304. The Power of Quitting

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, episode 304: The Power of Quitting.

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. What’s happening? Welcome to 304^th episode, the 304^th episode I should say of Better Than Happy. I mustn’t train your brain, because I’m thinking about Train Your Brain. Train Your Brain is the five day workshop that’s coming up 10 days from the day that this podcast airs. So I don’t know when you’re listening to it but Train Your Brain is happening starting on May 24^th, and you’re not going to want to miss it.

If you like what I teach you here on the podcast, you find it to be interesting, you find it to be helpful in your life, then Train Your Brain will 10x that experience for you. I know that because we did a similar event to this back in January, we called it Better Than Happy Bootcamp, it was similar although I’m going to be teaching a little bit different things this time. And it was the most powerful experience. So many people told me that they felt transformed at the end which is awesome because that’s my goal is to help you feel transformed by this work.

So it’s only 19 bucks and it’s five days of an opportunity to come and learn, and interact, and get help, and learn from what you hear others asking which is really, really powerful because your brain can develop right along with the brain of the person getting coached. So don’t miss it, jodymoore.com/brain.

And if you can’t be there live, that’s okay because everything will get posted and a lot of people catch it that way, they’re not able to come live, which reminds me we’re going to give it to all of you in Be Bold, automatically. So it’s just part of your membership that you’re already paying, so you don’t have to worry about signing up if you’re in Be Bold, it will just automatically get posted in there where we post all the other content.

But if you’re not in Be Bold and you just kind of want to check out what coaching is like. Maybe you’re wondering if coaching is for you, or it sounds weird, or you just like what you’re learning on the podcast, you want to go to that next level, Train Your Brain, jodymoore.com/brain.

Okay, so today I want to talk to you about the power of quitting. I know this sounds weird because usually that word ‘quit’ has a negative association. Most of us hear that word and we think of it as us sort of failing at something. In fact when I think of the word ‘failure’ I think of quitting because when I first started building my business I remember thinking this. I remember thinking well, okay, I don’t know exactly what I’m even trying to achieve here.

I’ll just say that is not my strength, thinking about the future and thinking about what I’m trying to achieve. And I’m trying to work on that, I think it will be useful if I was better at that. But I did know that I wanted to make a big impact in people’s mental and emotional health. And I especially wanted to focus my impact on serving members of my church, people who shared my same faith that would want to combine the power of mental and emotional health, the way I teach it with their values. So anyway, that’s what I knew.

And I thought how am I going to make a big impact? What if I fail? And what I realized is that if I just don’t quit I can’t possibly fail. I didn’t have a date or a deadline for when I needed to achieve something by it. I didn’t even have an exact end goal. It wasn’t like in the beginning I knew exactly what it would look like, I just was like, “If I just keep going there’s no way I don’t reach more people and make more of an impact in the world.” So anyway back to quitting, that was in my brain, as long as I don’t quit I’m good.

But what I want to talk to you about today is the power of quitting. I want to talk to you about how quitting can serve you and how quitting has helped me tremendously in my life. So before I dive into that I want you to think about quitting as something that happens first in your mind. In fact a lot of quitting is a mental process.

Now, sometimes then it shows up in our actions, sometimes we literally quit doing something that we were doing or we stop, maybe we quit a relationship let’s say. So we stop talking to that person, seeing that person, living with that person maybe, interacting with that person, being intimate with that person. That might show up in our action. But it happens first in our heads. And that’s true with anything we quit.

If I decide, if I’m taking a class and I decide to quit that class, it happens first in our brains, like I just don’t think I want to keep going to that class. I don’t want to keep learning. I don’t want to keep doing whatever the work is or the assignments are. I quit.

So that part of quitting in your brain is the main part I want to focus on today because I want to recommend that doing that with almost every area of your life can be useful if you find that you’re operating in a lot of obligation, or self-pity, or resentment. Because the feelings of obligation, self-pity and resentment come from thoughts like I have to do this, poor me. My life is so hard. And I want you to know that that’s a big lie. I mean I should say some of it’s a lie. Maybe it’s true that people have expectations of you, probably is true. But that doesn’t mean you have to do it.

The part that’s not true, when we say, “These people just expect it of me.” Underneath that is therefore I have to do it. I have to meet other people’s expectations. And sometimes when I’m coaching someone and I show this to them, they’ll say, “Well, my family just all expects me to make dinner every night.” “Okay, so does that mean you have to?” And they’ll say, “Well, if I don’t they’re all going to be upset, or they’re going to be disappointed, or they’re going to be mad.” And I say, “So does that mean you have to?”

The part that’s the lie is the part of your brain that says you’re responsible for how they feel. And you should do things in order to control their emotions. So if you feel a lot of resentment, or obligation, or self-pity then you might want to consider in your brain just quitting all of it. Here’s what I mean. I did this work myself when I first found coaching years ago because this was me, I had tons of obligation, self-pity, resentment.

Now, here’s the thing I loved my kids and my husband and I still do. But it wasn’t that I didn’t want to be with them. It wasn’t that I resented them so much as I resented my whole life. I was just like, okay, what’s the matter with me? Because I want to be the mom here, I want to be married to this man. I want to have this life but I don’t like many of the tasks that I have to do in this role.

I just had this idea that as the mom I have to make dinner. And I have to whatever, I have to do all the motherly things which many of which were things that my mother did so well that I really appreciated that she did. That’s why I felt like I have to do that now. And so I was in lots of obligation, self-pity, resentment. So what I did is in my head I just quit all of it.

I just asked myself first of all, okay, you know what? You don’t have to be here in this situation, do you really want to? You don’t even have to stay here. You could just get up and leave. You don’t even have to tell them you’re leaving. You could just walk out the door. You could go get an apartment somewhere. It’s up to you whether you’re going to tell your family where you are or not, you could just leave and abandon your family. People actually do this sometimes.

So I started from there, I literally quit everything in my head. And I asked myself, do you want to do that? And here’s the thing, I gave myself fair chance to consider it. Now, that one, I didn’t really have to consider very long. There was not really any part of me that was like, “Yeah, I kind of do want to.” I was like, “No, I don’t want to do that at all. I don’t want to abandon my family, I don’t want to leave. I want to be with them. I want to live with them. I want to stay here in this home.” Okay, alright. So I took that part back.

Then I said, “Well, let’s look at the rest of your life.” This was at a time when I had just two kids and they were both little, they were less than a year and half apart. So I was managing and raising two toddlers you might say. I say that because people like to argue with me about what age is a toddler, what’s a baby, what’s a child. But anyway they were pretty little.

And I remember thinking, I hate giving them baths every night, getting them both in the bath and getting their hair washed, and then getting them out and getting them dressed, and then there’s all the clothes and the mess. And somebody’s cold and somebody’s crying and just the whole thing, my back hurts leaning over the tub. And I was just like, “I hate giving them baths every night.” So I told myself, “Okay, let’s quit. You know what? We don’t have to, we really don’t. We don’t have to bathe those kids.”

Let’s just consider our options. Do we want to hire someone else to come in and bathe them? Do we want to try to get our husband to bathe them? Do we want to bathe them less frequently? And ultimately what it came around to is yeah, I don’t want to bathe them every night. And I think they’ll be fine if we only bathe them every three or four days. In fact they’re happy. They don’t actually like taking a bath every night. So you know what? There’s a little part of me that’s like that’s not what good mothers do. I mean kids get dirty. They’re going to get sick.

There’s all that chatter around like listen brain, we’re not going to operate out of this obligation, and resentment, and hate our lives, it’s not necessary. I don’t want to bathe them every night. I’m not going to. They’re going to be fine. We’re going to bathe them every three or four days or whatever, less frequently. That’s what I decided I wanted to do. I didn’t want to hire someone. Now, again part of my brain was like, “We can’t afford to hire someone, are you ridiculous?” And I was just like, “Listen brain, stop. We’re quitting everything right now.”

We could quit paying some other bill and just hire someone instead. Do you want to do that? No. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to keep paying my bills and bathing my own children. But you have to give, like I said, you have to give it fair space. There’s ways that I could find somebody that might do it for free. Maybe I could ask someone to serve me in this way. Again, maybe I could get my husband. Ultimately that’s what I decided. I want to bathe them, just once or twice a week instead of every night.

I did that with all areas of my life that I was feeling stuck and obligated. There were some things that I completely changed. I quit making dinner as frequently. I gave myself permission to have alternative ways for us to get dinner, to get takeout, to have simpler dinners, to have cold cereal for dinner sometimes because I really just hated making dinner. And I was like, “Okay, I don’t want to do that. I’m not going to do that. I’m going to find a different solution.” In my brain I just quit all of it.

At one point I remember even realizing wait a second we don’t even have to have dinner every night. This whole idea that you eat in the morning, and then you eat around noon, and then you eat at 6 o’clock at night, somebody just made that up at some point. We don’t have to do that. I noticed that my toddlers didn’t ever want to eat dinner. They wanted to snack in the afternoon and then they weren’t really hungry and they never liked what I made for dinner.

And oftentimes my husband who was working in corporate at the time was eating a big lunch out and came home, was like, “I’m not really that hungry.” I realized we don’t even have to have dinner. We can do this any way we want to. We could have a snack right before bed. And again I’m not telling you that you just go to unhealthy habits or that you just start living your life in a way that’s going to create other problems and not serve you.

But do you see how if you mentally quit all of it. And then you one at a time take back the pieces that you want. You’re going to create the life that you want to live instead of the life that someone else told you to live the life that you just sort of got from society or you haven’t consciously chosen and consciously thought about, just in your mind quit all of it. And then take back the pieces you want.

My guess is you’re going to take back 80% of what you’re already doing. But that 20% is the magic, the 20% that you realize I don’t want to do this, or I don’t want to do it in this way, or I don’t want to do it to this level of frequency. And I don’t have to. There’s a better, easier, more appropriate way for me to live my life. What a huge blessing. So that’s the first thing that quitting does is it releases you from the obligation, the self-pity, the resentment and the unconsciousness that came from all of that, or that was driving all of that I should say.

Now, the second thing that quitting again, in your mind, don’t literally leave your family unless that’s really what you decide. But in your mind quit all of it. The second thing that does is it gets you out of stagnation. So maybe you have a situation that isn’t necessarily generating self-pity, resentment, obligation for you but you’re just feeling kind of stuck. I feel like anything we do should get better every time we do it. It should get a little bit better, we should become innovative.

It’s natural for us as human beings once we’ve done something multiple times to just keep repeating it. The brain actually loves that because it’s like, hey, good news, we don’t have to use the prefrontal cortex. We don’t have to do much critical thinking. We’ll just rinse and repeat what we’ve already done. And that can be very useful in a lot of ways. That can make us very efficient, but you know there are times when you realize this thing is kind of stagnant. We need to improve it, or I want to improve it, or maybe I’m sort of bored with it in some way.

Or I just know we could make it better but we’re not thinking about it in the fresh way that would have been necessary for us to innovate and improve this thing. So what you do is you just quit all of it in your mind.

So let’s use by way of example, I’m just going to pick girl’s camp because girls camp is something that our Stake does the most amazing job of. Seriously, I went to girls camp a couple of years ago, first time in this Stake and first time since I was a young woman just a few years ago. And I was like, “What? This is amazing.” And girls camp was amazing when I was a young woman too. But they’ve done such a good job of innovating it.

But let’s just say that you’re in charge of girls camp. And you’re sitting down to plan it, a great way to approach it, and you just apply this to any project you’re over is just to quit all of it. In other words if we were starting from scratch today, if we were going to create girls camp from the ground up and let’s forget everything we’ve already done. Or let’s just say we don’t have to do anything that we’ve already done in the past.

We don’t want to forget it because the benefit of doing this is that you’re not actually starting from scratch. You’re not actually brand new. You have done it. So you know a lot more, you have experience. You know what to expect. You know some things that work and some things that don’t work. So you just want to be like, “Okay, if we don’t have to do any of the things we’ve done before, if we were just starting from scratch with the knowledge we have, what would we want to do? How would we want to structure girls camp?”

And you just take it back piece by piece. Would we want to manage the girls the way that we do? And would we want to break them up in terms of who they camp with, and who leads them, and what activities they do, and how the food works, all of it? The place we go to, the location we go to, would we want to go there if we were just starting over, is that the best way? Would we want to keep it the same length of time? Would we even want to do girls camp, is the first question.

So when you begin by just quitting all of it, you start from scratch, my guess is you’re going to take back 80% of what you’ve been doing because I bet you, majority of it’s working really well. But there’s that 20% that if you really get creative and go, “Wait, if we didn’t have to do it that way, would we still, or is there another way? Could we make it easier? Could we make it more fun? Could we make it more effective?” Then that’s where the magic happens. That’s where the innovation happens.

I think this is a powerful thing to do in your marriage starting from do I want to be married to this person? I know a lot of people are afraid to go there in their heads. They’re afraid to quit their marriage in their head. I personally think it’s a really healthy thing to do, because if you really don’t want to be married to that person, you not acknowledging that, doesn’t make it not true. Does that make sense? Did I use a triple negative? What I’m saying is us not being willing to look at what’s going on and how we’re feeling doesn’t mean we’re not still feeling that way.

I think you get more leverage over making space for it and allowing yourself, again it doesn’t mean that you file for a divorce or leave your spouse. But in your brain you remind yourself that you really don’t have to stay in this marriage. Do you want to? And I don’t believe there’s any right or wrong reason for wanting to. If your reason is just, you know what? Financially it makes sense for us to stay together, I’m okay with that. If you’re reason is for the kids, I think that’s a perfectly fine reason. Any reason that you want is fine.

And maybe you have a different reason, it may be your goal is to eventually have what you think is a more noble reason, alright, that’s fine too. We can keep working on it. But I just want you to own that it is your choice. Here’s the thing you guys, we all have agency. We do get to choose what we’re going to think, how we’re going to feel, and how we’re going to show up, what we’re going to do. We do.

Whether we acknowledge that agency or not is up to us. Whether we really consciously utilize our agency or we just sort of on default see where we end up next, that’s up to us. And we all do some of both. But what I recommend to get yourself out of feeling stuck, or again, resentful or obligated is to acknowledge your own agency and then to start making conscious choices. So it might be that you just decide I want to stay in this marriage even though it’s challenging, if it’s challenging. For some of you it is.

Even though it’s challenging I want to stay here for now because I’m afraid to leave, or because that would be too messy, or for the kids or what have you. At least you’re owning that you’re choosing to stay in the marriage. Do you see how that’s more empowering than I have to be with this guy? Because you really don’t have to, that’s a lie. We want to own the truth. And then start taking back the other parts too. Remember, we quit all of it.

So you don’t have to sleep in the same bed as your spouse. You don’t have to have sex with your spouse. You don’t have to go to work and share your money with your spouse. Actually there might be laws about that. Even so, you don’t have to follow the law. You don’t have to make dinner. You don’t have to raise the kids or whatever it is that you’re doing. You don’t have to do any of it. What do you want to do? What other solutions can you find?

Again, this isn’t to say that you won’t probably choose some things just because your spouse prefers it and you don’t care for it or it doesn’t matter to you. But own that you want to do the thing that your spouse requests. And if you don’t then we need to have a more honest dialog first with ourselves and then with our spouse, because resentment and self-pity is on us. We create that for ourselves by not owning our agency, and not acknowledging the truth, and not being emotionally mature enough to have conversations, to set our lives up the way that we want.

The other thing I love about just quitting all of it in your mind is it helps you examine your reasons why you do things. What’s the old story? I don’t know where it comes from but there is a story about a woman who every time she cooks a roast she cuts it in half and puts it in two separate pans and then puts it in the oven. And one day her child asked her, “Mom, why do you do that?” And she says, “I don’t know, that’s just what my mom always did.”

And so the daughter goes to grandma and says, “Why do we cut the roast in half before we cook it?” And grandma says, “I don’t know, that’s just what my mom always did.” And so she goes to great-grandma and says, “Why do we cut the roast in half and put it in two separate pans?” And great-grandma says, “Because I didn’t have a pan big enough to cook the whole roast.”

So if we’re just doing things and we don’t know our reason, or we haven’t stopped to examine our reason why, sometimes we end up in a situation like that which is maybe that was necessary for great-grandma but the world is different today. And my situation is different. I have a bigger oven and a bigger pan. I don’t need to cut the roast in half. There are a lot of things actually in our life that we just inherited many of which serve us really well, but a handful of which don’t make sense in the world we’re in today, even if they might have made sense for previous generations.

So you want to stop and examine your reasons why you’re doing things. The final thing I want to say about this topic is when I talk about quitting all of it in your mind, if you are struggling with depression or anxiety, and you’re having thoughts of quitting your life in some way, this is not what I’m talking about. I don’t want you to do this exercise if you’re driven by shame, or overwhelm, or depression.

Please go seek help from a professional if that is you, or just tell a loved one and have them help you find some help. That is not what I’m talking about that. That is just your brain malfunctioning. I’m talking about making decisions driven by love, love of yourself, love of your loved ones, an acknowledgement that we want to be emotionally mature, responsible adults who are accountable in taking ownership of our lives. That’s what this is about.

Alright you guys just go ahead and quit all of it in your mind. And I cannot wait to hear how this goes for you. This is such a powerful exercise. This is what helped me especially in my home life with my children, and my husband, and my family, it helped me create a much, much better life for myself. This is the reason that I don’t ever feel busy. This is the reason that I love the things that I do mostly. And if I don’t love them, I stop and I quit it all again and I do this exercise again and it’s so powerful.

So please do come to social media and share with me what happens for you, how this exercise goes. I’d love to hear what you discover because I know for me it’s been powerful to hear from other people the things that they quit because it helps me go, “Yeah, I could quit that.”

For example, jumping on trampolines, I don’t like jumping on the trampoline. It makes me feel very old. And after having four babies I feel like I’m going to wet my pants every time I do. And I’m afraid I’m going to hurt my back. And my kids always wanted me to and one day I realized I don’t have to jump on the trampoline. This sounds like a little thing but I don’t have to make that mean I don’t love my kids. I don’t have to make it mean I’m not a good mom or that I’m not spending quality time with them.

No, there’s plenty of things I can do with my kids that aren’t jumping on the trampoline. So little things like that, I’d love to hear those on Instagram. So either DM them to me or even better, come and share them in the comments of the posts that’s associated with this podcast. We also publish a post on Instagram every week. And I’d just love to hear what you’re working on, what you’re quitting. Alright, let’s all quit together.

Okay, you guys are awesome. Have a great week. I’ll be back to talk to you next week. 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.