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I recently had the good fortune of talking to some high school seniors at a Mission in Life prep class recently, and I had them write anonymous questions for that session. And to be honest, their questions aren’t that different from the questions that we have as adults, so I thought I’d bring them to the podcast.
Nobody would disagree that this has been a tough year, so I’m really hoping that you’ll share this episode with the youth in your life who might be struggling right now. I had a great time with these kids, and whatever is going on in your life, I’m sure there’s something in here for you and your loved ones too.
Join me on the podcast this week as I answer questions from high school kids. I’m sharing why we have the ability to create whatever we want in this world, how to deal with conflict, negative thoughts, making decisions, and why no matter how hard something feels in this moment, everything works out in the end.
I’m so excited to announce the launch of the Better Than Happy Bootcamp. If you’re a fan of the podcast and you want to start taking the concepts I share on the podcast and applying them in your life, this is the place to be. We will meet virtually for five days in a row, January 25 – 29, taking a deep dive into a specific topic on each day. You’ll get the chance to hang out, ask questions, and be coached live on whatever is coming up for you in your life. And if you can’t make it live one day, I will even be providing lifetime access to a replay of every workshop. And the best part: All of this is available for just $19! Click here to sign up. It’s going to be so much fun and I can’t wait to welcome you.
If you don’t currently have a life coach, I would be so honored to be yours. I created a virtual coaching program called Be Bold that I want to invite you to join me in. 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, including my new upcoming course, Lighten up for the Holidays. If you’re ready to take this work to the 10X level, click here to check it out!
What You’ll Learn on this Episode:
- Why you can create whatever you want in this lifetime, even if the world around you doesn’t look the way you thought it would.
- How to deal with other people not liking you, or not getting along with others.
- What you can do if your friends are questioning their faith.
- How to reframe “important” decisions so that they’re easier to make.
- What you can do to develop the habit of positive thinking.
- Why I know that everything works out in the end.
Mentioned on the Show:
- When you’re ready to take what you’re learning on the podcast to the 10X level, then come check out Be Bold.
- If you’re a coach who is already certified through The Life Coach School, I want to help you take your coaching to the next level. Interested? Get on the waitlist here.
- Follow me on Instagram!
- Grab the Podcast Roadmap!
- Letter to Me by Brad Paisley
I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, episode 286: Questions from High School Kids.
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.
Hello everybody, welcome to the podcast, 286. I have a fun episode in store for you today. So, I was fortunate enough to get to go speak to the high school seniors in our stake. Our stake does a college and life prep program where they meet a couple times a month, and I was fortunate enough to get to hang out with them. It was so much fun.
One of the things that happened is I asked them to write questions on note cards and pass them up to me after I taught them the model and talked about a bunch of things. But I didn’t have time to answer very many questions because I ran out of time.
And so, I thought let’s answer them here on the podcast, not just for those kids. Those kids probably don’t listen to my podcast at all. But for other kids listening and for adults, because they had really good questions. The questions that they asked me were really not very different from the questions that I get from people of all ages. I will say this is going to be a great episode though for your youth. A lot of you reach out asking me for good episodes for teenagers. This will be a good one, of course.
Really, it’s all the same. We just have different circumstances by which our brains become challenged. The circumstances change, but I find that working with youth and the types of struggles they have are really not that different from what we have as adults.
So, I’m excited to share with you both the brilliant questions and then some answers to them and a little bit about what we discussed that evening at that fireside.
Now, I also want to announce a program that I’ve been working on that is ready to go. And I want to invite you to join me. It’s called Better Than Happy Bootcamp. So, if you are a fan of this podcast, maybe you’re brand new to it but you like what you’re hearing or maybe you’ve been listening for a long time, then I want to invite you to join me for Better Than Happy Bootcamp.
It’s going to be amazing. I’m so excited about it. I’ve been thinking about it for a while now and working on the details of it. And we’re going to spend basically five days in a row together, you and I, virtually of course. We will learn a deep dive on a different topic each day. And I will be taking your questions. If you’re one of those more shy introverted people, you want to just type a question, you’ll be able to do that.
If you’re up for it and you want to come on camera and talk to me about what’s going on in your life, I’m going to help you apply what you’re learning right here on the podcast to your real life. And we’re going to have a lot of fun doing it.
Like I said, five days in a row, five workshops, one per day. And if you can’t come to them all live, that’s okay because you’re going to get replays of all of them. Maybe you come to some live, or maybe you can’t come to any live. That’s alright. There’s a whole beautiful webpage laid out for you where you will have lifetime access to all of these workshops.
All of it is just $19. That’s it. 19 bucks. So, there’s more details about this at jodymoore.com. If you just go to the website, you’ll see the link right there for Better Than Happy Bootcamp, really big right on the homepage.
But I want to encourage you to go sign up for it. It’s happening the last week of January. Those of you that are in Be Bold already, I’m going to put the replays of all of these workshops in Be Bold, so you don’t need to sign up and pay additional, unless you want to. But for everybody else that just is a fan of the podcast, you’re the ones really that I created this for. So, give it a try. Again, go to jodymoore.com and let’s hang out together, okay. Let’s take everything to the next level for 2021.
Okay, so I want to tell you just a little bit about what we talked about that evening when I went and spoke with those youth. It happened to be right before thanksgiving, right after the prophet had given us his gratitude challenge where we as members of the church participated, a lot of us anyway, if you wanted to in just being more grateful, focusing on what you’re grateful for and sharing it with others on social media or whatever way you wanted to share it. And that was a pretty cool thing.
But I talked to them about why that is such an important thing to do and why I believe it can really be healing, like the prophet described. So we talked about how gratitude is a feeling and therefore it’s created by our thoughts. I actually taught them the whole model and they were great, and we did just a couple of examples but they responded really well to it. And some of the things that came up for them were things like how do I be excited about my future when everything that I thought was going to be happening right now, my senior year of high school is not happening?
How do I not get discouraged about the future? And what I told them was, “You’re allowed to believe, and I highly recommend that you choose to believe that you’re going to have everything you want.” So this darling girl asked me this question and I said to her, “What are the things that you want?” And she said, “Well, I want to graduate high school. I want to go to college. I want to get married. I want to be a mom”, all that stuff. And I said, “That’s awesome.”
So what you really want it sounds like is to have new experiences, to gain knowledge, to grow, to fall in love, to love other people, to become the next version of yourself. That’s what we really want. And what I told her is like, “Let’s just decide that you’re for sure going to have all of that. And then let’s try letting go of the details in terms of what it’s going to look like and what the timelines are and how that’s all going to play out.” Because that’s where we get ourselves in trouble, so I totally want you to still look forward to what you really want you guys.
We had an experience I’ll just share where we planned a trip to Hawaii for our family. We thought that it was okay to travel there and that we were going to be able to. And we decided we felt good about it so we planned a trip. And then when it came right down to it that was wrong for us. I’m not saying you can’t get to Hawaii, but for us it just didn’t work out. There were too many variables that we weren’t able to get arrangements. So at the last minute, a couple of days before we were supposed to go, we cancelled our trip to Hawaii.
Now, I was like, “My kids are going to be so devastated.” But they weren’t actually, we were all a little disappointed but they weren’t that disappointed. So you might say that’s because 2020 has been such a crazy year that we’ve stopped looking forward to things, we’ve stopped getting excited about things. Or you might say that’s because we’ve learned how to become more resilient. I think it can be some of both and maybe different things for different people.
But I think that we’ve learned how to sort of not take for granted that just because we make a plan that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. And one of the things that I hope my kids are learning, I know certainly I have learned it because I’ve intentionally practiced it, is I can still have what I want even if the things on the outside don’t look the way I thought they would.
I don’t actually have to go to Hawaii to have an amazing week. It’s easier to do when I’m in Hawaii, nothing wrong with going to Hawaii to make that happen. But if what I wanted was a week of relaxation, enjoyment, fun, entertainment, I can have all that no matter what. But if I cling tight to what that’s going to look like, sometimes I’m setting myself up for disappointment.
Now, the second thing I want to add to that that I told these kids is that it’s also okay to be disappointed. Disappointment is totally understandable with what you’re going through right now, where you thought you were going to be in your senior year of school, going to the prom, doing all the things that you get to do your senior year. And that’s not happening and you’ve been thinking about that your whole life, you’re going to want to be disappointed.
But disappointment isn’t really a big deal. It doesn’t even last that long. It’s not even that painful. What’s painful is resisting it. What’s painful is all the dirty pain that we create afterwards of self-pity, and frustration, and resentment, and blame, and shame, and all of that drama is what’s really painful. So be disappointed and then relax into the reality that you still can have all of the things that you want. You just might not get it in the way you thought it was going to come, or in the timing you thought it was going to come, or in the packaging you thought it was going to come.
But what if it’s going to be even better than what you planned? That’s what I believe. I believe that when I relax and open up to the direction that life is trying to take me, and still allow myself to get excited about all the amazing-ness that lies ahead in my future. But I let go of how, I let go of when, I let go of my tight knit plan, then what life brings me is even more amazing than what I would have created on my own.
Final thing I want to tell you that I taught them before I go to these questions is we always talk about what would Jesus do? Don’t they make little wristbands or something that say WWJD What Would Jesus Do? It’s a great question to ask because we can’t go wrong following in his footsteps. But I want you to ask yourself, what would Jesus think? And those kids are so smart.
I asked them, “Do you think that if Christ were here on Earth right now and He was a senior in high school, and He was experiencing what you guys are, where He’s at home doing online school, He’s not participating in sports and all the things you thought you were going to be doing. Do you think that He would think thoughts that would cause him to feel disappointed?” And they all kind of said, “Yeah, I think He probably would”, which I agree.
And then I said, “Do you think that He would be really worried and fearful about the future, or resentful that some bureaucrat somewhere made a poor choice, or blaming, or upset about what’s going on?” And they all agreed, no, that doesn’t sound very much like Christ as we know Him. So I love to ask myself that question, what would Christ think in this situation, because it’s always a useful way for me to think about life when I can get there.
So I’m going to go to their questions here and read these and just answer them. So first question I got was, “How to deal with people who you think don’t like you?” So here’s the thing my friend, other people not liking you is not a problem. So when you say, “How do I deal with someone who I think doesn’t like me?” The answer is you don’t deal with them, you deal with your thought, I don’t think they like me. That is not a very useful thought to walk around thinking even if it’s true. Even if someone told you, “Hey, I talked to that person and they said, “I don’t really like her very much.””
It’s still not a useful thought for you to walk around thinking because as human beings we naturally want everyone to like us. So when you walk around thinking that person doesn’t like me, your brain thinks, well, that’s a problem. How are we going to solve it? How are we going to deal with this person? But it’s not really a problem. A lot of people don’t like me. I mean some people anyway, a lot of people do like me but there are definitely some people who just don’t like me. And there are going to be some people who don’t like you and that’s okay, you’re not for everyone.
So you don’t deal with other people not liking you, you deal with your own brain thinking this is really a problem. You remind your brain, it’s okay, I’m not for everyone. Sometimes I don’t even like me. Sometimes there are other people that I don’t really care for either. So I get it. But at your core you are a loving, compassionate, connected, wanting to connect with others person. And that is why it feels bad to you to walk around thinking she doesn’t like me or he doesn’t like me.
So what I recommend is you redirect your brain to it’s okay because I like me. And there are many other people who do like me. You guys, this is so important to know. Let’s say that you’re in a room with 25 people. And one person doesn’t like you and the other 24 do. What is your brain going to fixate on? The one person who doesn’t like you, our brains are wired this way. Our brains think that that is dangerous and so that feels the most relevant.
When you remind your brain it’s not dangerous, it’s fine for that person to not like me, I’m going to focus on the 24 that do then you’re going to feel so much better and you’re going to stop trying to alter yourself to please other people. You’re going to stop trying to manipulate the way other people feel, just make peace with people not liking you.
So this one says, “My friend is having doubts about the church and doesn’t know if he wants to go on a mission. What can I do to help him?” what I recommend you do friend, is just love your friend no matter what. Here’s the thing, everybody in this life is on a journey. And a part of our journey is a spiritual development.
And I wish that that development just looked like climbing stairs and we go from sunbeams learning to sing, I’m a child of God up to the next class in primary where we learn to choose the rite, up to the next class, and the next class. And then we get baptized and then we start going to activity days and then we become youth. And we just keep climbing the stairs one step at a time, wouldn’t that be lovely? So that’s not really how it goes, at least not for everybody.
Part of our spiritual development has to be questioning and sometimes even doubting. And then deciding what we’re going to do with that question and that doubt. And some of it is a personal development of learning not to people please and learning to really explore what you want to believe and who you want to be in the world. And how to operate from integrity and how to access truth, and sometimes that means a period of stepping away from the church even.
We’re not serving the mission if you’re not able to do it from an authentic place, if you’re just doing it to try to keep your parents happy or something like that. So what you can do is love your friend, so that just means be there to listen, be a safe place for them to explore their thoughts. Sometimes as we’re having doubts, especially about church or something, we need a place to be able to speak it out and hear ourselves out loud.
And a lot of times that’s hard to find because we find that everybody has an agenda for us of wanting to convince us to think a certain way. We pick up on that very quickly even if people try to hide it. And often it doesn’t help the situation.
So I would say don’t think it’s your job to help him. It’s just your job to love him and to work on your own testimony and being who you want to be because your example of loving your friend no matter what, even if he chooses not to go on a mission or not to go to church, is more powerful than anything you could say or do. And he will figure things out on his own timeline. You have to put some faith in that.
This next question says, “How can I make an important decision?” Well, I think the thought, this is a very important decision is not really very useful in most situations. If we put that into a model and if you don’t know the model go get the podcast roadmap at jodymoore.com/map and it’ll walk you through the episodes you need to listen to, to get onboard and you’ll learn the model.
But basically if we ask ourselves, when I think the thought this is an important decision, how do I feel? Most of us don’t feel peaceful, and confident, and calm and empowered when we think that thought. Most of us feel nervous because behind the thought, this is an important decision is a lot of other thoughts like so I better get it right. I don’t want to mess it up. This could have a long lasting effect on my life, something like that. So I really don’t ever tell myself this is an important decision. I just don’t find it to be useful.
If it feels good to you, if it feels empowering and it gives you the emotions that you want to have as you make a decision then great, keep it. But if it doesn’t, know that it’s just a thought. Did you know we can never define important or unimportant decisions? It’s just a matter of opinion. So what I like to remind myself is, listen, there is no right answer, there is no wrong answer here. I’m just going to make the decision based on the information that I have. And by the way, that’s a process I recommend. Gather a reasonable amount of information. You need some information.
Let’s say you’re trying to decide which college to go to for example, you want to gather some information about each school, whatever you decide is a reasonable amount. For me it’s very little, I like to ask one or two people, “What do you think?” And get a couple of opinions and that’s about the extent of my research. I’m not saying that’s good, that’s just how I tend to do it. Some people go the opposite extreme, they research tons. They create whole spreadsheets. I think somewhere in the middle is probably healthiest, gather a reasonable amount of information.
Then make a decision and take it to the Lord, say a prayer, ask Him. Now, here’s what happens in my experience mostly. I take a decision to the Lord and I feel nothing, which to me means the Lord is saying, “I don’t know. You decide.” Whatever decision you make you will either make it right or make it wrong by the way you will think about it. More important than making the best decision is confidently owning your decision. I want to say that one more time, the more you confidently own your decision the more right that decision will be for you.
It’s not about the decision, it’s about the way you think about it which is why instead of asking myself how do I make this important decision, I ask myself, what seems like the best thing to do? Because there is no right and there is no wrong. There will be pros and cons either way. So what do I want to do? What am I going to commit to? Let’s go.
Right, next question, “When dealing with stress, anxiety or depression how do you overcome the ‘thought stage’?” And then they said, “Depressed or stressful thoughts.” Well, I don’t think of it as a thought stage that I’m trying to overcome. When you have stress, anxiety or depression, those emotions are coming from thoughts but it’s not like a stage that we move through and then we’re done. We’re never going to stop having thoughts. So the first thing that I recommend we do is to learn how to feel feelings. So we have to learn how to process depression, process anxiety, process stress.
If you have a mother or somebody who’s in Be Bold there’s a whole bunch of courses in there that teach you how to do that. There is also a bunch of podcasts on that topic which on the podcast roadmap it will direct you to those. So listen to the things I teach about that. But when you learn how to feel feelings then we don’t have to be in a rush to change the thoughts or get to a new model necessarily. We can slowly navigate our way there, which I find to be much more effective for people in most cases, especially with really strong emotions like depression and anxiety.
If I could tell you how to just change them right away I for sure would, but I haven’t really figured that out. I haven’t really found that to work for people. I’ve found that it’s a process. It doesn’t have to be a long process, but it begins with not being stressed that you’re stressed. It begins with not being anxious and depressed, that you have anxiety and depression. Do you see what I’m saying? Step one, make a little bit of peace around where you are and then we get leverage to start thinking different thoughts.
But really what I teach is really it’s just about awareness. When you become aware of the thoughts creating your emotions, and you start recognizing that while they feel like just true observations of the world, they’re not. They’re choices, they’re optional. Then you get so much control over yourself and your emotions.
Alright, let’s see. “How can I make a habit of having positive thoughts? And then how can I be more trusting that things that happen are meant to happen?” Okay, I love this question. So how can you make a habit of having more positive thoughts? Well, let’s think about it.
If we wanted to make a habit of let’s say brushing our teeth after lunch, I don’t really do that. I brush them in the morning and I brush them at night. Are you supposed to brush them after lunch? Probably. Anyway, if I wanted to make a habit of that, what would I need to do? Well, first I’d need to plan for it, so I’d need to, if I’m not going to be home, I’d need to pack a toothbrush and toothpaste with me. I’d need to find a way to remind myself. Maybe I’d choose to set an alarm on my phone every day at 1 o’clock or whatever is after lunch.
I’d need to be willing to just do it even though I probably wouldn’t want to some days. I’d probably want to say, “Well, I don’t have time, it doesn’t really matter, it’s not that important.” So in other words I would practice doing it over and over again until it became a habit. And that is the same way you develop the habit of thinking positive thoughts. So maybe you want to have a practice like a gratitude journal. It’s a really good thing to do because it helps you develop the habit of positive thoughts.
Or I like journaling personally. I think it’s the easiest way to develop the habit of positive thinking because as you’re writing things down you’re really consciously choosing your thoughts. Or maybe it’s just a conversation.
Maybe you have a friend and you’re like, “Hey, every day let’s call each other up and instead of what we normally do in conversations, which is to complain about the people and things around us and how we wish the world were different. We’re going to just spend two minutes saying all the things we love about our lives right now, or about ourselves, or about each other, or about the people in our families or in our world.” So you need some kind of a routine like that where you practice thinking positive thoughts.
And I promise you, it will become much, much easier as you do this. And the second part of your question, “How can I be more trusting that things that happen are meant to happen?” It’s the same thing. You just choose to try believing that. This gets easier I think as you get older. So for all of you young people listening, it’s totally natural that right now that feels challenging because the younger you are the harder it is to see further ahead. You just have a different perspective I should say.
Like there’s a Brad Paisley song and he says, “At 17 it’s hard to see past Friday night.” Which I love that, I remember feeling that way in high school, the most important thing is what are we going to do this weekend? So as you get older and you get more perspective you are able to look back on your life and realize that was such a blessing that that thing happened, even though at the time it felt so tragic and heartbreaking. So just trust that everything is going to work out in the end and if it’s not worked out yet, it’s not the end.
And try looking for examples of that in your life because if you try you will find them. I like to start with something that’s really a blessing in my life. And then I like to work my way backwards to something that at one point happened, that if that hadn’t happened this blessing wouldn’t occur, like my kids for example. So I have four kids, they’re amazing, I love them. I think I have the best kids on the planet. Sorry to all the rest of you, but that’s just how I feel. So they’re such a blessing in my life.
So if I work backwards, well, those kids, I have those kids, those specific kids because I married Jake. And I’m married to Jake because I met Jake when I was 29 and we started dating and then we got married when I was 30 and had kids. And before I met Jake there were other boys that I dated who I thought I was really in love with. And in fact some of those boys really broke my heart. And I don’t know if I’ve experienced heartache as painful as that.
But it turns out, if those boys hadn’t broken my heart I wouldn’t have gone on to keep dating and met Jake and married Jake. And then I wouldn’t have these kids that I have. Do you see what I’m saying? So anything that’s a blessing in your life, if you work your way backwards to the tragic event, if that hadn’t happened you wouldn’t end up where you are. You can find it. So that’s an exercise you can do, but overall you just practice believing that.
Let’s see. “How do you keep a positive attitude towards a sibling you don’t always get along with?” I think that it’s really important first of all that you are keeping a positive attitude towards yourself as well. When you don’t get along with that sibling it’s important that you not beat yourself up. You have to be really compassionate and patient with yourself because as you do that it will be easier to be compassionate and patient with your sibling.
But here’s the second part I’ll say is as human beings we match one another sort of emotionally. So if somebody’s upset with me, my default is to match them and be upset with them. If somebody’s mad at me, I want to get mad at them. If somebody’s a little grump, I want to be grumpy around them. So it works both ways. If somebody’s really nice and kind, and interested, and curious about us, we become nice, and kind, and curious about them as well. So that’s our default setting.
So in the sibling dynamic, it’s really easy to match one another. My sibling’s upset with me, I get upset with them. So you can practice just not matching, it’s totally available to you. You just have to be aware of what’s going on. So when you recognize, he was grumpy and then I got grumpy that he’s grumpy. But he could be grumpy and I don’t have to be. I can be totally fine with it. I could be like maybe I want to have some empathy or sympathy for him. Gosh, it must not feel good to be feeling grumpy. But I’m not going to be grumpy about his grumpiness.
And maybe you want to remove yourself from being around them because that makes it easier. I’m okay with all of that. But I love the idea of you practicing not matching. Practice it with siblings, because you’re going to have relationships your whole life. You’re going to have roommates. You’re going to have a spouse. You’re going to have coworkers and bosses that this is really good practice with. Practice just not matching.
I literally just say to myself, so that person’s mad but I’m not mad that they’re mad. What do I want to feel then? I just want to feel at peace. I just want to feel compassion. Okay, he’s mad. It’s okay that he’s mad. I don’t have to get mad that he’s mad. See what I’m saying?
Okay, this is kind of a little bit similar but I’m going to speak to it because it’s slightly different. It says, “How do I continue a relationship with a family member who’s making bad decisions?” And again you guys, you have to decide at what point do you need a boundary? And a boundary might be an official like, “Hey, listen, if you do this thing, I remove myself from the room because it’s not safe for me to be around you.” Or it might just be something more internal that you recognize like I can only handle being around that person this amount of time.
Or there are certain topics that I don’t really want to discuss with them because it gets too heated, it’s too hard for me to manage my emotions. So you’re allowed to navigate yourself in order to regulate your emotions. And I highly recommend that you do that, that you make decisions that way. You are responsible 100% for your own emotions. And a lot of people don’t do that, they try to control the emotions of the people outside them and they sabotage themselves in the process. So please don’t do that.
But the second part to that is that you want to make sure that you refrain from judgment for your family member. People make bad choices, they do. It’s just the way of it, they’re going to. We’re all going to at times. So it’s not my responsibility to judge other people’s decisions, other than to the point where I protect myself or other people if necessary. But beyond that it’s really none of my business. I don’t know what it’s like for them. I don’t know what they’re going through. I don’t even know if that’s a bad decision for them necessarily.
So I guess what I’m saying is stay out of their business emotionally and otherwise. But stay in your own business which means decide what you want that relationship to look like.
Okay, the last question here says, “How can we move on from the guilt of past mistakes?” Every human being on the planet is going to make ‘mistakes’. It’s not a mistake that you made a mistake. Here’s what I mean. Heavenly Father didn’t send us here to Earth with a bunch of commandments and say, “Keep the commandments”, and cross His fingers and hope that we would all do it all the time. He knew we wouldn’t do it. It doesn’t mean He doesn’t want us to do it, but He knew that we wouldn’t.
That is the plan, just like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, He said, “Don’t partake of the fruit.” And then they did, which was the plan. So this is a really complicated topic. It’s still hard for me sometimes to wrap my head around. But the short answer is that there is zero upside to you feeling guilty about something that happened in the past. Unless it’s something that you’re still engaging with and you have a conflict between your behavior and your beliefs.
I love the idea that cognitive dissonance is a thing that we experience as humans. If we believe something but we behave differently than what we believe then we’re going to feel bad, that’s cognitive dissonance. So for example if I believe that smoking is bad for me and it’s not what somebody who’s healthy does and I view myself as a healthy person. And then I start smoking then I’m going to feel some dissonance. It’s going to feel uncomfortable to me. And sometimes we say, “I feel guilty for smoking because I know I shouldn’t.”
Or you can apply to this eating ice-cream and brownies in excess, anything. That guilt says, “Hey, listen, my actions aren’t lining up with what I believe.” And it’s going to feel uncomfortable enough that we’re either going to modify our belief systems or modify our actions to try to get out of that pain.” So in other words I might start rationalizing, you know what, one cigarette a day is not that big of a deal. Or everybody eats brownies and ice-cream every night, a lot of people eat a lot worse than this, it’s not that big of a deal.
That’s one way we can sometimes change our belief systems, or I might change my belief system to be like I’m just not a healthy person. I’m just not the kind of person who is going to live a long life or is going to feel good. I’m just not that kind of person. See how we’re changing our beliefs to match our action? So when you say, “I feel guilty for past mistakes, well, don’t just operate on default, because your brain, it’s a lot easier actually to rationalize your beliefs and change your beliefs, even if like I said, it’s your beliefs about yourself, than to change your behavior.
But that might not necessarily be serving you. In most cases that doesn’t serve us. So what we want to do is go, ha, you know what’s true? Is that I still think that this is behavior isn’t healthy in this way. And I’m a healthy person. And I’m a complete human being who sometimes does a great job operating at my highest and sometimes doesn’t. Ha, good to know, that’s what that was. That was me not operating from my highest self because I’m a human, because I’m not always able to override the part of my brain that just seeks pleasure and wants to avoid pain.
That’s okay; it doesn’t mean I’m not a healthy person. It doesn’t mean I’m not a good person, a righteous person, whatever it is. It just means that I’m a human. Sometimes I do it well, sometimes I’m a mess. That’s it. And then we stop thinking about the past my friend, you can’t go back in time and change the past. So there’s zero upside to ruminating over it. Let’s start thinking about who you want to be today, who you want to be in the future.
Let’s say you did do something that you feel like you need to make right. Well, go make it right then. Let’s think about what we can do now. What are we going to do? Who are we going to be now? Not who were we in the past.
You guys, I love you. I have so much respect for our youth today. I know this is a tough year. I guess it’s only been a year, it feels longer. It might be tough for a little while longer here still. I don’t know what next year’s going to look like.
But here’s what I do know. You’re going to have all of the things in your life that you desire. You are going to have amazing magical experiences. You are going to have love, connection; you’re also going to have heartbreak. You’re going to have challenge. All of that I want for you because that is how you are going to become the person that you are capable of becoming. You’re going to have so much fun, so much excitement, so much joy, so much success, there’s so much of that in store for you.
And I don’t know what that will look like and I don’t know what the timelines are. But I know it will be more amazing than anything you or I could have dreamed up. And I hope that you’ll trust me on that.
Alright, you guys, have an amazing rest of your week. I’ll see you next time. Bye bye.
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.
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