to try again, to see what else we could do, to strive for the next level or the next thing. That’s the way of it, as it should be. So I call this the comfort-discomfort cycle because we’re not meant to live in discomfort all the time I don’t think, I really don’t. I don’t think that getting down there to the right in front of the goal and then going at it with the defense and trying to get past the goalie is the state we should be in all the time.

I think that we should do that some of the time and then we score the goal and then we should relax and celebrate. And there should be times of taking a water break and just enjoying where we’re at. There should be in between game times even and timeouts and all of that. And just running up and down the field a little bit. It’s not always like that last minute hustle.

So there should be comfort in between the discomfort but unfortunately or fortunately, however you want to look at it, being in comfort for too long starts to feel boring to us and we want to see if we could score another goal at some point. So think of it as the comfort-discomfort cycle but make sure that you are geared up because I don’t want you aiming for any goal at your own expense, it’s not necessary, not worth it.

Alright, thanks for joining me today. I’ll see you next week for another episode. Take care.

Hey there, if you enjoy this podcast or even if you just find that it sort of piques your curiosity, or it makes you think, you’re going to love the book that I wrote. It’s called Better Than Happy: Connecting with Divinity Through Conscious Thinking. And it’s available now at Amazon in print or kindle version. Or if you want me to read it to you, head over to audible and grab the audio version. And why not grab a copy for your sister, your best friend, or your mom while you’re there too. Just saying.