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When I became certified as a coach, I went through the process alongside my mother. This raised some questions for my father, who now found himself surrounded by the women in his life discussing something he didn’t really think very highly of at first. He even thought it was a little self-centered. As you can imagine, I tried to think of ways I could show him the power of this work, but as time passed, I didn’t really have to.
I did struggle myself early on with the notion of what learning about this mindset tool means about my faith in Heavenly Father, especially being that there is no mention of The Model in the scripture. But when you look a little deeper, it might have more relevance than first appears obvious. That’s where the Good Fruit comes in.
Join me on this episode as I discuss the process of incorporating my work as a life coach into my beliefs as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Discover not only how I came to see the two as compatible, but also what made my father realize the importance of the work I’m doing, not only for me, but for everyone in my community.
As well as ASK JODY ANYTHING, I’m hosting a couple of webinars over the next few weeks around dealing with anxiety and how to deal with loved ones questioning or leaving the church. Click here to find out more.
What You’ll Learn on this Episode:
- How I struggled with the idea that the work I’m doing was not necessarily the work of Heavenly Father.
- Why we have to be cautious about what we choose to believe.
- How we convince ourselves things are true, especially when we see others who believe it.
- 3 stories that make me truly confident that there is nothing self-absorbed about self-help.
- What made me realize that there are incredible examples of The Model in the scriptures.
- How I define the fruits of my work as a life coach.
- Why you will know whether you’re on the right path by the fruit you produce.
Mentioned on the Show:
- Come hang out with me in Seattle at Better Than Happy Live! I’ll be there in June to spend a whole day with you, give you a taste of coaching, and record a live podcast all about how to create a deliberate future.
- Join me for the next Ask Jody Anything coaching call!
- Kim Giles
- 99. Individual Worth with Kim Giles
- Choosing Clarity by Kim Giles
- Abducted in Plain Sight on Netflix
- The Carbonaro Effect on Netflix
I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, episode 204, Good Fruit.
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, how’s it going? Welcome to the podcast. I hope you’re having an amazing day. I hope you’re diving into summer with your family and your kids and that you are going to enjoy summer, as opposed to being stressed out about summer and all that’s going on, or maybe a little bit of both. Let’s shoot for 50-50, right? 50% fun, 50% challenging, that’s how we roll.
We’re going to talk about good fruit today, and we’re not going to talk about food in the literal sense. So before you think, “Oh great, it’s another food episode,” stay with me. We’re not talking about good fruit in the literal sense. I’ll tell you what we are talking about, but first, I want to invite you to some free webinars I’m going to do in just a couple of weeks.
I like to, as you guys know, on occasion, throw out just some extra help, some little bit more intimate help, because I show up on webcam, invite you into my home office via my webcam, thank you, technology. And I invite you to go a little bit deeper on what you’re learning here. So if you like what you’re learning here – maybe you’re new here, welcome if you’re new.
We take everything to the next level on a webinar because I have a little more time, I have the benefit of some visual things that I can share with you through technology. And also, I can take your questions. So we get to interact with one another, and that’s pretty powerful and just takes everything to the next level for you.
So, the first webinar I’m going to teach is going to be on coping with anxiety because I coach a lot of people on coping with anxiety. Some of them are coping with it themselves, others of them have loved ones, maybe they’re teenagers, their spouses, somebody else close to them that they love or a friend. And anxiety is something that unfortunately is on the rise and we see a lot of it affecting a lot of people.
And so I want to empower you with some tools to help you cope. So make sure you come to that one if you have that going on in your life in some way. The second webinar I’m going to teach is about when you have a loved one that is questioning the church, or maybe they’ve left the church or they want to leave the church.
So, loved one can mean anything, right? We can be talking about, again, one of your children, maybe it’s a teenage child, maybe it’s an adult child. Maybe it’s your in-laws, excuse me, son-in-law, daughter-in-law. It could be in-laws in general, right? Maybe it’s your spouse. Anyway, if somebody you love is questioning or leaving the church and you’re struggling with that, I want to invite you to this webinar and I’m going to take care of you.
I’ve coached many, many people in this exact scenario. So to sign up for the webinars, we will put a link in the show notes, of course, as always, but you can go to jodymoore.com and click on Free Resources, and you will see the links to the webinars there. As always, I’m going to have my monthly Q&A call also happening, Ask Jody Anything, so you can just come to that one and ask about any topic at all if you want some help from me.
Alright, let’s talk about good fruit. Okay, so explain to you why I’m calling this episode that, I want to take you back in time a little bit. We’re going to go back about six or seven years ago when I first became obsessed with coaching tools. I learned them in a work setting, and that was fun, and I loved using them in corporate. But I really understood the power of them when I was going through some challenges of my own and coaching really helped me through that in a really powerful way.
I saw just a little glimpse of how coaching could change things and how it applies to any situation. Now, I didn’t feel like I was doing anything wrong by hiring a coach or learning about coaching tools, but the part of me that loved this work so much and wanted to share it with others and the part of me that saw the parallel between what I was learning through coaching and what I believed religiously and what I was learning at church, there was a little bit of conflict there because I thought, “Is this okay?”
I had this little question in the back of my head, like, you know, is this the philosophies of men? Do I need to be cautious? Am I headed the wrong way? Am I going down the wrong track? Am I going to start questioning my religion? Is this going to become my new religion?
I had all of these concerns, and so I was sort of cautious about talking about coaching tools in terms of how they related to my religion. And I remember being at church and just overhearing somebody talking about a meeting that they were planning and they were talking about what speakers they were going to invite or workshops they were going to offer or something. It wasn’t even a conversation I was really a part of, I just overheard it.
And the woman said, “Yeah, we’re thinking about asking this one woman in the stake. She’s a life coach.” And I was like, “Wait, what? She’s a life coach? There’s a woman in our stake who’s a life coach?” And I didn’t even say this out loud, just in my head I was like, “Oh, that’s okay? Like, it’s okay to be a life coach and a member of the church and in fact you’re even going to invite her to come and speak at something? Oh, okay, maybe this is okay.”
And then I went home and I got on the internet and I Googled LDS life coach because I wanted to see, maybe there are life coaches who are members of the church. Maybe this isn’t a bad thing. Maybe this isn’t leading me the wrong direction.
And when I Googled LDS life coach, I found Kim Giles. Maybe some of you know Kim Giles. She’s amazing. I’ve had her on the podcast actually, quite a while ago, but she came on and did an episode here. And I love Kim Giles. I love what she teaches. I love her book, it’s called Choosing Clarity. If you want to read a good book – she doesn’t bring the doctrine into what she teaches, but she is a member of the church and it certainly all aligns with our values.
So at any rate, I found Kim Giles and a couple other people who looked like they were mostly associated with Kim Giles and her work. But again, it got this idea, like, “Oh, maybe this is good. Maybe this is okay.”
But here’s the thing; we have to be cautious because it’s true that we can be led astray. The truth is, the brain is a powerful thing and your ability to influence other people and affect the neurochemistry of the brain is a real thing. Brainwashing is a real thing. We see this happen in cult situations. We see cult leaders who are able to convince people that certain actions are good and useful and certain belief systems are useful, that the rest of us who haven’t been brainwashed, who haven’t been through that process sit back and go, “What are they thinking? How could they possibly think that was okay?”
We see corrupt governments do similar things. There’s a show people keep talking about right now on Netflix called Abducted in Plain Sight which I have not watched because that’s not the kind of show I enjoy, I don’t like filling my head with those kinds of stories, but what I’ve been told about that show is that it’s a really amazing hard to believe story about how a family was basically brainwashed into allowing their daughter to be taken advantage of and abducted in this situation.
That is a real thing. It’s really easy for us to sit here on the outside and want to judge people and think, “How could they think that? How stupid could they be?” But that is the power of the brain and of being able to convince people to follow a certain path.
And this is why we’re cautioned to be careful about who we follow. Now, on a lighter note, let’s just shift gears for just a minute, I love seeing, again, how easily the brain can be persuaded on a show that my family and I love to watch called The Carbonaro Effect.
If you have not seen The Carbonaro Effect, you must go look it up and watch it. It’s super fun. It’s great for kids and adults alike, a great family show, which I think we need more of, we need more opportunities to watch TV together as a family, don’t you think? I do.
At any rate, Michael Carbonaro, who is the host of the show, is an amazing magician. It is a hidden camera magic TV show. So he happens to not only be an amazing magician, but he’s also a great actor. So he poses as the clerk in a store or a new employee at a location or the worker at a restaurant. And then he performs these magic tricks, but people don’t know he’s performing a magic trick, it just looks like something unbelievable happening in front of their eyes, like a toy fish instantly turning into a real fish or an average sized bag that might hold three or four hamburgers and he’s pulling out like 25 hamburgers and drinks in cups with lids.
So these seemingly unbelievable things happen in front of these people’s eyes and they don’t know what to make of it because they don’t know this guy is a magician performing a trick. And because he acts so calm and cool about it, like, “Yeah of course, haven’t you seen this? You didn’t know this was a thing? You didn’t know this was possible?”
He’s so convincing that people leave their questioning, “Maybe it is possible. Maybe that really could happen.” We don’t want to be the foolish one and we have a tendency to think, if everybody around us seems to be getting it or somebody seems really confident about it, then it must be us. We must be the ones misunderstood. We must be the one who doesn’t get it.
And so we can convince ourselves of a lot of things in the name of not being foolish or in the name of following along with what somebody really confident is telling us. We can even make things true with our brains.
I want you to think back to when you were a child. Maybe I’m the only one who did this. But I remember, as a child, not wanting to go somewhere. Maybe it was school for example, and just deciding that I would tell my mom that I was sick, to the extent that I actually made myself sick. I convinced myself that I genuinely was sick and then my body started to act and feel as though it were sick. That’s the power of our brains. So we do have to be cautious about just believing anything or following somebody who’s really charismatic.
So again, back to coaching, back to thought work. I wanted to be cautious. I had questions like, why haven’t I heard this at church before? Because this work is a little bit spiritual, right? So why isn’t it in the scriptures? I kept asking myself and I have clients that ask me that’s sometimes as well.
And then I would think about, well, on the other hand, we have things like the law of gravity, which I don’t really recall reading about in the scriptures. And yet, I think it’s true, I think it’s a useful concept for us to understand and I don’t think it’s straying from the path by any means. There’s actually a lot of things not in the scriptures, like how to perform a cesarean section or any of the other amazing things that we’re able to do in the world of medicine and science, not really outlines in the scriptures.
How to treat mental illness is not in the scriptures and all sorts of other useful things that I’ve learned in my lifetime are actually not in the scriptures, or are they? We’ll come back to that question in just a minute.
Here’s what I know; the model, the things that I teach here are in the scriptures, actually. The scriptures use different wording, of course. But I see it in the scriptures all the time. And you guys do too. Every time we have general conference, I get flooded with messages, which I love so keep them coming, messages from you guys noticing how our church leaders are sharing these same concepts and how aligned all of it is.
Truth is truth, even if it’s worded in different ways. And we have different tools and different kinds of knowledge that serve different purposes and are applicable in different ways. But it still begs the question, how do we make sure that we’re not being led in the wrong direction?
Do you see where I’m going with the good fruit thing? I hope you do. But just to be sure, let’s break it down. The Lord answers this question in the New Testament during the Sermon on the Mount. In the book of Mathew, it says, “Beware of false prophets which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles? Even so, every good tree bringeth forth good fruit, but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire, wherefore, by their fruits, ye shall know them.”
Oh, now we get it, right? “By their fruits ye shall know them.” So let’s take a look at that. What is the fruit? Well, the fruit, of course, is the thing that’s produced. It’s the result of everything else happening. So you have a tree. That tree has roots and a trunk and branches and leaves and all of those things are in support of the fruit that it produces because that fruit is the seed-bearing structure that then allows that tree to produce other threes like it.
But the fruit is how we know whether that’s a good tree or not a good tree. And this is the natural order of things, right? We create more of what we are. If we are selfish and conniving and dishonest and manipulative, we create more of that in the world through the fruit that we produce, and if we are loving and generous and kind and gracious, we produce more of that. It’s as simple as that.
If we are full of fear and worry, we produce more fear and worry. And if we are full of trust and love, we produce more trust and love. And any fruit that is good is of God, and if it’s evil, it’s not of God.
So once I read this, I realized that the fruit of this work, everything that I get to do as a coach, everything I’ve been taught by all my teachers, the fruit of it love and connection and patience and peace and compassion. It’s allowing and processing feelings in a healthy way. It’s ownership of all of the results in our lives, which is the empowerment for us of the results in our lives. It’s healthy relationships, abundant mindsets and contributing something valuable and good in the world.
And these are the same fruits of the religious principles I live by, right? there are other things involved in the religion, there are other complexities and there are covenants that are made and other work that is done religiously, but the fruit is the same, right? It includes also connection with a higher source, which I happen to call Heavenly Father. It’s peace and truth that everything will be okay in the end and if it’s not okay, it’s just not the end yet.
Now, you may be thinking, well what about those people who mess up? We see people who are members of the church, and this is true in any religion or any body of people, but let’s just use the church by way of example. We see people who claim to be practicing the religion and using the religion as a way to judge others.
We see ignorance and intolerance and separation and exclusion. We see people operating in pride or self-righteousness. We even see church leaders who sometimes make really poor choices, like even illegal or immoral choices. So does that mean that the church is producing not good fruit?
No, that’s not the fruit of the doctrine, that’s somebody’s personal stuff. That’s their fruit. That’s the fruit of imperfect people, human beings whose roots have gone bad and are now producing bad fruit. And if they choose to, they can clean it all up. But if not, they’ll continue to produce bad fruit, which is why I think compassion and an understanding of what’s gone wrong is so much more powerful than the judgment and contempt we tend to want to offer in that situation.
So, this isn’t just about throwing out the bad fruit and condemning the tree, hating the tree, judging the tree. This is about, this tree needs extra love. Something’s gone wrong with this tree. We need to tend to this tree in order to figure this out and figure out why this tree is producing bad fruit.
Now, this is true of the things I teach here as well. Not everyone will have the same result with the tools I teach here because you can use this information however you want. You can use it against yourself. You can use it to judge people around you. You can use it to feel frustrated and resentful with people around you. But that’s not the intention of it. That’s a misuse of it. And when used properly, the fruit of this work is so, so good.
Now, I want to tell you that my dad, when I first became a coach – and some of you may know this – but my mother went through coach training with me. We were certified at the same time. So she and I both love this work. We love these tools and we went through coach training together.
And so my dad was kind of surrounded by she and I talking about it and getting bits and pieces, and he was a little like, “I don’t know about this”. I mean, it sounds a little self-centered, right? Let me take care of my own needs and my own emotions and let me build up my confidence. And you can definitely look at self-help as being sort of self-indulgent. Like it has the word self in it and it is a focus on self in order to improve one’s self, right? Which he was like, “Shouldn’t we just focus on other people and not focus so much on ourselves?”
And some of it, he just didn’t know and we didn’t take the time to properly explain it to him, and so he was, I think, I don’t know if he would admit to this, but I think he was a little skeptical at first. And over time, as he learned more about it, as we shared more about it, I started when I moved here, and now I live close to my dad, at one point I started sharing with him some of the messages that I would get from clients who were in my coaching program and from people who would listen to the podcast and from people who had used these tools in the right way and seen the effects of them.
I started sharing with my dad some of the fruit of this work. I’m going to share just a couple of those with you today because I try to keep those messages and I went back through and pulled couple and I’m like, “This is awesome. I need to share just a couple of these.”
And I’m going to keep these anonymous because I did not check with these people, so I’m going to leave out any details that I think might identify anyone. But these are real messages that I’ve received from real clients.
This one says, “Dear Jody, I’m writing today to let you know how you have helped me. My daughter introduced me to your podcast. I considered it an answer to prayer and I have been listening ever since. I joined the Be Bold program and am really working on my thought work and am running the model often. I got a little stuck when you did the podcast on pornography. My thoughts went something like this; she is so wrong about this one. The circumstance of my husband being addicted to pornography is not neutral. It can’t be neutral in my situation. My husband’s porn addiction cost him his job. He’s been through five or six different jobs in a two-year period and he was fired from the last one, which led to us burning through all of our retirement savings, losing our house and our cars and declaring bankruptcy, not to mention the emotional toll it has taken on me as a woman. I counseled with bishops, went through the church’s 12-step program, saw a psychologist and read every book on the topic.
My husband didn’t do any of that. He just kept on living as if nothing was even wrong, even though my world had been ripped apart. Every time I hear a conference talk on pornography, I felt sad, victimized, worried, and afraid. My self-esteem plummeted and then my son became addicted to porn. He was disfellowshipped and has since left the church. This was the hardest blow. Hadn’t I been a faithful church member, dedicated to my family, gone to the temple, read my scriptures, being a good diligent mother, accepted every calling, sacrificed my whole soul to mothering?
My self-esteem and everything I thought I knew about myself was gone. When I first started listening to you, I realized that pornography was probably a buffer for my husband. I shared the concept of buffers with him and he agreed that we all have buffers to keep us from feeling emotions. Then I found more porn on his laptop. I was crushed and all my old ways of coping kicked in. It was like post-traumatic stress and I couldn’t stop the cascade of negative emotions and actions.
We just became empty nesters and moved. So here I am in a new city, no kids, no friends, living in a 500 square foot apartment without a kitchen feeling depressed and aimless. I have been praying to know what my purpose is. Maybe I should go back to school, start a blog, take photography lessons, work on family history. What does Heavenly Father want me to do? What is most important?
I got an answer I didn’t expect and frankly wasn’t happy about. The answer that came was, work on your marriage. My immediate reaction was, I don’t want to work on my marriage. I’ve been working on my marriage for 24 years and it’s been pretty one-sided and I’m tired. I’m really, really tired. Not too long after that, my daughter introduced me to your podcast. It made a lot of sense to me and I love that you allow for acknowledging emotions and that our thoughts can be so powerful.
I felt like I was making progress in ways that I hadn’t for a very long time. This weekend was a huge breakthrough for us. We just celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary and it didn’t feel like we have much of a marriage to celebrate. I was wondering about boundaries and how to set them in our marriage when it comes to porn. How do I respect someone who breaks commandments and doesn’t care about how I feel?
We were driving from California to Utah and I asked my husband if he was okay with me listening to a podcast. He agreed and I turned on the podcast you did recently on pornography. What followed was one of the most heartfelt, real, respectful, and heartbreaking discussions we’d had in years. My eyes were opened and my heart was broken.
Just like you talked about, because of my thoughts about my husband’s porn use, I was showing up in very unloving ways. He talked about feeling ashamed and hated by me and he felt that he must deserve it. As a result of those feelings, he pulled away. What a wakeup call for me. That certainly wasn’t my intent but it was the result of my thoughts about the circumstance. You were right. Wow, I felt horrible and sad and realized that I needed to repent. I had been in the wrong. I also felt hope for the first time in a long while; hope that as I continue to work on the model the next 30 years of my marriage can be hopeful and loving and respectful and so much different. Thank you for teaching me that love is always an option.”
Okay, I know that was a long letter, but wow, what a powerful story, right? I have just a couple more I want to share with you that are shorter, but other scenarios. And I’m sharing these with you because I want you to wrap your head around whatever is going on in your life and know that the tools I’m teaching you here genuinely can apply to anything.
It says, “Hi Jody, today I want to reach out and thank you for everything you do because although I thought I joined Be Bold and listened to the podcast for me. I had an amazing experience yesterday that made me realize it’s so much more than that. I have a cute first-grade daughter who has some major struggles with anxiety and controlling her emotions.
We’ve been to therapy and I’ve read endlessly trying to find ways to help her. About a month ago, I started really earnestly praying for help and guidance in parenting her. I couldn’t figure out what to do. I hated the way I was interacting with her when she acted out.
Over the past few weeks, as I’ve increased the number of hours I’m listening to you each week, through Be Bold, I’ve tried to focus on just loving her for her and noticing all the little things about her that I adore, rather than the big huge hard things that are too easy to focus on. It’s very common for her to have one small thing go wrong at school and it throws her into a funk for the whole day.
I’ve tried to tell her that she can choose her reaction and choose her emotions, but she never seemed to really care. Yesterday, she came home more upset than usual. I was bracing for impact, knowing we probably had a long afternoon and evening ahead. But instead of the usual routine, I decided to take her up to her room and talk to her one on one about the thoughts in her head that were creating these emotions and action.
I used the principles you’ve been teaching me to talk her through. Within 10 minutes, her demeanor had changed considerably. She was able to go on with her afternoon as if it was a normal day and at bedtime she gave me a hug and said, ‘Mom, even though that one bad thing happened that we talked about, I still had a great day.’
At that moment, the spirit nudged me and I knew that you, the podcast, Be Bold, all of it is an answer to my prayers. It’s blessing me personally and in turn, giving me tools to teach my daughter so I can raise her as a strong confident woman. It brings tears to my eyes every time I think about it. I’m more grateful than you could ever know. I still have a lot of work to do with myself and my daughter, but that moment yesterday was a desperately needed ray of hope. Thank you for all you are doing. I look forward to working with you more.”
Okay, one more situation that I want to share with you, one more letter. This is of, like, hundreds of these heartfelt messages that come in where you guys are seeing the effects of this work in your life.
It says, “Hi Jody, I just can’t let another day go by without thanking you for what you’ve done for me. I’ve been a member of Be Bold for almost a year. I’ve never actually been coached by you but I’ve become very good at self-caching from listening to you coach others. I know for certain that Heavenly Father helped me to find you just before I went through some very traumatic things.
On Christmas Day, last December, I found myself in a behavioral health hospital visiting my son who had just tried to commit suicide. I started to have thoughts like, look at me here in this awful place on Christmas Day. Then I realized, wow that’s a lot of drama. And I was able to choose different thoughts.
I also wanted to blame my husband for my son’s suicide attempt because of something that he had said to my son, but then, I almost immediately directed my thoughts to, this was my son’s choice, whether or not it has anything to do with my husband’s words doesn’t matter now. This was supposed to happen this way and it will be for everyone’s good in the end.
Your work has helped me in a million other ways as well. I’m definitely more loving, less judgmental, less fearful, and more optimistic than I have been in a long time. My faith has grown as well as my ability to feel the spirit. This is partly because I’ve been able to eliminate a lot of negative thoughts that have kept me from feeling the spirit in the past.
I’ve been able to choose more faith-filled thoughts. Even when I want to dip into self-pity sometimes, my higher brain won’t allow it anymore. It’s almost annoying. My children have benefitted from this work as well, even if they get tired of hearing me talk about thoughts. One time when I was feeling frustrated, my nine-year-old son patted my arm and said, don’t be stressed mom, go do some thought work.
Another time, two of my sons were teasing their sister, she got upset with them and one of them said, ‘Don’t worry, Emily, Jody says it means something about us, not you.’ I laughed so hard. Thank you for giving me the tools that have allowed me to feel more joy and peace in my life. What can be more valuable than that? Sometimes I worry that you will become so successful that you will stop doing this, heaven forbid.”
Oh my goodness, okay, you guys are amazing, right, these letters. Don’t worry, I’m never going to stop doing this. I have zero plans to stop doing this. My point is, in reading these letters, you guys, this is the fruit of the work. This is more love, more connection, stronger families, more confidence, more feeling of the spirit. Cleaning up our brains allows us to feel the spirit. And by their fruits, ye shall know them.
My dad is one of my biggest fans now, I’m happy to say, a huge supporter of me. and I asked him one time, why he views this work a little bit differently now than he did in the beginning, and the answer that he gave me is, “By their fruits, ye shall know them.” And he said, “I still don’t understand why it’s so impactful for people,” because to him, the model is very simple. He’s like, “That’s it? It’s just CTFAR?”
But he sees the fruits, he sees the result, and he says, “There’s no way that what you’re doing is not of God. It is good and I know by the fruits it’s producing.” And my dad is now reading the scriptures and looking for the model in the scriptures, and he tells me it’s everywhere.
Now, here’s the other point I want to make before we wrap up this episode. Some of the thoughts that helped the people in these letters that I read to you, or some of the thoughts that I offer you on this podcast are going to be helpful for certain people in certain situations, and they’re not going to be helpful in other situations.
There are no right thoughts in most cases. There are just thoughts that help you become your best self and thoughts that cause you more anxiety or worry or judgment or fear. The same thoughts that’s peaceful for one person might be poison for another person. So how do we know? We know by the fruit it produces.
The fruit is how you feel and show up, which is what creates actually the end result. The fruit is the end result, right? When you’re thinking that thought, you feel a certain way and you show up a certain way and then you create a certain fruit in the end. So in some situations, the thought, “I just want to love my husband how he is,” is really useful. And in other situations, “I don’t want to be married to a man who treats me like that,” is more useful.
So how do we know? How do we know when to change the circumstance? Well, we have to look at what it’s creating in your life. Does the result that it creates for you provide the kind of fruit you want in your life? And I hope that what you want – and here’s the truth, I basically assume for my clients that this is what they want because we’re all created in God’s image and what we all want when we clean up the earthly human stuff is to be love.
Christ is the ultimate example of being love and he is what a life that is love looks like. Now, we won’t get to that level in this life, but we want to be pointed in that direction is the goal. And so that means that the result that we want is that we be our most loving selves. I want to be loving towards me, loving towards everybody else in the story. We want to be operating in love and trust.
So the question, what does love do, is a powerful question. And sometimes, love says, “We need to pay attention and take some action and stop some injustice that’s occurring.” And other times, love says, “This is just human beings, we don’t need to try and change them, we can just love them.”
And so what love does is not always an easy question to answer but love is the goal. Love is the fruit of everything that I’ve learned, from my teachers who have taught me the tools I use today as a coach, love is the ultimate fruit that we’re trying to produce. And if you find ways to increase love, then that’s some good fruit, my friends. Those are some good tools. Grab onto them. They are of Heavenly Father and they are good.
Thank you for joining me today. I’ll be back next Friday with another episode. Make sure you hit subscribe so that you don’t miss a beat on the podcast. I’ll talk to you soon, bye-bye.
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.
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