282. The Spirit

I’m Jody Moore and this is episode 282: The Spirit.

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 episode 282. I’m excited to talk to you today about this topic of the Spirit. It’s one that I get questions about a lot. I’ve never done a podcast on it. So I have a lot of thoughts and sort of questions for you to ponder and things to share with you today on this topic. I’m very excited to teach it to you.

I want to make sure that you don’t wait any longer to go get your annual pass to Be Bold. If you’re not already in there and you need to get a pass, 2021 is a coming. And I think it should be your year. I think it should be the year that everything starts working out for you and that you start achieving the goals you’ve been wanting to achieve. And that you stop feeling so frustrated, and overwhelmed, and irritated. And you start feeling more confident, and fulfilled, and successful.

And I can help you do all of that my friends, I promise you, because I’ve helped thousands of individuals do that. Not only that but we have a lot of fun. So I do want to say and I know a lot of you listening to this are already in Be Bold. And I’m so excited for 2021 in Be Bold because I’m changing up a few things, not a lot of things, but a couple of things. The main thing is the way I teach the monthly courses. They are going to be workshops. So we are going to do some work together. I’m going to teach all of them live. We’re going to spend 90 minutes together once a month.

Come on, you can carve out 90 minutes to sit down and do some deep dive personal development. So maybe you just want to be less frustrated. Maybe you just want to be more confident. Maybe you’re just curious about this work, or maybe you have big goals that you haven’t been able to achieve. I promise you the reason why is not because you don’t know what to do or because you’ve never done it before. It’s because you need to develop yourself.

I’m constantly trying to develop myself you guys, because I know to achieve the next level goals that I’m constantly setting for myself, I can’t do it without developing myself. I can’t do it in a way that I’m willing to anyway. I’m not going to suffer my way to my goals. I’m not going to punish myself. I’m not going to white knuckle and burn out and overly effort myself. That’s not the way I want to achieve things in my life. So you should come with me is all I’m saying.

So go to jodymoore.com/gift to get the annual pass or to purchase it for someone else. And you’ll get the Take Tuesday book as a bonus, which is super fun. I read it myself, the whole thing, even though I wrote it. I told my husband, “That was a good book. I’m just saying, that lady has some wisdom to share right there.”

Alright, so let’s talk about the Spirit. I want to just begin with some of the most common questions and things I get around this topic. So I teach that our thoughts create our feelings and that our thoughts are optional, they are within our control. Now, I get that we have a lot of them, although recently I researched it and I used to say we had 40,000 a day, that was the number I’d heard. And then I looked it up and I don’t think it’s quite that many according to the latest research.

The latest research says, I want to say closer to four or five thousand thoughts a day. But anyway it’s still a lot, it’s still a lot of thoughts. They come very quickly so it doesn’t feel like we have control over them because they just come into our minds so rapidly. But the truth is we do always have control over our thoughts. I as a member of the church love the principle of agency.

I was just on a walk with a friend of mine the other day who is finally in Be Bold. Come on, be bold. Anyway, so she’s been listening to coaching and she’s having all this insight now and saying how powerful it is. She’s like, “I can’t believe – I think you’re right, I think just listening to coaching is the best way.” But anyway she made the comment that, she’s like, “The more I think about all of this work and I think about agency, I think our agency might not have anything to do with the actions we take and what we do. But it might have to do with how we think.”

And I said, “Yeah, you think.” So I think it does include our actions as well. But a huge part of our agency that is highly under-talked about and maybe not even well understood even by me, is the agency to choose how we’re going to think, because that really triggers everything else. So anyway, once I teach people that it’s common for them to then say, “Okay, so if I get to choose my thoughts, and my thoughts create all my feelings, that means I’m choosing my feelings ultimately. So how does the Spirit work?”

Those of us who are members of the church, and even if you’re not a member of my church, you probably have some version of this, most people do. We call it the Holy Ghost, the Spirit, we believe that the Holy Ghost is the third member of the Godhead. It’s how Heavenly Father communicates with us. It happens through feelings, sometimes thoughts most of the time. But again you probably have some version of this higher power, maybe you call it the universe, maybe you just call it Spirit. I’ve heard it called all kinds of things.

How does that work? Does Heavenly Father give us a thought? Does he give us a feeling? Does he override our own ability to choose our thoughts, and our thoughts creating our feelings? How does that work? To which I always just say, “I don’t know”, because that’s the truth, I don’t know how God works. The model that I teach is meant to help us understand human behavior, not divine behavior. So I couldn’t claim to be an expert on that and feel good about myself if I did that.

However, I do have some thoughts and things I’m going to share with you today. Another question that I get a lot is, “Well, aren’t you afraid that if you really dive into all of this work that you’re going to lose your faith?” I get that one pretty commonly and I’m a little bit confused by it. I’m not really sure why strengthening your mental and emotional health, and understanding yourself, and navigating yourself in the world would equal losing your faith.

But I think what people mean by that is if I start owning that I’m in control of myself, and my results, and my future, then why would I need God? Is that what people are saying? I don’t know. Or maybe they think that they’re going to intellectualize themselves out of just believing in things that we can’t explain, maybe that’s it. I don’t know. But when people ask me that question, “Aren’t you afraid you’re going to lose your faith”, I’m always really honest in saying, “No, I’m not afraid of that at all.” Because I know that faith isn’t just something that I lose.

I mean it happens, people don’t realize that they’re thinking different thoughts and then feeling different feelings. But this model and these tools, if anything, strengthen my faith because they teach me that I’m allowed to believe anything I want to, literally anything I want to. And if it feels good to me and it creates the results I want in my life and it helps me live for my highest self then I’m all in, I’m believing anything. It doesn’t have to be proven, in fact people can come along and give me all the reasons why they think my faith is wrong, and people do.

There’s lots of people out there who will tell you why you shouldn’t follow the prophet or whatever. They’re just all kinds of ‘proof’ that maybe the church isn’t true or maybe God doesn’t exist, or maybe Christ was just a really inspirational man, but not the actual son of God. But I know I get to believe anything I want to and I don’t have to have any proof. And I know that believing in God, and Christ and his atoning sacrifice and all of that makes me a better person, makes my life better. So I just choose to believe it.

You can’t just lose your faith, you start thinking different thoughts and then you don’t feel the same emotions, faith goes in the feeling line. It’s an emotion that you feel. Just like you don’t just fall out of love with your husband. It’s not just something that happens to you. It’s something that your brain does and if you’re conscious about it then you can choose to fall out of love or choose to stay in love. The problem is most people are unconscious in these areas and then it feels like it just happened to us.

So the work that I do with people here in Be Bold especially when we’re coaching is designed to give you consciousness around one small portion of yourself and your life at a time because our brains operate unconsciously. When I say unconscious I think there are varying levels of unconsciousness. Somebody that’s in a comatose state or we might say when we’re asleep we are completely unconscious. So I’m not talking about that level of unconsciousness.

But throughout your day, the majority of your day when you’re awake if you’re healthy then your brain is operating in unconsciousness. What I mean by that is that your thoughts, feelings and behaviors just happen automatically without you having to stop and use your prefrontal cortex to make decisions and figure out how to do things. This is a beautiful thing, this is why we’re so efficient. This is why we’re able to do so much. This is why we’re the most intelligent species that exists on the planet.

So think about typing on your computer, you do that unconsciously. I mean you make a conscious decision to like I think I’ll sit down and answer some emails now or whatever it is you’re doing on your computer. But then your fingers just move across the keyboard. If you learned to type at one point, what you did is you trained yourself to be able to type unconsciously. And they move as you’re thinking of the words and they find the keys and they press them accordingly and create the words you want on the screen, that’s unconscious behavior. See what I’m saying?

It’s the same thing you do when you drive your car, after you learn how to drive, it requires consciousness at first. But then after you drive for a little while you don’t have to stop and think, now, what does red light mean again? I need to look it up, I forgot what red means. No, you don’t forget. It’s all unconscious. So most of our lives we want to be unconscious because of how much it saves us energy and how efficient it is.

But occasionally there are areas of our lives when we want to bring consciousness because we want to stop just operating on default if it’s not getting us the result that we want. That’s what coaching is, it’s consciousness. So you guys know that we only pick one small area and we dive in. And we only need to pick one small area because you’ll rewire that part of your brain and then your unconscious behavior will be really useful and it’ll serve you in lots of areas of your life.

So the reason we only pick one area is because we don’t want to overwhelm your brain or it will not participate with us. But also they say the way we do something is the way we do everything. How does it go? The way we do anything is the way we do everything, I think that’s how it goes. That is true to a certain extent because of our brain’s desire to operate unconsciously.

Okay, so I know it feels like I’ve digressed, but I’m going to bring it back around here. What I want to encourage in all of you and in my clients, and I’m trying to do for myself as well is to allow the unconsciousness and just ride it out when things are good. To not try to go conscious, to not try to analyze it and figure it out, because sometimes that kills the magic of it.

It’s what Abraham Hicks calls milking it. Abraham’s like, “When you’re feeling good and life is good, and everything is going your way, just milk it.” I love that term because it reminds me of a toddler having a tantrum and we’re like, “Look at him milking it for all he can.” And we tend to use it in a negative way, but it could be a positive thing. When you have those moments and they’re available all over, you guys. You have to get used to looking for them. But as you milk them they become more obvious to you and they have more of an impact on your life.

Let me give you an example what I mean. Yesterday, or no, a few days ago, I don’t know what day, anyway recently I walked out of my door because I decided to go for a jog. And I looked out across my neighborhood and we have a view from our front porch of some mountains and hills. And the sun was shining on the top of the mountain and there were some fog like clouds just hovering in the valley just below the mountaintop and it was beautiful.

I tried to take a picture on my phone and of course in the photo it never looks as amazing as it does in real life. So then I just put my phone away and I just paused for a moment and was like, “Wow, this is a beautiful moment.” I’m about to go for a jog, which I love doing. I have a little time to myself. There is a beautiful sunrise happening. I live in this beautiful neighborhood. I feel safe here. My legs work. I have tennis shoes that keep my feet protected while I jog. Life is good. Just a little moment like that, I just milk it.

Now, what I think ruins a moment like that is me trying to get in and figure out, no, wait, what am I thinking right now that’s making me feel this way. No, I’m not going to do any of that. I just allow the emotion to rise up within me, to overcome me. Maybe it makes me emotional even hopefully, that would mean it’s really powerful. And I just soak it in. I’m unconscious with it. Do you see what I’m saying?

Alright, so I want you to be unconscious more often with the good moments. And then I want you to develop consciousness, like I said, around one area at a time that is not getting you what you want in your life. And when I say not getting the result that might just be that you don’t feel good in the situation. You don’t like the way you show up. Or it might be a more obvious result that manifests in the form of money or something like that. So don’t analyze the good moments. Who cares?

You know what some of the most powerful amazing moments are? Those moments when we feel the Spirit. We don’t need to figure out how it works. We don’t need to know how it works, we really don’t. We can just be unconscious with it, and experience it, and enjoy that part of being a human.

So what does the Spirit feel like? How do you hear him? This is a campaign that our church launched within the last year, was how do you hear him? Because that’s a valuable question. Not how does it work, how does he cause you to think or feel the way you’re feeling? Just what does it feel like to you? What is that experience like for you? Here’s the truth, it’s really hard to define. It’s hard to put into words. And it’s not the same for all of us, we all have slight variances in terms of what we experience when we feel the Spirit.

But it’s one of those things that you just sort of know when you experience it. You can’t really explain it, you can’t really define it, but you kind of know when it happens. My teacher and mentor, Brooke Castillo who you guys have heard me talk about a lot, published a podcast episode called Fierce Love, if you want to go listen to it later. She said a lot of really amazing things about me in that podcast. It was, I’ll just tell you, equally amazing and uncomfortable to listen to because she was so lovely. She got really emotional talking about me.

And Brooke’s not an overly emotional person. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen her cry in the seven years I’ve known her. She’s a very loving, very compassionate person, but not highly emotional. Anyway she was emotional, it was very loving, very flattering things that she had to say about me. So that was an amazing experience. In fact I wake-up Thursday mornings and listen to the Life Coach School podcast because that’s when it comes out. And I was not expecting this at all. So there I am laying in my bed sobbing because it was so powerful and emotional.

And the uncomfortable part came from my brain being like, you’re not that great, she’s wrong. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. You really fooled her, you really pulled one over on her. So I had that happening. That was the uncomfortable part. But at any rate it felt like the Spirit. And as Brooke was describing her love for me and she was saying how much she appreciates my love for her. My thought was Brooke’s feeling the Spirit. She’s giving me the credit for it but that was really the Spirit.

And I know a lot of you who listen to both Brooke and myself, I got tons of lovely messages from all of you saying how cool that was. And you were very kind and lovely towards me, but you also recognized that was the Spirit, Brooke just felt the Spirit. Even my daughter who’s 13 years old was listening to it and as Brooke got emotional, Macy said, “That’s the Spirit.” And I said, “Yeah, it is.” So that’s what it feels like. It feels loving and peaceful. It feels overwhelming sometimes, the emotion of it because it’s so powerful, and it’s so calming, it feels so good it can move us to tears.

Now, I think this is true even when the Spirit is warning us of danger. There’s that kind of experience that’s really lovely which is like this is good, this is of God, this is amazing. But then there’s the Spirit that can sometimes give us cautionary awareness, if you will. But even that to me feels different than the kind of human fear that I create with my own brain.

So I had an experience when I was 19 years old, I was a freshman in college, I met a great guy, we started dating, we got engaged. Not too long after that we had like a typical young Mormon couple, we were going to get married, I think five months later or something. And so a couple of months into our engagement I just started feeling really unsettled about getting married. I just had kind of a lot of discomfort, sort of knots in my stomach, it just started to not feel right to me, is the best way I can describe it.

And that was really uncomfortable, that didn’t feel like this overwhelming crying, loving experience I had with Brooke in her podcast. It felt really uncomfortable and scary because I was afraid to break off this engagement. And we had already started making wedding plans and I did still love that guy and there wasn’t any obvious reason why I shouldn’t marry him.

So even though it was uncomfortable though, moving towards that felt right. It’s a different kind of discomfort. It’s sort of like the discomfort of courage. It’s like yeah, I’m afraid this is kind of hard, this is challenging but it feels like the right thing to do, it feels like it’s progressing me towards where I’m supposed to be.

And so I broke off that engagement which was a really hard thing for me to do at that point. I don’t know why, that guy that I was engaged to is, as far as I can tell on social media, a great guy and a great father, and has a lovely family. And it’s probably that I just wasn’t ready to get married. But here’s the thing, was that the Spirit telling me not to get married? Or was that just my own brain? You know what I say to that? That’s the wrong question. Who cares? I mean really, I don’t think it matters.

I think what matters is, was that a decision that I was making from my highest self? And remember, our highest selves are trusting, loving, full of faith, full of courage, full of abundance. Or was it a decision that I was making from my more human fear based self, like people pleasing, pretending, scarcity based, out of pride or out of shame? I don’t want to make decisions from that point, I want to make them from my highest self. And my highest self is what the Spirit feels like because we’re all created in God’s image, we all have some of that within us.

And so that’s my goal is to operate from that highest version of me. Do I create that or does the Lord provide that for me? I don’t think it matters, I really don’t.

I want to speak to scarcity for just a minute, this month in Be Bold we’re diving into abundance. And I want to just explain that I had this really interesting insight, especially when Brooke’s podcast came out where I started recognizing the connection between abundance and the Spirit. Because essentially what Brooke talked about was me getting her back at a time when she was being attacked. And I made a comment to some of my colleagues and friends who were nervous that Brooke’s reputation was on the line.

And I said, “If Brooke’s going down, I’m going down with her.” Now, I have zero judgment from my colleagues who were nervous, I really don’t. I didn’t at the time even, and I still don’t to this day. I don’t blame them at all. I am pretty good at abundance, it sort of comes naturally to me. I think it’s a gift that Heavenly Father gave me, that I don’t have a lot of fear. I don’t have a lot of scarcity. I’ve had to do work on it in certain areas of my life but I feel like it comes easier to me than it does to some people.

So the fact that they were afraid about Brooke’s reputation going down because their businesses relied a little bit on her reputation, makes perfect sense to me because if you’re in scarcity and you’re worried about how you’re going to sustain your business, or pay your bills, or support your family then you’re going to be worried. It’s not that those people aren’t loyal to Brooke, or they don’t love her. They just had scarcity, whereas I was in such a place of abundance, it doesn’t matter. If my whole business goes down the toilet then we’ll figure out something else.

I love Brooke, I stand by Brooke. So that was just one moment. And by the way, I’m terrible at it in many other areas. I’m terrible at being able to operate from my highest self. But in that one moment I was able to align with the Spirit, align with being loving, loyal, supportive and trusting because of my abundance. So all of these things help us hang out where the Spirit resides.

So I think understanding what it feels like to live from your highest self, which is the same as feeling the Spirit is a really worthwhile endeavor, because it is a confusing world that we live in. It’s easy to be confused.

Last week my family and I showed up to church and there was a gentleman outside with a vehicle parked right at the front doors, that was covered in stickers that said things like repent now, judgment is coming. And he was standing there outside the front doors telling everyone that we are going to hell, and that we need to repent, and that Jesus wants us to make a different choice basically. And he was very animated and dramatic. And he was talking to our children and it was a little bit scary. But anyway, then we walked into church.

Now, my seven year old, Oliver was sitting by me and he was a little bit nervous and had some questions, and rightfully so. And here’s what I think is interesting is some of the things that that gentleman was saying sound not entirely different from what we teach at church, especially to a seven year old. It was a different tone, there was different energy behind it. But some of his words weren’t all that different anyway than what we read in the Bible or the Book of Mormon.

But what I told Oliver is I said, “So that guy, he means well, he thinks he’s doing the right thing, he thinks he’s helping people. But when you were around him and when you heard what he was saying, did it feel like the way you feel when you think about Heavenly Father? Did it feel loving and peaceful? Did it feel good or did it feel scary?” And he said, “It felt scary.” And I said, “Yeah, that’s how you can tell the difference.”

Because like I said, even when the Spirit is trying to caution us it doesn’t feel violent. It doesn’t feel full of fear. It doesn’t feel full of scarcity. It doesn’t feel full of judgment. It feels peaceful. It feels the same way we feel when we serve out of a true desire to serve. It feels the same way we feel when we’re operating out of love, compassion and trust because the Spirit reaffirms for us that that is who we truly are. It’s true, that’s who you are. Even if you think you’re not very good at it, if you think that you have a lot of judgment, or you have a lot of scarcity, or you have a lot of whatever.

The reason none of those things feel good to you is because they’re not who you really are. And when you’re out of alignment with who you really are you feel ‘bad’. That’s it, that’s how we know who you really are. And the Spirit reaffirms to you when you’re getting closer, it’s like playing a game of hot and cold. You’re getting hotter, you’re getting hotter, you’re getting colder, you’re getting colder. The Spirit is there to guide us to our highest selves.

So there you go, I don’t know how it works, but I know that allowing myself to not try to figure out how it works, to just allow myself to remain unconscious in those areas of my life that are good, that I want to just keep, my brain already knows what to do. And my brain knows how to every now and then tap into that higher vibration that is the Spirit and that’s pretty fun. So spend some time allowing those emotions, don’t overanalyze them. I promise you that you have it within you to navigate yourself when you trust in the feelings that come when you’re operating from your highest self.

Alright you guys, have a beautiful, amazing rest of you 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.