247. Value Flow

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy episode 247: Value Flow

Welcome to Better Than Happy. I’m your host, Jody Moore. I’m a mother to four children. I’m a huge Taylor Swift fan, and I’m a master certified life coach. I’m here to teach you how to manage your brain and manage your emotions so that you can create a life that’s even better than happy. Are you ready? Let’s go.

Hey, how’s it going? Listen, before I get started, I want to make sure that you know that if you need any extra help right now, I want to make sure you are in Be Bold. I’m doing lots of extra calls in there and just making myself and my team extra available as we go through everything that we’re experiencing right now.

If you don’t have a coach, I don’t know why you’re not taking advantage of the help that’s available. You don’t have to do this alone. It’s so much easier when you have a community of people doing it together and a coach to help you. So, go check out Be Bold and get in there because we’re doing some good stuff.

All right. I want to talk about value flow today. I want to talk about value in many different ways, and I want to continue on with the conversation that I started in episode 240, which was entitled “Talking About Money” because in that episode, I talked about my teacher and mentor Brooke Castillo, and all the things that I’ve learned from her about ways to think about money, and how my relationship with money has changed as a result of learning from her.

One of the things I shared that I learned from her is that you make money by putting more value into the world. I talked about that a little bit. I talked about that in relation to my own journey and experience, and I got quite a few messages, some of them from people that were upset, some of them from people that were just curious and wanted to understand.

But I got enough feedback from people that I felt like, yeah, I can see why people misinterpreted what I meant to say, and that I may have even said it incorrectly. So, I want to own that, and I want to just add on to my thoughts about value flow. Basically, the question or concern that I got from people was, well, if it’s true that that money comes from putting value into the world, then how do you explain stay-at-home moms?

What you’re saying basically is that stay at home moms aren’t valuable because they don’t get paid, or people in these super amazing important jobs that maybe aren’t making top income amount. Are we saying that those jobs aren’t valuable?

Teachers, in my mind, should be making many times more than they make. I don’t know what a teacher makes nowadays and wherever that falls on the scale of income levels in a given state. I think they fall in the median range. But are we saying that their work is only medium importance because they make a medium level income, which is not at all what I meant, by the way.

When I say you make more money by putting more value into the world, let me expand on some of the other things that go along with that thought, which is first of all, there are a lot of ways to make more money. Putting more value into the world isn’t the only way to make money. You can make money by detracting value from the world, in my opinion, by harming the world in various ways.

The porn industry is one of the biggest industries and the highest revenue generating industries, as far as I know, in the world today, and that is not putting any value into the world. In fact, that is detracting value from the world, in my opinion. You can make money by stealing or conning people, or hacking into people’s lives or accounts, and you can make probably a lot of money that way. None of that puts value into the world.

So, I’m not saying that if you make money, it means you’re putting value into the world. I’m just saying that one of the best ways, I think, to make more money is to decide to put more value into the world. That’s the way that I choose to make money.

If I want to generate revenue, or I want to make more money, I find the most powerful way that aligns with my values and who I want to be, is to think, “All right, I’m going to have to put a lot more value out then, and I will make more money in that way. It’s not the only way.”

The second thing that I want to speak to is, again, back to the question that came in. It doesn’t imply, like I said, that whatever money you’re making equals the value you’re putting into the world. That may not be the case. There is a difference between marketplace value and moral value, or value systems, or goodness, if you will. That kind of value.

There’s also a huge difference between marketplace value and human value. So, I want to make sure and speak to both of those for just a minute.
First of all, making more money doesn’t make you a more valuable human in terms of human worth. It really doesn’t.

I think you guys probably all know that, but sometimes we still struggle to really understand that and really wrap our heads around it. Sometimes our subconscious brains believe otherwise, but human value is equal across the board. Every single human being on the planet is a value, period.

They were the moment they were. They continue to be until the moment they die. No matter what happens to them, no matter what they do, and in fact, even before they were born and after they die. Their value just is. As soon as God created them, they had unlimited incomprehensible value.

It doesn’t matter what you do. It doesn’t matter how hard you work. It doesn’t matter how many tasks you accomplish. It doesn’t matter how many children you raise, and it certainly doesn’t matter how much money you make. None of that increases or decreases your value as a human. That is first and foremost true.

Now, second of all, the things that we value as humans, the things that you value personally, I want you to keep and think about your value systems, but they’re not the same for all of us, and they don’t always align with marketplace value. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.

If you look at the fields and the industries that generate the most revenue, we can have opinions, and thoughts, and judgments about whether those things, and those people, and those careers should be paid what they’re paid or not. I don’t really know. I’m not really here to give you my opinion on that. I want you to have your own opinions on that, but it doesn’t always align with moral value or goodness in the way that we think of it.

But the market does indicate this is how much value there is here, and by the market, I just mean if you put something out there and people are willing to pay money for it, then you know it has marketplace value. I like to try to find things that have marketplace value that also align with my personal value system. That is who I choose to be. Not everybody chooses to live that way.

So, when I say I want to make more money by putting more value into the world, I mean I want to put moral goodness in the world and marketplace value, and I wish those things always perfectly aligned, but they don’t always. I have to find where my niche is, where I want to hang out in the world.

Now, adding on to that, if you’re someone who’s like, “Hey, I do good work, and I want to keep doing what I’m doing, but I’d like to make more money at it,” and maybe the marketplace doesn’t value it at the level that we wish it did or that we even think it should. Then I want you to try on the idea that you might have to think bigger. You might have to think different. I don’t even know if bigger is the right word.

You’re just going to have to think differently because maybe there is a way. Maybe there is a way that you can still do what you’re good, at and what you love, and what you know adds more value and goodness in the world, and figure out how to maximize it in the marketplace.

I like to tell myself, “No, money does grow on trees,” because I grew up thinking, “Money doesn’t grow on trees,” and I’m like, “Well, what if it does? What if it’s just easy to get money?” But also, I have to go in the backyard and gather that money. I got to go back and pick it off the tree. It’s not just going to land in my wallet. I have to do a little bit of work. I got to figure out how to go get it.

So, speaking of teachers, because I had a lot of people say what about nurses? What about teachers? What about stay at home moms? The coaching program that I offer now is what they call a membership, meaning people pay a monthly fee to come in, and learn from me, and take all my classes, and get coached by me.

They pay month-to-month, and if they want to just stay a month, they can. It’s $49, super cheap. Or if they want to stay three and a half years, Iike many people who have done, they can do that too. It’s what we call a membership model. Similar to a gym membership.

So, a membership model of business has a few things to figure out, let’s just say. It’s a little bit complicated. There’s a lot of moving parts, there’s a lot of tech, there’s a lot of marketing and sales intricacies that go along with it, and wanting to make sure that we take great care of our clients. There’s a huge customer service component. Anyway, there’s just a lot of moving parts to a membership.

Three and a half years ago, when I decided to offer a membership, I was like, “I need to go learn about memberships,” and I learned 90% of it from a podcast called The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. You can go check it out. It’s awesome. It’s run by a husband and wife, Shane and Jocelyn Sams, and they are schoolteachers, you all.

He is, or I should say was, a high school history teacher, I want to say, and she was an elementary school librarian, and they figured out that they have all kinds of lesson plans, and resources, and strategies, and tools, and knowledge as teachers that could help other teachers. So, they opened up memberships.

I haven’t listened to them for a little while, but at the time, when I was learning about memberships, she had a membership for elementary school librarians, and he had one for high school history teachers. They provided lesson plans, a community for one another to share, and they became millionaires through these memberships. In fact, they ended up leaving their teaching jobs because they were making so much money in this way.

Now, I’m not saying that you have to do that or need to do that. You don’t need to become a millionaire if you don’t want to. It doesn’t make you any better. It doesn’t make you any valuable, but if you want to make more money, maybe you have to figure out how to take the knowledge you have and leverage it in the way that the marketplace responds to.

Now, here’s the other point I want to make. Value is a flow. It flows in and out of our lives, and I’m going to talk about that more in just a minute, but some of you are thinking about it in a very linear way, and I want you to open yourself up to thinking about it more organically.

Again, we’ve got to think a little differently. We’ve got to think a little bigger. We can’t just think one plus one equals two. It’s very limiting to think that way. So, all of these women who were like, “I was kind of offended when you said that, that money comes from putting more value in the world because I’m a stay at home mom. I don’t make any money.”

I thought, “What are you talking about?” Of course, you make money. Of course, you have money. If you’re a stay at home mom, you have a way to buy groceries, and pay the mortgage, and support yourself financially. It might be that you’re married to somebody who works full time, but whatever the way is, you have a way to get money. You are earning that money.

Let’s just take what is the most common scenario probably, which is that you’re a stay-at-home mother, and your husband works and “supports the family”. But do you know what’s really true? That you and your husband together are taking care of those kids, and managing the house, and supporting the family.

You’ve just chosen to divide up the work in this way. You’ve chosen to divide it up where dad goes to work wherever he goes or whatever he does to make money, and you are at home with the kids, and you get them ready for school, and you help them when they get home, and whatever else it is that you do at home while your husband is not there. That’s how you’ve chosen to divide the jobs.

I want you to think about your family and your household as a business. I used to work in corporate America, and for the first half of my career there, I was in what would be considered the customer service side of the house. Customers would come along who needed help and had questions, and I was one of the people that helped them.

Now, I never said to myself, “Gosh, we’re not making any money here.” Even though I never collected anyone’s credit card number, or took payment, or took money for them, I knew that someone else was doing that. These customers and clients paid money to come into this business.

My job wasn’t to take their money. My job was to help them in these other ways, but overall, I’m part of this bigger picture and part of this business. Of course, we’re generating revenue. Of course, we’re making money, or else I wouldn’t have had a job. So, if you’re the stay-at-home mom, don’t tell yourself you don’t make money. Of course, you do.

You know what you make? 50% of whatever your spouse makes. That’s what you make. Now, you don’t have to divide it up like that. You can just think of it as your household money overall, but many of you think, “I don’t make any money.” You think that it’s his money. I can tell by the way you talk about it. You say, “I’m going to have to ask him for some money,” and maybe he thinks that too. Maybe he thinks it’s his money, and he’s the one making it, and he should be responsible for it.

But I just want to offer to you that you’re both missing the big picture here, which is that he couldn’t go to work and do the things he’s doing if you weren’t there taking care of the kids. If something happened to you, heaven forbid, then he would have to hire childcare or figure out a way to have somebody take care of the kids because you wouldn’t be there doing it, and that would be an added expense, or an added step, an added person, an added help needed.

State to state, it varies, but I’m just going to, for the sake of simplicity, say that in most states it’s probably 50%. When a marriage ends, the state says 50% goes to each party, and that’s 50% of maybe time that was spent in school. There’s all kinds of details they get worked in. So, how do we figure out what 50% even means?

But ultimately, you are making money if you’re a stay-at-home mom. You see what I’m saying? In some way, you’re generating revenue. I promise you. So, please stop thinking in such a linear, small way, you guys. I want you to think bigger about the value in your life. You have things coming into your life, value, much of it in the form of money, that you are creating. I promise you that. Don’t discredit yourself. Don’t disempower yourself by not owning that you’re creating that result.

Now, back to the flow of value. I like to think of it as a flow. I like to think that when I put goodness out, I get goodness in return, and I want to put out as much goodness as I can. Goodness that’s both moral goodness and marketplace value. The more I can put out, the more I get in return, but again, it’s not always linear.

I try to put a lot of amazing, awesome, useful, helpful tools out on this podcast. This is our 147th episode of when I really try to show up for you guys, but I don’t make a dime off of this podcast. In fact, it costs me money to produce this podcast and put it out for you guys, but I also have revenue coming into my life in other ways.

So, it doesn’t have to be an exact one-for-one exchange. I just know that when I put goodness out, goodness is going to come back, and I’m going to figure out how to go in the backyard and pick the money off the money tree, but I do also just have a lot of faith that putting goodness out means goodness will come back in my life, and goodness doesn’t always have to mean money either.

There’s a lot of other ways that goodness comes back into my life. I went to see Oprah last month, and she talked about the power of intention, and I wanted to share one of the stories she told with us because I thought it was so powerful. So, intention, meaning whatever you’re focused on, you’re going to create. She calls it intention, which is my version of what you think is going to end up in your result line, what you’re thinking and believing you’re going to create in your life.

So, have some faith, have some bigger picture views of your life and yourself, and be willing to show up and make it happen for yourself. She talked about it as a young girl. She had a pretty rough childhood, and she was raised in a lot of poverty, and abuse, and a lot of what we would say are terrible situations.

She talks about remembering being a young girl, going to a woman’s house who had some money, and she saw that woman’s house, and the woman had a bunch of nice cars in her driveway, and she thought, “That’s cool. I want that one day. I want to have some nice cars.”

Then she started looking around the yard, and she noticed a whole bunch of trees, really tall, beautiful trees surrounding the woman’s house. She had six beautiful, tall trees, and Oprah was like, “Wait a second. Forget about those cars. I don’t care about that. I want those trees. I want to have six tall, beautiful trees. One day in my life, I’m going to have that outside my house.” This is when she was a young girl.

So, Oprah then showed us a picture of the view from her kitchen window, and looking out the window, you could see six gorgeous, tall trees. She said, “There they are, you guys. There’s my trees that I envisioned when I was a little girl. I told myself I wanted those. I didn’t know how or when I was going to make it happen, but I set my intention to want them.”

Then she showed us a picture. I wish I had it, but she said she doesn’t publish it really anywhere. She said it was a picture from basically looking up towards the front of her house, but as you can imagine, Oprah has a pretty big front yard. It looked like at least an acre or so, and there’s a pathway up the middle of grass.

So, you can see the house at the end, but on either side are these huge forests full of trees. She said that she started counting the trees one day, and then decided that there were too many to count, so she hired a tree counter, because she has money, and that tree counter came back, and there were like, I don’t remember the number, but over 3,000 trees. She said, “I set my intention to have six trees, but God had a bigger plan for me.”

Oh, my gosh. It just gave me the chills hearing her tell that story. You set your intention, and then you go put goodness out into the world believing that you can create whatever you want, and sometimes God has even bigger plans for you.

Now, another thing that people confuse sometimes my messaging, because I do love entrepreneurship. I love being a business owner. I love helping other people who feel called to start businesses as well. Even before I was a business owner, I loved being a working woman and a working mom, but sometimes people think that what I’m saying is that I think it’s better to work or be a business owner than be a stay-at-home mom, which could not be further from the truth.

I don’t think either one is better. I don’t think either one is more righteous or more noble. I don’t think either one is more respectable or less respectable. I don’t think either one is harder or easier either. I think that they are both   50/50 experiences. I think that you need to listen to what you feel called to do, and you might feel called to different situations at different times in your life.

I had an experience when I was working in corporate. I had two little kids. I was pretty overwhelmed with it because we lived in Southern California, and I commuted in Southern California traffic every day to and from work with my little babies in the car because we had to get in quite a bit of traffic to get to their childcare.

The woman who watched them, she lived a little ways away, and I was just exhausted from sitting in Orange County traffic every day for an hour and a half with two toddlers. I thought, “Maybe I shouldn’t be doing this. Should I not be working?” I was driving on the 605 Freeway, for those of you who live in Orange County area, L.A. area.

I was on the 605 headed to my kids’ childcare one morning after a stressful morning, and it had rained earlier that morning. Then all of a sudden, there was a rainbow. It seemed like that rainbow went from one side of the 605 Freeway to the other. It was just there waiting for us to drive underneath it.

I remember thinking that I just felt this tremendous peace in my heart, and I thought, “I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be right now. Maybe this won’t always be. Maybe I will need to be at home with my kids one day, or maybe this won’t last forever, but right now, I’m doing exactly what the Lord wants me to be doing.” It was just so peaceful. I think you have to assess it. I still assess it all the time. Am I doing what I should be doing in my life? Am I doing what I feel called to and what I think the Lord wants of me?

I want to share one other story, which is right after I had my first child, and I went on maternity leave from my corporate job, and I was home with him, and just trying to adjust to being a mother, which for me, was a super challenging adjustment. I was really overwhelmed.

My baby had acid reflux, and so he cried a lot, and he didn’t sleep well, and I was struggling with motherhood in general. Then you have all the hormones and everything happening on top of it. I remember thinking, “Wait a second. Then I’m going to go back to work, and I’m going to have to get myself dressed and out the door every day. I’m going to have to get this baby to childcare.” How am I possibly going to do all of that?

I knew I was going to miss that baby, and being away from him was going to be so hard, and I was probably going to feel guilty. I just thought, “How am I ever going to go back to work?” I talked one day to my sweet sister-in-law, Jenny Anderson, who lived right by me at the time. She has been both a working mom, a stay-at-home mom, and everything in between.

I said, “Jenny, how am I going to do it? It just seems so hard to go back to work, and leave my baby, and get out the door. I don’t know how I’m going to do it,” and I’ll never forget. She said the most beautiful thing to me. She said, “Jody, you know what? It is hard. It’s hard working and having kids, and you know what else is hard? Staying at home and having kids. It’s hard either way, but we just do it because we love our kids, and we don’t have a choice. We’ve got to show up for them, and you’ll do it. It will be hard, but you’ll do it, and it would be hard either way.”

And that is absolutely what I believe. I believe that being a working mom is hard, and I believe that being a stay-at-home mom is hard, and they’re both amazing and wonderful in many ways as well. Value is a flow, you guys. It flows into our lives, and it flows out of our lives.

When we cling tightly to things, we’re seeing some of this right now, we’re seeing some scarcity. People are starting to cling tight. Like we got to buy up all the groceries, and buy up all the toilet paper, and hold on to things just in case. When we hold on to things, we stop the flow of value.

You have to let stuff go, or you plug up the hole. You kink the hose. Again, I was coaching a woman the other day who said, “I have all these things that I feel like I should get rid of in my house like clutter that we don’t really use, I don’t really want, but I’m afraid to get rid of it because what if I need it? I feel like I could donate it somewhere, but they probably won’t get top value out of it when they go to resell it. So, that’s a waste.”

I said, “You’re stopping the flow. Send things out into the world. What’s a waste is it sitting in your house gathering dust, not being used for its purpose. Whether it gets money exchanged for it or not, let’s send it out into the world. Let’s hope somebody else uses it. Let’s hope that thing goes to someone who wants it and needs it.”

Let’s not stop the flow of value. When we tighten up, and restrict, and hold on to things, we don’t make room for things to come in. So, send all your goodness out into the world, whatever way that is that you do that, whether that be at home with your family right now, or it be at a job, or a business, or at a volunteer thing that you’re doing, or whatever you’re doing, put value out. Let material things go when you no longer need them, and trust that you will always have exactly what you need.

My brother served his mission in Russia several years ago, and he said, “This whole toilet paper thing is hilarious. This is how it was.” He was in the Ukraine, I should say. He said, “In the Ukraine, you never could buy toilet paper. They never had it in the stores. You had one or two rolls maybe that you could find, and that’s all you had. Miraculously, when those were gone, you found another one or two rolls, and you always had toilet paper even though there was no toilet paper to be found. This is just how we lived, and we never stressed about it. We never worried about it. It’s just the way it went.”

So, I like to trust that I will always have what I need and let things go. Make room for stuff to come into your life by letting things go. All right, you guys, I love you so much. Have a beautiful rest of your week, and I’ll see you next time.

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.