223. Jody Moore Coaching Values

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, episode 223 Jody Moore Coaching Values.

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? You ready to hang out for a little bit? Are you ready to listen to my voice? I’ve got some things to share with you. It is the beginning of October when I’ recording this, probably closer to the end of October when you’re hearing it. But I just had a meeting this week with my husband and my assistant and we mapped out the calendar for next year. And we have so many fun things happening.

I’m so excited for the things that we’re going to bringing to you. And some of them aren’t even on the calendar yet, I’m just working on them. And I’m so excited, I want to tell you all the things. But my husband and some other people get a little bit annoyed when I do that on the podcast because, if I put it out there too early, then we start getting bombarded with people asking for details. And when we don’t have details to give, that’s kind of a bummer for everyone.

So I can’t really tell you the things yet, but as soon as I can, this will be the first place I will announce things, right here on the podcast, new offerings and opportunities and just ways that we’re going to try to take care of you. So that’s pretty exciting. Lots of exciting things happening for you guys in Be Bold too, so stay tuned, lots of goodness coming in 2020.

Today, I’m going to talk to you about the values that we have just been – I should say I had to pull out of my head, and then my husband and I together sort of crafted them into what they are today for our company because it’s important to me that you know what our values are and that I offer them to you the same way I offer them to my employees and my staff and the people that are working with me, not because you have to adapt them. Of course, you don’t, but I just like you to know where I’m coming from and I think you’re going to find that these values might be really useful to you in your life as well.

They probably do, you probably will like them, otherwise you wouldn’t enjoy listening to my podcast. So let me tell you what I mean by values. So I have a lot of different values. I have things that I value that are part of my spirituality and part of my beliefs, if you will, especially things that I believe in terms of where we came from and why we’re here on earth and where we’re going.

And I have values in terms of even just moral and ethical things that I think are right and wrong. We all have a lot of values that drive us in our life. So when I talk about the values in my company, I include all of those things as sort of a given, like people should be kind to one another and we value human life and we value honestly, and all of those things to me are just a given.

What I’m talking about are the things that maybe make me, in some ways, unique or different from other entrepreneurs or other thought leaders even, and yet, in many ways, they probably overlap with people as well. But these are the things that, over the past year, I had to sort of, in my mind, figure out what was driving me. What are the parts of me that are somewhat natural and innate to me, or at least they were as I was building this company?

Because the first couple of years of building this company was just me, I didn’t have a partner, I didn’t even have any staff helping me. I did everything on my own for the first couple of years. I was a solopreneur in the purest sense of the word. It took me a long time to even just start hiring someone to do my graphic design work. I even built my first website on my own and I figured out all of the technology and I just was a DIYer, let’s just say, because I was on a budget.

So the things that were driving me, I wasn’t even really consciously thinking about. They were just things that, for whatever reason, were helping to move me forward and served me really well. Now that I’m at a little bit of a different stage and I have a lot more contractors and I have a business partner, it’s important, at this point in building a business, that you figure out what are those things that made me successful and the things that were important to me then that are still important to me.

You don’t want to lose those values that you built your company on, and yet they’re not going to be as innate to everyone else. And everyone else can’t just read your mind. You can’t expect that they’re going to think like you think and that they’re going to carry out things in the same way that you did. So identifying your values really helps get everybody on the same page about what’s important and how we make decisions and how we go about the work that we’re doing.

So when I sat down and figured out what these values are through a whole process I went through with a coach that I work with on my business and I sort of figured out what matters to me, what are my priorities and what served me well in the past that I want to bring with me into the future, I came up in the end with three things.

Now, I should say, because I didn’t know how to do this exercise quite right, the only thing I knew of values before was what I’d learned in my corporate job. Like you come up with a list of five or so words, like integrity, excellence, perseverance, success, things like this.

Nothing wrong with those types of values, but I came up with a list like that and I took them to my coach and she was like, these are kind of boring and these are very corporate and they actually don’t really sound like you, because this woman, Kris Plachy, is not only a coach but a friend of mine, and she knows me and has watched me build my business since the beginning.

So she’s like, “Are you sure these are really you?” And I was like, “No, I just think I’m trying to do this right.” And in the end, I came up with, instead of a list of words like that, three statements or sentences, if you will. And I want to just share them with you today and talk through each of them.

So, the first sentence, which many of you have heard me say over and over again, but it really is one of the driving forces in this business that I run is, this is going to be fun.

So, when I first came out of coach training and decided that I was going to see if anybody wanted my help – that’s basically what happened. I went to coach training just for the experience of it myself to learn and grow and sort of find myself. And when I got done, I thought I wonder if I could help a couple of people. I wonder if there is anyone that would want my help.

And I decided that finding those people and helping those people would be fun. I really genuinely thought of it that way. And I really still, to this day, find doing this work to be so much fun. Sunday night, when your brain starts thinking about what’s going to happen the next day, your brain goes to the place of, what is on my schedule tomorrow and what time do I need to get up and what are the things I’m going to need to be ready for?

My overall thought is, tomorrow’s going to be so much fun because I’m going to get to coach some people, I’m going to get to put some of my work in the world, I’m going to get to work on my business and it really is fun to me.

Now, there are parts of it that aren’t as much fun. There are things that I don’t enjoy that I need to do in order to do the fun parts. But I really try to keep my head in the space of, if this isn’t fun, we’re not going to do it, because this is my business. Isn’t that great news? This is my company, so that means I don’t have to do anything that isn’t going to be fun. I really don’t.

I can decide, hey, we’re not doing that anymore. We’re going to change this part. We’re going to mix it up. And I really want to keep things fresh, not just for me, but for my clients. If I start not having fun, they’re not going to have fun.

There are times when I think, I’m sort of bored with this part, I’m not getting as excited about it, I’m not having fun with it, and I can work on making it fun because it’s always up to me to make it fun. But if I decide for whatever reason that I don’t want to, I can just change it. Isn’t that brilliant?

So I tell my staff that too. I tell them that I want them to have fun at their job and I want them to come to me and let me know if they have ideas about how to make it more fun. I want us to all be looking for ways to make it more fun.

I find that to be a useful concept with my clients too. When they’re struggling with their goals or they’re overwhelmed with their life, a really valuable question, you guys, is what would make this more fun?

There are things in your life that I know feel heavy and overwhelming. And you think possibly, a part of you anyway, thinks it’s not appropriate to enjoy this. Having fun is not appropriate in this situation. And I just want to encourage you to question that. What if it’s always okay to have fun? Fun doesn’t have to mean a lack of respect. Fun doesn’t have to look like any certain thing. But if we’re not having fun, what’s the point of any of this? This is going to be fun.  It’s a really important value to me personally and in my business.

Value number two is a sentence that I learned from Marie Forleo, and actually decided to make this one of my values right before she came out with her book of the same title. And the sentence is, “Everything is figureoutable.”

I loved when I heard this from Marie because, obviously, figureoutable is a made-up word, but I’m all for a made-up word, especially one that is so powerful as figureoutable. Marie Forleo talks about this being something that her mother instilled in her. And by the way, I just started reading her book and I’m really enjoying it, so you might want to check out her book.

But her mother was always of the mindset that everything is figureoutable. She just figured out how to make things work. Her mother was an immigrant to this country and was a single mom for much of her life and really instilled that in Marie, that everything is figureoutable.

And when I look back on building my business, again, I heard that statement from Marie Forleo very early on as I was building my business and I remember so many times getting frustrated and overwhelmed and stuck, especially with technology and my brain starting to say this is so hard, I’m not a tech person, I don’t want to be.  I didn’t start this so that I could learn to get really good at website coding or integrating payment gateways with web pages or any of the things that I was having to figure out how to do, or editing videos, right.

I would tell myself, why do I have to learn this? And then I would just remind myself, but everything is figureoutable. Not only is everything figureoutable, I’ve discovered that pretty much everything is YouTubeable or Googleable. It’s not even hard to figure out.

Somebody else has already done all of the things I’m trying to do in my business. They haven’t done them in my way exactly, but they’ve done them enough that they know how and then they made a video and put it on YouTube.

I’m not sure what motivates people to put videos of everything on YouTube, but it seems like they do, literally. I remember a couple of years ago, we had gotten a new stroller. It was a really nice BOB Double Jogger stroller. It’s a beautiful stroller, but I went to put it in the car and I could not remember how to collapse it.

And, of course, I didn’t have any of the instructions and I was late and I needed to go somewhere, and then I remembered, hey, everything is figureoutable. And I went to YouTube and I looked it up, and sure enough, someone had made a video on how to collapse the BOB Double Jogger, the exact one that I had, and it was so cute because you could tell they were talking to one of their parents in the video.

They were like, “Okay mom, so here’s how it works.” It was a video they’d made for their mother who is probably going to be watching the kids. But thankfully, they put it on YouTube, they made it public, boom, I got my answer. And that is literally how I built so much of my business because even all the software that I was trying to learn, the software companies would do their best to give me all the answers, but sometimes I couldn’t figure it out from that, but I could always eventually go to YouTube.

Now, this is not just applicable to people building a business. What if you believed this in your life, that everything is figureoutable? What I love about that statement is it gives you a lot of hope and it keeps things open-ended without having to know the answers yet. It doesn’t mean that I know how. It doesn’t always mean that it’s right there on YouTube.

Sometimes, I had to go to bed and let my head get clear and then come back and look at it again the next day or a few days later, and then I made progress. Sometimes there are things in my life that are challenging and overwhelming and I can’t know right now how they’re going to go. But I do believe that everything is figureoutable.

And when our brains want to run away with worry and concern and overwhelm and but what about this and then what will we do about that and then what if this happens, I can really turn that part of my brain off by just answering it, everything is figureoutable. And if we have that problem, then when we get there, we will figure it out. Everything’s figureoutable, my friends. I’m telling you, it’s a life-changing thought, thanks to Marie Forleo.

Okay, the third value that we have in our business, Jody Moore Coaching, that I want to offer you today is we make things better. So, again, as I started my business, I didn’t consciously realize it, but that was a value that was driving me was this desire to make things better. So it started first and foremost with wanting to make myself better, with wanting to be more confident, wanting to show up more as a mother, as a wife, as a woman in the world, and just wanting to be better myself.

From there, it turned to me wanting to help other people feel better, to help other people be better in any way that they wanted to be better. Now, I do want to caveat this with we are all amazing and good and there is actually no better that we have to seek for. There’s just what feels better. There’s what we’re going to look back on and have a better story about and feel better about.

But your worth is already set. It’s really important to me that you know that. So when I say I’m helping make you better, I don’t mean better in that you’re literally better than you are. I just mean you’re going to like where you end up better than you will like it otherwise.

Now, the other way that this value really served me in the past and still serves me is if I know that I’m always going to make things better, then it means it doesn’t have to be perfect right now. So my first ever website was pretty sad looking. It just was. It wasn’t great. I’m not a graphic designer. I’m not a web designer. And I’m not a coder, so I used programs that helped me sort of work around all of that. And it was fine.

It wasn’t terrible, it just wasn’t very good. It was fine. But you know what, I knew that it was going to do the job of getting my message to some people and helping some people find me who might want some help. And then, one day, I would go and make it better.

And so I did. I put it out there and I just eventually made it better. I started blogging even though I wasn’t a great writer, and I knew, if I kept going, I would get better. And then I started a podcast, even though I had no idea how to be a podcaster, but I knew that the more I did it, it would continue to get better.

The work that I’m doing with my clients is to help them, again, show up better for themselves and their family and who they want to be in the world. My parents really instilled this in me. When I was younger, they said, “We always want to leave some place better than we found it,” so maybe we throw away a piece of trash as we leave the beach, or certainly not only do we clean up any mess that we made, but we try to leave it just a little bit better.

And I love the idea that we can leave this Earth and we can leave something behind that will help make it a little bit better of a place for the generations after that. And you look at all the people that came before us that did that. I can’t imagine living in a world where we didn’t have all of the conveniences that we have today, all of those people that worked hard to figure out how to have the world that we have today left it better for us.

And we have the opportunity to leave it better, in some way, for the generations behind us. I feel like each generation in some ways gets a little bit smarter, a little bit more intuitive, a little bit wiser, and then in other ways, we also become a little bit more selfish or negative or bad in some ways. That is how the world is going is everything is sort of expanding and there’s opposition on all things. So the good is increasing and the bad and the evil is increasing as well as it’s supposed to expand.

But what are contributing? We can do our part to make it a little bit better. So again, I offer this to my employees. I love so much when they come to me and say, you know what I think would make this part of the business better is if we tried this. You know what I think would provide a better experience to our clients is this. Or do you know what I think would make this easier or more effective in some way.

I love, love, love when they bring their ideas, they take initiative to help make the business better, especially make their portion of the business better. And I am in full support of them bettering themselves through their goals and whatever they’re working on. I really want to contribute to that. And I try to live that value in my own life as well. My husband and I both want to be people and we want our company to be something that helps to make things better.

So, there you go, those are our three values. I hope that you will consider if you think that one or all three of them is useful in your own life and they certainly don’t have to be these though. What are the things that drive you? What are the beliefs that you have that you just take for granted because they’re so natural for you that you don’ even realize that not everybody thinks that way, not everybody approaches life that way? Maybe you want to have some values like that in your family.

Maybe you have a business and you want to have some values like that in your business. Maybe you just want to have them for yourself individually. But I think that this exercise that I did this year of really just slowing it down and figuring out what were the things that drive me to get to where I’m at now has been really useful for me and then gives me language by which to communicate with the people around me.

So, I hope you found that useful. I love you guys. I will be back with more episodes. I have some amazing guests that I’ve interviewed that will be coming on the podcast very soon, so make sure you’re subscribed. You’re not going to want to miss all the goodness happening this fall. I will talk to you next time. 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.