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Where do ideas come from? Well, it’s complicated. If you’ve been a listener for a while, you might think ideas come from our brains. That’s true to a certain extent, but when you slow things down and look closely, the answer might surprise you.
If my daughter says to me, “Mom, for my birthday, I want a unicorn party…” the first thing I’d do is go to Instagram and look up unicorn birthday cakes and take inspiration from what comes up. But those ideas didn’t come from Google. They originated in someone else’s brain.
However, if we go deep here, did the idea of the unicorn cake originate in the brain of the person who posted it on Instagram? Or did they receive the idea from somewhere else, like a higher power? Wherever the idea came from, the person who had it had to be open to receiving it.
Tune in this week to discover the truth about where ideas come from. I’m sharing why we need to be open to receiving when it comes to ideas, solutions, and new approaches, how our brain stops us from expanding on some ideas, and how to approach all ideas with an open mind.
I want to invite you to Wellness Week, a new 5-day workshop I’m going to be teaching very soon. This is a great way to get a better feel for how coaching can impact your life, and while I can’t promise to change your life in 5 days, you’ll be shocked at the change you can experience in this time. Best of all? It’s only $19! Click here to grab your spot now.
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If you enjoy this podcast, or even if it just piques your curiosity and makes you think, you’re going to love my book, Better Than Happy: Connecting with Divinity Through Conscious Thinking. It’s available now on Amazon for Kindle, in print, and on Audible!
What You’ll Learn on this Episode:
- Where we think ideas come from versus where they really come from.
- Why you have to be open to receiving ideas, even ones triggered by people and the world around us.
- How our brains default to shutting down ideas that don’t seem immediately realistic.
- What you might be missing out on when you shut yourself off to ideas before truly exploring them.
- How to create a space in your brain where all ideas are welcome.
Mentioned on the Show:
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- Get on the waitlist for Business Minded here.
- Follow me on Instagram or Facebook!
- Grab the Podcast Roadmap!
- Better Than Happy: Connecting with Divinity through Conscious Thinking by Jody Moore
- Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert
- Abraham Hicks
I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, episode 357: Where Ideas Come From.
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 Better Than Happy. I have a very fun episode I’m excited to talk through with you today. Before we get into where ideas come from, what do you think is the answer by the way? Where do ideas come from? It’s a complicated answer. We’re going to go through it in a minute. But before we do that I want you to just pause the podcast and go to jodymoore.com/wellness and give yourself the gift of Wellness Week because Wellness Week is happening very soon, just barely over a week out from when this episode airs so depending on when you’re listening to it.
Starting on May 30th which is Memorial Day. We’re going to kick off memorial day by kicking off Wellness Week. And here’s the good news. Some of you are like, “I’m going to be camping on Memorial Day. I’m going to be boating on the lake”, or whatever you’re going to be doing. That’s okay. There are a lot of people like myself that really love Memorial Day. We love remembering those that have served our country but also we love the slowness of no school and things.
But we also still do a little bit of, you know, we don’t just sit back and watch Netflix all day. So, one of the best things I love to do on a holiday, in fact one year on my birthday, by the way, I signed up for a class that I just sat in my office on Zoom and it was all day long and it was the best birthday ever. But anyway, this one’s only going to be 90 minutes. So, you can come and join me live or you can just catch the replay after and I promise you, you’ll get the same effect either way.
But anyway, Wellness Week is where I’m going to take you through the five categories, according to all the experts, that are required for overall wellness. We’re going to have emotional wellness, we’re going to have physical wellness, financial wellness, social wellness and spiritual wellness. And we’re going to take a deep dive into each of those five areas. I’m going to teach you the way I approach each of those areas, the way I guide my clients through the approach on each of those areas. And then I’m going to help you through your specific situation and challenges.
So especially if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a little while and you love what you learn but you sometimes lose traction in the implementation part, you’ve got to come to Wellness Week, that is where things really get real. And I’m telling you, it’s one of my most favorite things that I get to teach as a coach because of the amount of progress that we make compared to the investment. The investment, I don’t just mean financially, it’s only 19 bucks. But I mean even the time investment, the energy investment, the discomfort investment is very low.
It doesn’t take that much time. It’s not going to be very uncomfortable. It’s actually going to feel really, like you’re going to feel more alive, you’re going to feel more awake at the end. It’s different than just happy, or joy, or excitement. It’s like that light bulb feeling that you get. And I know this because I’ve taught five day intensive workshops like this in the past before. And I’ve witnessed that. And I even feel the effects of it from all of you who come. So, if you haven’t signed up for Wellness Week you’ve got to join me.
Now, those of you in Be Bold, we’re going to be posting it there every day. So, if you want to come live, you can go sign up but otherwise you don’t need to. I’m talking to everybody else who hasn’t experienced coaching, or isn’t in a regular coaching program, or needs just a boost of wellness, go to jodymoore.com/wellness and all the details are there.
Okay, so I want to talk to you today about where ideas come from. And I played around with a lot of different titles for this episode. So, I hope that where ideas come from sort of sums up what I’m trying to teach you but it may not be the best descriptor of it because I don’t just mean ideas. I also mean where solutions to problems come from. I mean where the best way to approach something comes from. And so, I want you to think for just a minute about what do you think is the answer to that question? Where do ideas or solutions come from?
Now, if you’ve listened to me, if you’re one of my clients, if you’ve followed me, if you’ve read my book etc., then you probably know or you probably think the answer is they come from our brains, they’re thoughts. And that’s true to a certain extent but I want to first point out to you that when we ask a question. This is one of the amazing things about taking a class, or a workshop, or getting coached is that when we slow things down and we answer a question really intentionally like this which is the same thing that happens when we’re in school etc.
We answer questions from the prefrontal cortex. Somebody asks us a question, we go to that logical linear part of our brains, the part of our brains that other animals don’t have. And we intelligently logically answer the question, that’s a beautiful thing. But what I want you to know is that the other 99% of the time when we’re not in a class, or listening to a podcast like this, or in school, then we answer questions as much as possible from the lower brain.
So, you have the higher brain, this really intelligent critical thinking part of the brain. Then you have the lower brain that’s just more survival based, less logical, a lot of times the answers that we get from the lower brain we don’t even agree with in the higher brain. But that’s alright, that’s just the way we operate. So that lower brain that’s driving us 99% of the time, unless we pause, and really take notice, and be intentional. Then that lower brain is the one at the steering wheel of our lives.
And for most people including myself much of the time, the answer to where do ideas come from is Google, or Pinterest, or YouTube, or my best friend who’s really good at this thing that I’m not good at, or my husband, or another coach or teacher. That’s where we tend to think ideas come from. If I’m thinking, I want to put on a birthday party for my daughter and maybe she tells me, “Mom, I want a unicorn party.” I say, “Okay.” And what’s the next thing I do? I go to the Google, or the Pinterest, or Instagram and I look up unicorn birthday parties and I start to get ideas.
Now, I’m not here to say that’s a bad thing. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think that’s a really amazing thing about our world that we can exchange ideas so easily, that we have a plethora of knowledge, and solutions, and resources, and information at our fingertips. I love that about our world. But still let’s say I create a really beautiful unicorn cake that looks 50% as good as the one I found on Pinterest, that’s probably the best I’m going to get to, let’s be honest. But let’s say I do that.
Still, the idea for that unicorn cake didn’t originate in Pinterest. It at one point originated in someone else’s brain. So, ideas, solutions etc., originate in someone’s brain. Now, if we want to get deeper here, stay with me, let’s go deep for a minute, did the idea originate in whoever was the first person to make that unicorn cake, did it originate in their brain? Or did they receive that idea from somewhere else, from some higher force, from what we might say is the universe, or God, or inspiration, or the realm of possibility, or whatever you want to call it? I don’t know, maybe.
I personally like thinking of the world that way. I like thinking of it in sort of a magical or spiritual way. But for the sake of this episode let’s just say that the person who had the thought first had to be open to receiving it. Where it came from, I don’t know, but that person had to be open to receiving it even if the receiving of it was triggered by something or someone else. Maybe they overheard a conversation about something not even related to cakes but it triggered an idea about how to create the unicorn cake that this person, let’s just call her a she, was thinking about.
She had to be open to receiving that idea and not shut it down. Now, here’s why I want you to think about this. There is a process that we call brainstorming. I think I first learned the term ‘brainstorm’ when I was in school, probably elementary school even. We talk about what is a brainstorm. I looked it up on the internet by the way and the definition for brainstorm says, a group discussion to produce ideas or solve problems.
So, when I think of brainstorming that’s what I think about. I think about a group of us sitting around a table, or in a classroom, or wherever we are and throwing out ideas. Now, when we label it ‘brainstorming’ we all tend to agree and understand that the rules of brainstorming are that we are just getting ideas out. We are letting any idea go on to the whiteboard, we’re putting all of them up there even though a lot of them are bad ideas. A lot of them are impossible ideas. A lot of them are ideas that we just never would choose, they never would work, they’re not good, they’re not doable etc.
They’re too expensive, they require too much time, or skill, or energy, or something. It doesn’t matter. The rules of brainstorming are all ideas, all thoughts in other words that come into your brain, are welcome here. Everything’s welcome here. We’re not shutting it down. We’re not judging it. Now, this is difficult for people to do especially as we get older, by older I mean after age 25. The older we get, well, I should say, I feel like kids are a lot better than this.
I feel like kids are pretty good at going, “You know what I’m going to be when I grow up?” And they pick something that I’m like, “That’s ridiculously impossible. You’re not going to be that.” They don’t shut down ideas as much as we do as we get older because life teaches us, hey, that idea didn’t work. That was sort of painful or you aren’t going to get that time or money back. And our brains become more cautious as we get older. So just keep in mind that the definition of brainstorming, the rules of brainstorming are anything goes, all ideas are welcome.
We’re not making decisions, we’re not making commitments about what we’re going to go do when we’re brainstorming. We’re just trying to create a space where all ideas are welcome because you know what that does? It opens us up to be able to receive ideas. If we don’t create that space then our brains tend to on default, not allow ideas in. Our brains tend to have a wall or a door that’s closed. And when ideas come to them they get simply turned away by that closed door. I witness this happen over and over again especially when I’m coaching entrepreneurs.
Let’s say they have some kind of a challenge. What’s a common challenge I coach on? I coach sometimes coaches or service based business owners who do what we would call a consultation call. Maybe they all have different names for it, they have different things that happen on that call but part of the idea is a potential client or customer can talk to the coach about what they do, and see if it’s a good fit, and learn about the program, and see if they’re interested in signing up for it.
So, it’s a challenge first of all to find the people that you help and then to motivate them to come to a consult call. And the first step is just getting people to sign up for the call. And once we master that it’s not uncommon for the coach to tell me, “Okay, I have people signing up for consult calls but now they’re not coming, they’re not showing up.” They sign up and then they don’t come. So, we will start brainstorming solutions. We try to brainstorm, well, what do we think is the reason they’re not coming?
And what things do we want to do, or change, or try to solve for this problem. Now, keep in mind, the coach or my client in this case, I’ll call them my client so it’s not confusing. My client is telling me, “People don’t come to consult calls. They no show. I get a lot of no shows”, or something they’ll say. And so, when I start giving them ideas they start batting them away. They have the door closed on ideas. I say, “Well, have you tried this, or could you do that?”
And the way they bat them away often sounds like this. “Yeah, I tried that but it didn’t work.” Or, “That won’t work for my clients or customers because they’re thinking this.” Or, “That’s not possible in my business because of the calendar system that I use.” Or, “I’m just afraid if I do that I’m going to get this problem that will emerge as a result.” So, I always have to stop myself and realize, wait a second, they are not in a place of allowing ideas. They’re not open, their minds aren’t open. And by the way, I do this myself too. So right there with you, gang. We all do this.
But I’m like, their head is not open to receiving ideas. The door is closed on ideas, they’re shutting them out. They’re not in brainstorming mode. I forgot to pause and go, we’re going to brainstorm, remember the rules of brainstorming, anything goes, there are no bad ideas, we’re not committing to anything. We just want to open up the door and let ideas flow in. So, if we don’t do that then your brain is just doing its job in trying to be right about what it believes.
So, if I believe that I get a lot of no shows and somebody starts trying to offer me possible solutions, I’m going to bat them away because they don’t reinforce my story that I get a lot of no shows. Now, this sounds crazy. Because those of you that have a service based business and you want people to come to a certain call, or class, or whatever it is, or an appointment, you would never go, “Yeah, I just want to be right about this idea that people don’t show up for me.”
Again, the prefrontal cortex, the higher brain knows that’s ridiculous. You don’t want to be right about that. But remember, that part of your brain isn’t driving 99% of the time, the lower brain is. The lower brain just says, “Okay, this is the story, let’s make it true so that we can feel safe in the world.” We understand the way the world works. So as ideas come the brain will shut them down. It’s so fascinating how we do this. Again, I’m just as guilty of this as the next person.
What’s the solution? The solution is to be in brainstorming mode as much of the time as possible. So, I wanted to call this episode, Brainstorming For Life, or The Daily Brainstorm but none of those titles sounded quite as accurate as Where Ideas Come From. But you could think of it this way because otherwise we only brainstorm when we’re sitting around a table as a group and we all agree, okay, we’re brainstorming. Otherwise, we judge our ideas as wrong, we judge other people’s ideas as not working and thereby we close the door and ideas cannot get in.
I see this happen over, and over, and over again my friends. So how do we open the door? How do we allow ideas to come in? How do we attract? And this might be ideas for your business, this might be solutions to a problem that you’ve having, something going on in your family, something going on financially. This can apply in all different ways. Ideas or solutions, things that you might try, resources you might tap into, strategies you might implement in your life, in your business, with your health etc.
How do we open the door and allow them in? We simply choose to believe that we’re wrong about whatever we’re currently thinking. Now, this is not as easy as it sounds, it’s not. It’s really hard for some people. It’s actually something that to me comes a lot easier today because I tested it out enough times. I challenged myself to be wrong about what I was sure I was right about and I saw how much better my life became. I saw how much more successful I became as a mother, as a business owner, as a coach, as a person in the world.
I saw how much kinder I was, I saw how much more generous, and successful in every other way that I was when I just decided to be wrong about what I was thinking and to adapt a new belief and just decide. Even though I had no proof, just decide to believe it anyway. Let’s go back to the example I gave you earlier. If my client is telling me, “I get a lot of no shows” then where we have to begin, in order to allow ideas to come is to get to a different story.
For example, this is the one I usually offer them, “Oh, no, you’re right on track. That’s the way it goes when you’re building this type of a process into your business. If your process is that people sign up for a free call then step one is we have to figure out how to get them to sign up. And once we do that then we figure out how to get them to show up. And once we do that we figure out how to get some of them to become paying clients. But it happens in phases. So, you’re just on phase two, you’re right on track.
Do you see how for most people that’s believable? We’re not necessarily, well, actually I would push them if they kept saying to me, “I get a lot of no shows”, I’d say, “Why do you want that to be your story?” That’s a terrible thought that you’re going to make true. It’s going to shut out ideas that are otherwise trying to come to you.
I like the idea sort of how like Liz Gilbert writes about this in Big Magic. Ideas come and they knock on your door. And they might knock several times but if you don’t answer the door, you don’t do something with them then they just go away and they try to find someone else to give that idea to. So, ideas want to come to you, they’re trying all the time. They exist all around us. And your brain is capable of just creating them from scratch even.
But if your thought is I get a lot of no shows then your brain is going to shut out anything that doesn’t support that. Or it’s going to at least shut it down, it’s going to quickly assess why that won’t work, why that’s not possible. So, you have to be willing to be wrong. What if I’m wrong about I get a lot of no shows, what if I get the average amount of no shows that somebody gets at this point in the game? See what I mean, how we just shifted the story a little bit?
What if the story is, I learned how to get people to sign up, now I’m going to learn how to get them to show up, I mean isn’t that possibly true? And imagine if that’s what your lower default 99% of the time driving brain who’s going to work trying to prove. I get lots of people that sign up for calls. I’m right on track. Now I’m going to figure out how to get them to come. That’s it, you guys, that’s what you’ve got to tell your brain to focus on. And next thing you know it will start to find ideas. Ideas, solutions, things you can try will show up in the most unexpected ways.
It might be that somebody directly gives you an idea, or you hear of an idea, or see an idea that directly relates to your problem or it might be, like I said, this is my favorite thing that happens all the time, a totally unrelated topic that I’m maybe in a conversation with someone else. Or I’m listening to a book about something, or I’m watching TV, or I’m at the grocery store. And things that are completely unrelated to getting a client to show up for a free call trigger for me ideas.
I mean this is how it works. It might be as simple as an email lands in my inbox and I notice myself inclined to click and open it. And because I was inclined to take action I realized that’s what motivated me. That’s maybe what’s missing in my process with my clients. Do you see what I mean? This is the way it works. So, you can’t get clients to show up for calls if you think that your clients don’t show up for calls. And you can’t figure out how to have useful conversations with your teenager if you think that you and your teenager don’t communicate well.
You can’t fix something that you believe is broken, you can’t. If your brain believes it’s broken it’s going to be really hard to fix. Have you ever experienced this? I have, this thing is broken. We don’t even try or if we do we don’t try very hard. Ideas don’t come to us, solutions and resources don’t come to us. It’s only when somebody else comes along to me and says, “No, that’s not broken, that’s really simple, you just do this.” And I go, “Oh, why didn’t I see that? That was so easy.”
You can’t do something that you believe you aren’t capable of doing. Man, this is a big one, so many people are telling me all the time, “I can’t. I don’t know how. I have never done it. I have never been successful. My husband and I, we’re never going to be able to not fight over this because we’ve never not fought over it before.” Okay, as long as you believe that, the ideas, and solutions, and resources will not come to you.
I love this one that Abraham Hicks says, you can’t find something that you believe is lost. What? This is why, according to Esther Hicks, she says, she gives this example of trying to find this really nice pen that she had in the bottom of her bag and she couldn’t find it. And she kept thinking, I can’t find my pen, it’s lost.
And then of course what happens, days later, weeks later we’re digging through our purse and there’s the pen right there or we open a drawer and it’s right there. It shows up in a place that we swear we looked 10 times before or not. Or we just go, “Why did I not think to look there? Of course, it was here.” My point is that it shows up in that moment because we stopped thinking the thing is lost.
Once we get rid of that story, this thing is lost then ideas can come, solutions can come, resources can get through the doorway in our brains. Until then we can’t find something that we think is lost. So, listen, I want you to allow yourself to brainstorm whenever you’re trying to solve a problem or generate ideas. Just tell yourself, this is a brainstorm, even if it’s just you, even if you’re not in a group discussion like the dictionary defines it. I brainstorm with myself all the time. I like to do it on paper. I like to open up a notebook and I like to just dump ideas.
And as ideas come and my brain wants to go, that’s a dumb idea, that’s stupid, that will never work. I just go, “No, remember, we’re just brainstorming.” And you get ideas. And don’t be in a rush to commit to something. Let them simmer a little bit, give yourself some space but believe that the solution is coming to you. You know how we always say this, “I don’t know, an idea’s going coming to me, it just hasn’t come to met yet.” I really do think of it that way but be careful because if your thought is, it hasn’t come to me yet, guess what will keep happening? That’s another door shut down.
So, I’d rather you go, “The idea is coming and it’s going to be here soon.” So, ideas come from the human brain every time, every one of them. And solutions come from the human brain. And it’s okay to get your version of an idea or a solution based off of what somebody else’s brain started on and you modify it, or add it, or apply it to your own life. I’m okay with that. I’m just saying, don’t shut down ideas because here’s the best part of it all, you have ideas and solutions that nobody else has thought of before, you do.
Just like every ‘original’ idea started somewhere, original ideas can start within you as well. And when you tap into that you will completely change any area of your life, I really do believe that. I think that an idea that you get from someone else and modify as your own, which is where I get a lot of my ideas by the way, most of my ideas, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. But I think the ideas that are generated within you, at least mostly are your most powerful ideas.
So do not shut down ideas, do not shut down solutions, be willing to believe and think crazy things that everyone else will tell you you’re crazy and unrealistic, and you should stop burying your head in the sand. I mean truly, that’s what people will tell you if you share them. But when you create a space that’s safe for ideas and solutions to come, your life will become extraordinary, your problems will get easier, solutions and ideas will be more fun than you ever imagine they can be. I promise you this is true.
Put me to the test, let me know how it goes. Come and tell me, come find me on Instagram or Facebook, let’s hang out. Come to Wellness Week. I want to hear all about it. Alright, have a beautiful rest of your week, I’ll talk to you next time.
Hey there, if you enjoy this podcast or even if you just find that it sort of piques your curiosity, or it makes you think, you’re going to love the book that I wrote. It’s called Better Than Happy: Connecting with Divinity Through Conscious Thinking. And it’s available now at Amazon in print or kindle version. Or if you want me to read it to you, head over to audible and grab the audio version. And why not grab a copy for your sister, your best friend, or your mom while you’re there too. Just saying.
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