212. Evolution

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, episode 212, Evolution.

This podcast is for people who know that living an extraordinary life is not easy or comfortable. It’s so much better than that. This is Better Than Happy, and I’m your host, Jody Moore.

Hey, everyone, what’s happening? Welcome to episode number 212. We’re going to talk about evolution today. How does that sound?

So, I use this term evolving quite a bit. I use it when I’m coaching. I use it here on the podcast. And sometimes people say, “What do you mean by evolving because aren’t you a member of the same church I am and don’t you believe in creationism versus evolution?” And I say, yes, I do believe in the creation, but I also believe in the word evolution and I use it quite frequently.

So I just want to talk to you about what I mean when I use that word first of all, personally and why I think it’s such a fun concept to think about and specifically think about in terms of your life.

So, I personally do not believe that we evolved from apes or any other species. I believe that we were created by a higher power, by a Heavenly Father who loves us and created all of the things here on the Earth, including the human beings and all of the animals.

So, a traditional Christian sense of creation is something that we, in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints believe. So you’re probably familiar with that, even if you’re not a member of the church.

But I also believe in the progression and growth and increase in complexity and knowledge and understanding and diversity and connection that happens here on Earth and has been happening for billions of years for the Earth itself, for all of the things that God created, and has been happening more recently for us as human beings.

I think that this happens on my different levels. I think that we have some understanding and have been able to study some of the ways that this happens. We can observe some of the ways that this happens, but there’s probably so much of this happening that we barely understand a tiny little bit of it, is my guess.

So, I’m going to talk about some of the parts that we do understand and that we see. And this kind of increase in complexity and understanding and connection happens on many, many levels. It happens for the human species. It happens for countries. It happens in communities and families and it happens with individuals.

And what I do as a coach and what I’m doing here on the podcast is really working at the individual level in order to try to contribute to then what happens in families and communities and countries and human beings in general. So, my goal, of course, is to impact those highest levels, but each of us as individuals are what make up those other bodies. So I think working on ourselves, starting with the man in the mirror, if you will, is really the way that we impact on a more global level, at least with the work that I do.

Now, there is a video on YouTube that I highly recommend by Rob Bell. It is the Everything is Spiritual 2016 tour. So it’s a couple hours long. It’s pretty long. But I think Rob Bell does such a beautiful job of talking about what I’m going to share just a little bit of here with you today and he does it in a really entertaining way. He is a Christian Megachurch pastor, I should say former Megachurch pastor who now has a podcast and has written a lot of books and things.

But anyway, some of what I’m going to tell you today, I’m taking from Rob Bell’s Everything is Spiritual 2016 tour, which you can see for free on YouTube. It’s excellent. But I love the way Rob talks about how the Earth is 13 billion years old. It’s actually over 13 billion years old. And over 13 billion years ago, the Earth started as a bunch of particles.

And those particles get together and form atoms. And as atoms get together, they form molecules. And molecules get together and form cells. And those cells get together, eventually, to form human beings. Again, I personally don’t believe this happened on accident. I think this was all orchestrated.

But if you notice, when we start with simple particles and we combine them, it becomes more complicated and more complex as we create atoms and so on and so forth until we are created, which are extremely complex individuals, right? But this kind of getting together and increasing in complexity and knowledge and ability has been going on for over 13 billion years, and we know this according to science.

I love the idea that our growth comes from connectedness and it always has, since the Earth started out as particles. And if you notice that as human beings, we have this innate desire or this innate drive to connect with other human beings. It’s kind of fascinating if you think about the history of our Earth.

Think about how compelling loneliness is, what a terrible empty feeling loneliness is because, as human beings, we’re not designed to be alone. We’re designed to connect with other human beings, even though that connection with other human beings complicates things.

It has a lot of amazing things about it, but it also creates a lot of complication and problems in many cases. And yet, it’s innate within us and we keep doing it. We spend a lot of time scrolling social media seeking that connection with other human beings.

Our country has been increasing in complexity ever since it was formed. Have you noticed? Think about what we know about when the founding fathers lived here and what the world was like and what our country was like, what our government was like. It’s definitely increased in complexity as it’s grown.

We like to say things like, “Remember when things used to be simpler? Remember back when things were more simple?” as though simple is better. And maybe, in some ways, it is. But our natural inclination is to grow and evolve and become more complicated. And maybe that’s a good thing actually as well.

I took my daughter, earlier this year, to San Francisco to see the play Hamilton because she is a huge Hamilton fan. For Christmas, she got Hamilton tickets, and I benefitted from that as well because she couldn’t go alone.

So in Hamilton, we see the story of some of our founding fathers. And one of the parts that really stood out to me is, a couple different times in that play, they illustrate that if somebody else says to you, “Hey, how about a duel,” that you don’t turn that down. You just say yes and you get your gun and you show up at whatever the designated time and place is and you have a duel and you see who comes out alive.

That used to be acceptable. That was an acceptable way to settle an argument back then. Thank goodness we’ve increased in complexity as we’ve grown as a nation.

But not that long ago, slavery used to be acceptable in our country. And actually, even more recently than that, segregation was acceptable in our country. And now, we look back and think, how could we think that was acceptable? Clearly that was inacceptable, right? But as a country and as a human species, we’ve evolved, we’ve learned a lot, we’ve grown and we’ve improved in the process of doing so.

Now, we see some countries that aren’t as far along in their evolutionary journey, right, that still have practices, some cultures, that we’d say, “How could you possibly think that’s okay?” And it’s easy for us to judge people. But guess what, it wasn’t too long ago we were practicing some pretty horrific things ourselves.

We see communities evolve as well in the way that we discipline our children. Things that used to be acceptable just a few generations ago are not considered acceptable today in the way we discipline our children.

I think even some of the things that one or two generations ago people used to worry about and stress about, we kind of realize today maybe aren’t worth getting upset over, maybe aren’t that big of a deal. I know my mom likes to tell herself, “Gosh, I shouldn’t have worried about the things I worried about when you guys were kids.”

But now, I think she understands, “No, I just didn’t understand what I understand now. I hadn’t evolved past that point.” In fact, our societies and our communities hadn’t evolved in that way. It was very common to worry and stress about the things that we worried about. And now we’ve evolved past that.

Sometimes, people who are new to my work say to me, “I wish I would have known this stuff earlier. I wish I would have had the podcast Better Than Happy when my kids were young and I was raising my kids.”

And what I tell them is, “No, you weren’t supposed to have it then because we hadn’t evolved to this level of consciousness yet as a people. And if you were meant to know it then, when your kids were little, then you would have known it. And you, my friend, are also increasing in complexity.

As an individual in your own life, you are growing and evolving and becoming more complicated. This is what I mean when I talk about evolving. So we can even think about physically what happens to our bodies. We are born as babies and those babies grow and develop, first of all before they’re even born in utero, but certainly after birth, we see rapid progression of growth with a baby.

Think about the way a baby’s brain develops and increases in complexity.  If you consider the way that a baby’s brain functions compared to the way an adult brain functions, the complexity is amazing in how it grows and changes. And even the fact that our cells are continuously dying and then new ones are replacing them, we are an evolving physical being. Like, my body today is not the same body I had when I was a baby because every cell has died and replaced itself as I’ve grown.

Like I said, our brains continue to grow. Our memories, our experiences, the emotions we’ve felt in our life, the knowledge that we’ve gained, all of this makes us more complicated species as we grow.

So, here’s the truth; life will change you because circumstances will happen outside of you. You will experience things. And you will evolve to a certain extent, but you can evolve by default into wherever life takes you, or you can evolve intentionally and change intentionally in the way that you want to change. You can direct the ways in which you’re changing.

And that is what we are doing here on this podcast. That is the work I am doing with my clients as individuals. Those are the things that I’m teaching you about are the ways in which your brain operates so you can understand it. And those are the things I’m constantly showing those of you in my coaching program; I’m showing you the little nuances of yourself because that awareness of yourself is really where we get to direct the changes happening to us.

So, if a plane is headed across the country to Los Angeles and we change the course of that plane just a few degrees, we can send that plane to an entirely different city on the West Coast. And that is the goal with us as human beings, is to just change the trajectory in which we are growing, the trajectory at which we are evolving so that we end up in the place that we want to be intentionally instead of our default destination, which may or may not be serving us.

So, again, if you’re in Be Bold and you’ve been coached, you know what it feels like to just have the trajectory changed a little bit in your head and send you in that new direction. I cannot even tell you how many times I’ve been coaching a client who I’m not even sure if they’re really seeing what I’m trying to show them. I’m not sure if it’s registering.  But it wiggles something in their head just enough that points them in the new direction and they come back to me later an entirely different person in that area of their life. It’s so much fun for me to see that.

So, here’s what I’m really excited about; I’m excited about how many of you listen to this podcast and how you share it with other people because I see you as individuals evolving. I see you approaching challenges differently and accomplishing things that we never used to even dream we could accomplish before. And I see your families evolving. I see your relationships changing course. I see things improving from the way we used to run our families in the past.

I see our communities evolving as well. I especially see those of you within the LDS church evolving your dynamics in your ward and your church communities. I see things becoming more complex. And here’s what you have to keep in mind; as things become more complex, sometimes it becomes more uncomfortable, especially as we shed the old way of doing things and we start to take on the new ways of doing things, it feels uncomfortable.

The brain would love to just keep repeating what it’s always done. So as we make a shift from visiting teaching and home teaching to ministering, it’s more complicated, right? Because it’s a lot easier to just tell people, “Go do this thing in this way on this frequency and then report back,” than to say, “Just go try to minister to people and take care of them.” That’s more complicated. But sometimes, complicated is the way that we grow.

It’s a lot easier to have a church-centered approach of teaching our children supported by the home than have home-centered supported by the church. But maybe that level of complexity is where we’re ready to go, we’re ready to evolve to as a species.

There’s a lot more room for interpretation now, for personal revelation, for spiritual maturity, and I think this is what we’re ready for as an LDS community. I notice that your conversations and your comments are evolving because sometimes you come to me saying, “Hey, I really wanted to make this comment in Relief Society, but I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate because it’s a little bit different than the way we normally talk about this subject.”

And I’m not telling you what is or isn’t appropriate for you, you have to navigate that. But I wonder if this evolution in the increased complexity around certain subjects isn’t a beautiful natural way that we are evolving as individuals and as a community.

So remember that evolution requires discomfort because we have to shed the old and adopt the new. We shed our old identity, which is extremely scary and uncomfortable. We shed our old story, our old habits that we’re really, really good at. We shed all of that safety and take on the scary new unfamiliar unhabitual ways that we now choose to think about things. It’s scary, but it’s 100% worth it.

I want to close this talk about evolution by talking about the way that Brooke Castillo is with myself and my fellow coaches that I meet with quarterly at a mastermind group. There’s about six or seven of us. We get together quarterly. Brooke Castillo leads us. And she is one of the most amazing coaches I’ve ever seen because she knows that the more she can help us evolve, the more successful we will be at our goals and the more people we will be able to help as a result.

And so sometimes, when one of us shows up saying, “Everything’s going really well right now, everything’s smooth and figured out,” she will push back on us and try to push us into discomfort because she will say, “I’m not doing my job as your coach if I’m not pushing you to grow. And if you’re not uncomfortable, you’re not growing.

So, let’s coast for a little while, but let’s not settle in there. Let’s make sure we’re up for the discomfort of growth. Let’s make sure that we are evolving ourselves as individuals so that we can help evolve the people that we interact with, our families, our communities, and our species. I’m all in for that.

Who’s with me? Let’s do some evolving. Thanks for joining me today, you guys. I’ll be back next week. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss an episode. I’ll see you then.

If you have a question about something you’ve heard me talk about on this podcast or anything else going on in your life, I want to invite you to a free public call, Ask Jody Anything. I will teach you the main coaching tool I use with all of my clients and the way to solve any problem in your life, and we will plug in real life examples.

Come to the call and ask me a question anonymously or just listen in. Go to jodymoore.com/askjody and register before you miss it. I’ll see you there.