553. What to Do When It’s Not Working

I noticed that when people are doing all the things they think they’re supposed to do, they’re taking the actions that they think are going to lead to the results they want. Maybe this is in your relationships. It’s how you’re parenting your kids. It’s how you’re interacting with your spouse. It’s in your business. All the strategies you’re executing, the advice you’re following. It might be with your health goals. It might be in any area. When you’re doing those things and you’re not getting the results in the timeline you thought you were going to, do you believe that means there’s something wrong with you or that this just won’t work for you? Or do you stop and acknowledge, oh yeah, this is how it goes for everyone. Things never work exactly the same in the same timeline for people. Everybody has ups and downs.

The difference between people who succeed and people who quit or walk away or fail is that the successful ones have tools and strategies for moving through the times when it’s not working, for keeping going and getting eventually the results that they want. People who don’t simply don’t have the tools or the bandwidth to stick with it. Today I’m going to give you three tools that will help you keep going when it feels like it’s just not working. Let’s go.

Welcome to Better Than Happy, the podcast where we transform our lives by transforming ourselves. My name is Jody Moore. In the decade-plus I’ve been working with clients as a Master Certified Coach, I’ve helped tens of thousands of people to become empowered. And from empowered, the things that seemed hard become trivial, and the things that seemed impossible become available, and suddenly, a whole new world of desire and possibility open up to you. And what do you do with that?

Well, that’s the question… what will you do? Let’s find out.

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Hey there everybody. Welcome to the podcast. I’m so delighted to be here talking with you today. I got to tell you that I recorded this episode a couple days ago from my home office and then I hit the road. I’m traveling a little bit this week for a business mastermind I’m in. And I realized that something went wrong with the mic and the audio was really bad. And so I’m recording this on my portable mic, which is still pretty decent quality, but a little bit different. That’s why I sound a little different today.

But I am excited to talk to you about this topic. I just talked to a group of entrepreneurs the other day about this topic. It’s been coming up in my mastermind with some of my peers. We’re all talking through this thing and I feel like it’s in the air right now. So I want to talk about what to do when it feels like it’s not working. And I want to give you some tools and strategies.

Now, before we dive into those three strategies, I want to take a step back and remind you about the nature of human behavior whenever we attempt something that is difficult or challenging. Okay? There are lots of different psychologists and behavioral scientists who have studied this and who present it in different ways. I’m going to give you my version of it that makes the most sense to me today, but I love thinking about this so that I can remember that, oh, this isn’t just me. This isn’t that this can’t work for me or that there’s something wrong with me. This is just the natural way of growing, evolving, gaining a skill or figuring something out.

Okay? Now, again, let me back up actually even one step more and say I want you to think about an area of your life where you could apply this to. Maybe you’re trying all the strategies from a parenting book that you read and you’re still not connecting with your child and your child is not behaving or it’s not making the impact you want to make. I see this happen in people’s personal relationships too with a spouse or friends. Of, no, I tried that. I said these things and I tried apologizing or I tried opening it up for conversation. I tried being more vulnerable and honest and it’s not working. They’re still mad at me, they won’t reply, they won’t connect with me, what have you, right?

Of course I hear this a lot with entrepreneurs building businesses. I’ve tried Facebook ads. I’ve tried posting online. I’ve tried sending emails. It’s not working, right? I hear this and have experienced this in all of these areas of my own life, of course, but especially with my health, right? I’m trying this strategy. I’m trying to eat right. I’m trying to process emotions instead of answering cravings and urges. It’s just not working. And what we mean by that is that we’re not getting the outside immediate result that we want, right? And we’ll talk more about that in a minute. But let me go back to these four stages I said that I want to walk through. There’s four stages and then there’s one surprise in the middle that we’ll talk about. But the first stage is what I like to call unconsciously incompetent.

Okay? So in this phase, we unconscious meaning in our prefrontal cortex aren’t consciously thinking about, so not fully aware of the things that we don’t even know. We don’t even know how much we don’t know. We don’t even know how bad we are at it. Maybe we know we’re bad at it. We know we don’t know how to do it. We know it seems it’s going to be complicated. But often it’s even more complicated and we’re even worse at it than what we consciously know. We are unconsciously incompetent, right? Now, you might think that this sounds like a terrible phase, but I actually think that this phase feels pretty good actually. Because we don’t even know how much we don’t know, we tend to have some optimism and some excitement maybe around trying things out.

There’s something that has propelled us into even wanting to try. And maybe that thing that propelled us was getting out of a lot of pain. Maybe we are really struggling or suffering or we have a problem we feel we need to solve. But with other things, it’s optimism and hope that maybe we can create a better result in our life. And maybe it’s even some of both, right? So unconsciously incompetent.

Now, the next phase we move into as soon as we start taking action, as soon as we start trying to execute strategies is we move into the consciously incompetent phase. Okay? So we go from being unconsciously incompetent to consciously incompetent. In other words, now I’m aware, I’m more aware anyway, of how difficult this task is going to be and just how bad I actually am at it and how far I have to go. So, I have a couple of young adult kids and so it wasn’t that long ago that they were learning to drive.

Right? So that unconsciously incompetent phase is when the child gets their driver’s permit and they are coming to you going, Mom, Dad, can we go for a drive? I want to practice driving. I’m ready to go, I want to drive. Okay? As soon as they start driving, even just a little bit usually, they move quickly into this consciously incompetent phase where they realize, oh, wow, there’s a lot of traffic laws that I don’t even understand. I hadn’t thought about these things before as a child passenger, right? I didn’t realize all the different rules about who has the right of way and all the things that there are to learn about the rules of the road. Even the car itself has so many more functions and options than they may have realized. And driving suddenly becomes something that they become consciously incompetent at. It’s not anything like Mario Kart they thought it was going to be, right?

And so this phase, when we move into it, doesn’t feel very good usually. It feels awful. It feels discouraging. It feels overwhelming. The brain wants to offer us all kinds of thoughts like, oh, what are you doing? This is going to be too hard. It’s going to take too long. Maybe we’re not going to be good at this. That type of thing, right? Now, between phase two consciously incompetent and phase three which I’ll talk about in a minute, we tend to often enter what I call the river of misery. Okay? So the river of misery is a fast moving, huge current river that feels you might drown. Right? And it’s worse than where you were before you even started this thing. Before you decided to dive in and try this thing, you might have, again, depending on the topic, you might have just been in a pond of misery, a little puddle of misery.

So, my kids, before they could learn to drive, were in a little puddle of misery, which was that they didn’t have as much freedom and flexibility. If they wanted to go somewhere, they had to ask one of us for a ride and we may or may not be able and willing to drive them where they want to go. So, this little puddle of misery is this whole, this isn’t ideal. Life could be a little bit better, I think. Maybe I want to learn to drive so that I could have more options in my life. But now we’re in the river of misery. This is when things are really hard. You’ve been trying things and quote unquote, it’s not working. Okay? So my kids had to do drives, a handful of drives with an instructor from their driver’s ed class. And depending on the instructor and depending on where they were in their skills of driving, those could be very painful. Sometimes my kids came home really feeling awful and upset. “I did terrible, Mom. The instructor was really mean.”

Sometimes they were emotional even and wanting to quit and really did not want to go drive the car after these experiences. Maybe this is where you are trying to be more open and honest with your spouse in the name of communicating better and it’s making it worse. He or she is more upset with you. You’re fighting more than you were now, more than you were before, right? Maybe you’re again, trying to build a business and instead of making money, you’re spending a bunch of money. You’re investing money on the software required or on marketing or on developing and growing yourself, training and coaching and you’re now not only not making money, you’re actually spending money on this thing. Again, sometimes with our health goals even, we might gain weight and we might even gain back more weight than we had before we started trying to lose weight. We might just feel awful. might be trying to change another marker that’s not related to weight, but we feel worse than we did before we started making the changes.

This is actually the reality of it. When you start going to the gym, you feel worse before you start feeling stronger and better, right? So this river of misery is a natural normal state that we go through multiple times usually in any process of change or in creating something especially the more difficult the thing is to achieve, the more times we may go through this type of a process. But if we keep moving through the river of misery, which again, I’m going to give you three tools to help you do in just a minute. But on the other side of the river of misery is dry land and that’s where we become now consciously competent. We go from consciously incompetent to consciously competent. Conscious meaning I still need to be using a good deal of my prefrontal cortex to do this thing. It requires that I focus.

So, as my kids got better at driving, right, they now could do it much more effectively and efficiently, but we couldn’t have the radio up too loud. We couldn’t have friends in the car yet. We couldn’t have big loud conversations going on. They needed to be able to focus. Required the prefrontal cortex to remember all the things they needed to remember to be safe and drive that car. Now, after driving for many, many years, we move into this phase of unconsciously competent, right? Not to say we don’t need to focus when we’re driving. We still do. We still want to minimize distractions and be safe. But a lot of it’s delegated to the unconscious part of the brain. You can do a lot of it. It feels on autopilot. Not completely unconscious, not while you’re sleeping, not when you’ve been drinking or something, right? But a good part of you just unconsciously knows what to do and so driving becomes much easier.

And so, that’s what I want to help you with today, my friends, because once you get through that river of misery, the consciously competent phase feels a lot better, right? It’s invigorating actually. It’s exciting and fun because you’re seeing small wins and your brain’s coming back online going, maybe I can do this, maybe I am going to be good at this. And it builds confidence knowing that you overcame something challenging and then of course that unconsciously competent phase is where things get a lot easier. So, how do we do it? How do we get through the river of misery? First thing I want you to try out is to separate out the math from the drama. Separate out your story or what you’re making it mean from the facts.

You guys know I’m going to start here. I always start here. If you’re thinking, oh, this again? The answer’s yeah, this again. You know why? Because this is the most powerful lever to keep you moving. The only thing you actually have to do to move through this process is keep going. That’s it. If you just keep going, you will move through it. The only way you fail is if you quit. I promise you, this is true with anything. But how do you keep yourself going with the least amount of suffering, the least amount of misery? How do we minimize the flow of the current and the feeling that you’re drowning in that river? We do that by separating out the math from the drama. Okay? I am, I said, at a business mastermind right now this week and one of my friends and colleagues said, I need help. I need strategies and ideas for getting people to show up. I assume she meant for a webinar or a challenge. And she said, I’ve tried everything and nothing’s working.

And then people started giving her ideas. Are you doing reminders? Are you trying this? Have you tried that? Do you say this thing? Tell us what you say. Everybody dove into her strategy and everything people said she would kick back to us and go, yes, I’ve done that. No, I’ve tried that. I’m already doing that. And she kept saying it’s not working, right? And this is what we do. I do this myself. This isn’t to pick on anyone.

But I said to her, listen, you are so married to this idea that you’ve tried everything that you’re not going to move through this until you let that go. Okay? The math would be whatever strategy she’s tried. Math would be the numbers. Math is just the facts, pure facts. The drama is I’ve tried everything. And I tried to gently point out to her and she’s awesome, so she totally heard it. But I said, listen, as long as you think you’ve tried everything, you’re going to keep creating that reality for yourself.

But if you decide there’s something I haven’t tried, there must be something I haven’t tried. It will change everything for you. And she heard it and she’s making that switch. I’ve watched it happen in just less than 24 hours since we had that conversation. So, listen, even as simple as that, shifting from I’ve tried everything to there must be something I haven’t tried. Or I will figure out, I will figure this out eventually, right? That’s a thought that helps me a lot a lot. I’m going to get this eventually. I’m going to figure this out eventually. I thought I would have figured this out by now. I thought I would have been able to create the result I want by now, but I guess I was wrong about that. But let’s just keep going.

Let’s just keep going. These don’t have to be super fancy, super motivating, I’m the best kind of thoughts. Just a simple shift. And isn’t it more true to say there must be something I haven’t tried than I’ve tried everything? It’s actually more true if you think about it. There must be something she hasn’t tried because some people get clients to show up to webinars and challenges, so there must be something she hasn’t tried, right? And that’s true for you as well, my friend. There must be something I haven’t tried. You’ve got to separate out the math from the drama. Just put facts in one column, make sure they’re very facty. Be very strict with yourself when you’re in this river of misery phase, you guys. The more pain and suffering and the more stuck you feel, the more strict you need to be about what you’re allowing to be a fact and what you decide is just drama.

And what I mean by that is there are sentences that some people would say, I’ll give you that as a fact and other people would say, no, that’s a thought. So for example, Byron Katie, her version of coaching has a lot of overlap to the way I was trained and the way I coach clients. And so she’s separating out facts, although she words it differently. But I heard her once coaching someone who said, she is my daughter. They were talking about their daughter, right? She said, she’s my daughter. That’s the fact. And I would normally let that be a fact for someone, right? We’d put that on the math side of things. And what Byron Katie said is, is she your daughter though or does she actually belong to God? Are you just a temporary role in her life or maybe a long-term role in her life, but you just play a role in her life and she doesn’t actually belong to you, period. So see what I mean about getting really strict with yourself about what you’re going to let be a fact. Very few things are facts. Most things are drama.

Separate it out because then you get to notice which drama do I want? What show do I want to be watching today? Is this the drama that’s going to get me where I want to go? Does it feel worse? Is there something that feels a little better that I could still believe while I’m in this river of misery? That would help me want to keep moving, that would give me some hope, that would give me some belief that it’s possible. You get to choose that part. The second tool I want to give you comes from a book called The Gap and the Gain by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy, amazing book if you want to go check it out. I’m going to give you the short version of it here today. And it says that successful people live in the gain, while people who struggle and mostly eventually quit, live in the gap. Okay?

So anytime we are attempting to change something, to create something, to build something or to solve a problem, there’s a result we’re hoping to get. We’re hoping to have closer connection in our relationships. We’re hoping that our children thrive more in whatever way we think they should be thriving. We’re hoping that our business is successful or that we’re not working ourselves to death or that we’re making an impact for clients, whatever it is you’re trying to change in your business. We’re hoping that our health improves in whatever way we want to improve it, right? So we have all these, we have this hope. Now sometimes we sit down, we write down a really literal actual goal, I want to get to this number by this date. Cool. This applies there. But even if you don’t, you have a guess in your mind about what’s going to happen and how long it’s going to take.

And many times we’re wrong about that. We’re wrong about how long it takes or we’re wrong about what we’re able to accomplish in the timeline that we thought we would. And when that happens, do you think about the gap? Do you think more about where you fell short and the distance between where you wanted to be and where you landed? Or do you think more about the gains? Do you think about and appreciate and acknowledge and recognize and be proud of and be grateful for what you did accomplish?

And sometimes those gains are the kinds of tangible results that we’re hoping to get in the end, and sometimes they’re not even those, but they are skills that you developed, experiences that you had that are helping you grow, people that you met, things that you purchased, tools or resources that you purchased or learned how to use, information that you learned that could serve you in this area or in other areas of your life. Sometimes even a gain is just figuring out that you don’t want to go that direction anymore.

That’s not fun for you or you’re not willing to or you just decided you don’t care enough, etc. So successful entrepreneurs live in the gain. It doesn’t mean that you’re not aware of the gap. You can still be aware of the gap. You can even still take lessons from it. It’s even okay to be disappointed by it and sometimes feel discouraged. It’s not that you’re not human. But you direct your mind away from constantly noticing where you fell short to constantly noticing what you gained and there is always a gain. Always. There’s never not gains. And if you get better at acknowledging that and recognizing that, that’s when the process becomes more fun. That’s when you get through the river of misery and even doing so becomes more enjoyable. Okay, the last tool I want to give you today is to think about the process of building confidence.

Okay? So confidence is so much fun. It feels great. It’s really useful. It helps us be more effective. And the truth is, I believe anyway, the way I teach confidence is that really just comes from a thought. Confidence is an emotion that you create in your body. It’s a feeling you have that gives you a surge of energy. It tends to foster a lot of creativity, a lot of courage. It’s really useful. We think more clearly from confidence. We do a lot of useful things and it feels good. But it just comes from a thought. And that thought is, I can do this. I know how to do this. I’m good at this or I’m good enough at this, or it’s okay that I’m not good at this. It’s a thought of approval of yourself. And typically, if we’re talking about a certain area of your life where you want to create a result, it’s a belief that you’re capable of it, right? And so you are allowed to just decide to believe that if you want to, but that’s challenging to do. Our brains want some proof first usually. So let me give you an example again.

If I gave you a glass right now and a pitcher of water and I said, I want you to pour some water into this glass, how confident are you that you could do it? Most people would say, I’m pretty confident I could pour water into a pitcher, no problem. Okay? So as you started pouring, if you spilled a little bit out the side, you wouldn’t freak out and go, oh my gosh, I thought I was better at this, but maybe I’m not as good at this as I thought I was. I can’t believe I thought I was good of it. Now I’ve gone backwards, right? You wouldn’t do any of that drama that we do in other areas because you’re already confident. You already believe you can do it and that doesn’t mean you’ll never make a mistake. You would just clean up the water.

Now, even if I asked you to pour water and as you were pouring, you turned away to look at something else and you accidentally completely missed the glass, didn’t get any water in the glass and made a big old mess, you would probably laugh at yourself, right? And maybe jump up and grab a towel and clean it up. And but you wouldn’t go, who do I think I am? I can’t believe I thought I was going to be able to pour water. I’m clearly terrible at this, right? You would just go, okay, sorry, I need to pay closer attention and fix it.

Now, obviously we do these drama things with our goals because we don’t have confidence. So if you can believe, I can do this and there might be areas of your life or moments when you’re in the river of misery even when you can access and believe the thought, no, I will figure this out. I’m capable of this. So do that anytime you want. But the other times when you can’t get to it because you don’t believe it yet, you’re not quite sure, then remember that there are three other really useful phases that come before confidence.

It goes along with the four phases I talked about in the beginning, but I like to think of it as more my beliefs about myself, okay? So the first one is choice. The first thing we do is make a choice. I choose to keep working on this. I choose to show up. Now, this is obvious when it comes to again, building your business or working on your health or a goal this that we can stop and go, yeah, I still choose to try to write this book. I still choose to pursue this thing. I still choose to train for this triathlon.

But it’s even true in areas of your life where you might think it’s not a choice. For example, maybe your marriage is really hard and you’re trying to work on changing the dynamic in your marriage. You might say, I didn’t choose this. I didn’t choose to have this problem. But guess what? You’re choosing to be in that marriage. You chose to get married to this person in the first place and you’re choosing to stay. And for some of you, maybe you want to make a different choice. At times it’s maybe we decide to make a different choice. That’s okay, but other times it’s, no, I still choose to stay and keep working on this.

Even with our kids, right? I didn’t choose for my kid to have this challenge, but you are choosing again to stay. You could literally just run away, not tell anyone where you’re going, go get an apartment somewhere, maybe send a note later so they don’t send a search party out, but say, please don’t contact me. I’ve decided not to be part of this family anymore. Now, I know none of you wants to do that. I’m not advising you to do that.

I’m just saying you have to remind your brain, this is a choice and I’m recommitting today. I’m remaking the choice. And sometimes you have to rechoose it. It’s empowering, right? To remind yourself, I want to do this. I want to show up for this. And that takes us to the next phase, which is commitment. Now, commitment doesn’t always feel good, you guys. We don’t have to commit to things that are super easy to do, things that are fun. I don’t have to commit to sitting down and watching Netflix or eating Reese’s peanut butter cups or drinking Diet Coke. I have to commit to drinking more water and going to bed on time and eating more protein. I have to commit to showing up and writing emails for my business. I have to commit to things that are challenging to do, things that I have resistance to.

So commitment is really useful, but it might not always feel great. So when your brain says, this isn’t fun, this is hard. I just answer my mind with, yeah, of course it’s not fun and hard because that’s the phase of growth that we’re in. That’s the phase of change that we’re in is we’re in the consciously incompetent phase or we’re in the river of misery and we’re in the commitment phase. So we just do it anyway. Commitment is an emotion that comes from the thought, I just do it no matter what. I just do it even if I don’t want to feel it. I just do it even if it’s not very good. I just do it, period. That’s commitment. I just do it even if it’s quote unquote, not working. All right? After commitment, we get into the phase I call consistency.

Consistency is, okay, I got to keep doing this thing. Usually in the consistency phase, we’re starting to see some wins. Again, this is more moving into the consciously competent phase, but it might also be necessary in the river of misery. I’m just going to be consistent. Maybe you’re not seeing any external results, but again, if you live in the gain, you might start noticing how you’re growing, how it’s getting a little easier for you to show up. It’s requiring a little bit less commitment. It’s becoming more of a habit or a routine even if it’s again, not creating the external results yet.

And if you can stay consistent, you don’t even have to be perfect, then eventually we get to the fourth phase of confidence, which is I know I can do this thing. That’s where you get to start making more critical thinking type decisions about actually how consistent do you even need to be and what other things do you want to take on because now we get bored and want to try something new.

Welcome to being a human, right? All right, you guys, I love helping people work through this phase, this river of misery, this it’s not working. It’s what I’m really good at. If you are a coach, make sure you’re signed up for pro coach camp. We’re in the middle of it right now, but you can jump in and join us at ProCoachCamp.com and we’ll send you what you’ve missed and get you right caught up. But this is the difference between people who succeed and people who don’t. It’s not that successful people are smarter or better or younger or any of those other things that your brain might be telling you. It’s just that they utilize tools and move through the it’s not working phase. And I’d love to help you do that if you want some help.

Thanks for joining me today, everybody. Have a great week. I’ll see you next time. Bye.

Oh wow, look at that. You made it to the end. Your time and attention is valuable, and I don’t take it lightly that you made it this far. In fact, it tells me you might be like me; insatiably curious about people and life and potential and connection. Maybe you have big dreams but a small budget and no time. You’re tired, but bored. You’re content, but dissatisfied. Sound familiar? Come to a free coaching call and see for yourself what’s possible: JodyMoore.com/freecoaching to register. That’s JodyMoore.com/freecoaching.