237. Why We Give Up

I’m Jody Moore, and this is Better Than Happy episode 237: Why We Give Up.

This podcast is for people who know that living an extraordinary life is not easy or comfortable. It’s so much better than that. This is Better Than Happy, and I’m your host, Jody Moore.

Hey, everyone. How’s it going? Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for tuning in today. Thanks for being willing to take the things that you’re learning here and apply them to change the way you’re showing up in the world, to accomplish more of what you want to, to own your emotions, to be an emotional adult. If we could just create a world of emotional adults, imagine what would happen! That’s my goal. I appreciate you guys sharing it, I appreciate you listening.

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Today, we’re going to talk about why we give up. I’m using that word ‘give up’ because I want to differentiate it from walking away from something intentionally. I want to differentiate it from making a conscious decision that you no longer want to pursue that thing you’ve been pursuing, or be in that relationship you’ve been in, or stay in that job or whatever it is. I do believe that there are times when things in our lives are complete. Our time in that situation maybe is complete, and that maybe walking away from it is the best thing to do, and I don’t profess to know when that is for anyone other than myself, but I want to make sure that I’m clear that there are times when that’s appropriate.

 

I feel like, as I coach people especially on their goals, that they think, “This thing just failed”. Maybe someone’s pursuing a business, let’s just say, and they say, “I tried to start a business and it failed”. I don’t believe that it ever fails, I believe that we give up. Failure is just part of the deal. Failure doesn’t mean that it didn’t work and that you had to stop, maybe you made a decision to stop. Maybe you made that decision consciously and you like your reasons, or maybe not. Maybe you just told yourself that it failed and therefore, what you did is you gave up.

That’s what I want to speak to today, the giving up that we do that we think is the only option, we think it’s the next step after, especially, a failure of some sort, and it’s probably not serving you to give up. Maybe you’ve set goals in the past, maybe you’ve tried to lose weight – that’s always the easiest example, that’s why I come to it. Even if you haven’t tried to lose weight or you’re not trying to lose weight, you can certainly understand what that is like and it is relevant to any other situation as a metaphor. Maybe you’ve tried to lose weight, but at some point, you gave up and maybe you told yourself, “It didn’t work. I failed”. The truth is, we gave up, meaning we stopped trying.

Again, I talked about building a business as another area where people often give up. This could apply to anything in your life where you’re pursuing a certain result, you’re trying to receive a certain goal, maybe you’re trying to achieve a certain financial goal or a personal goal of some sort.

Giving up is what we do when we stop consciously trying to achieve that thing. I also want you to know that giving up is a pretty natural human thing to do want to do. The brain desperately wants us to give up on many things. It’s because our brains are designed to save energy and do what’s easy and what is the minimum to keep us alive. That is the brain’s job, or a certain part of the brain, just to make sure that we save energy, that we’re ready in case there’s a crisis, and that we don’t die.

When we go and try to pursue these other goals, we try to better ourselves or our lives in some way, we try to contribute to the world in some way or we try to create something different in our lives than what we’ve had in the past, the brain does not like it at all. The brain thinks it’s dangerous, the brain thinks, “Well, why do we need to go and do this additional thing when what we’ve been doing has kept us alive?”.

Maybe you can relate to this, maybe there are situations in your life where you’re unhappy with the result, you know there’s a better result available to you, you’ve even had a different result at some point, but pursuing it, getting there, is challenging and the brain, basically, is like, “Why bother? This other way has worked just fine. Have you noticed? We’re not dead”. Again, I know you don’t have probably those exact words consciously running through your brain, but that’s essentially what’s happening on the primitive level of the brain.

I don’t want you to beat yourself up for anything that you’ve given up on in the past or maybe you’re in the process of giving up on right now. I’m not here to tell you that there’s something wrong with you, that you’re weak or bad. I don’t believe that you need more self-discipline or willpower. I really don’t believe any of that.

I really believe that you need to understand better what’s going on. You need to be, first of all, compassionate with yourself for walking away from the thing. It makes perfect sense because you’re a human being with a healthy human brain that you would give up on things. As we understand it with compassion, that’s where we get the ability to not give up even though we’re going to want to at times.

I’m going to give you several reasons why I see, for myself and my clients, that we give up, and again, I want you to assess what’s happening in your own life and see if some of these don’t relate to you.

The first reason we give up is because we are so lacking in patience. We start into something and we expect that we’re going to get the result and we want the result right now. We’re not willing to wait for that result to come at the effect of pursuing it over and over again. We are a society and a culture of immediate gratification.

This is not our fault. This is Amazon’s fault! This is Amazon Prime, and Hulu, Netflix, instant TV. This is the amazing world we live in that has trained us all to think that whatever we want, if it’s reasonable and doable, we should have it right now.

My husband and I were talking about this, remember when you were a kid and there would be some kind of little toy or prize you could get if you clipped the certain parts of the cereal box off and mailed it into the cereal company. We were laughing at how it was the cheapest, dumbest little things, but we still would do it and then we would mail it in and know that we needed to wait six to eight weeks for that little piece of junk toy to arrive in the mail, but we just knew that’s how long it’s going to take.

I can’t even imagine telling my kids, “We’re going to mail this in and it’s going to come in six to eight weeks”. They would be like, “Well, forget it. What’s the point? We’re not even going to bother,” because they’ve never had to wait six to eight weeks for something to come in the mail most likely, as far as I know. They’ve waited two days for Amazon Prime to get it here and Amazon is busy creating drones that will not even require a human being to just deliver that package right to your front porch within a couple of hours.

We love it, right? I genuinely love Amazon for creating that, but what it’s taught my brain is that I shouldn’t have to wait. If it’s more than two days, that’s ridiculous. Like I said, this is true with so many other things in our lives. Think about fast food. “Hey, can I get a cheeseburger and fries right now? I don’t want to have to wait more than a minute for you to wrap it up”. We just have an amazing world where we’re able to create things instantaneously.

The problem with that is that the things that we genuinely want, the results we really want, aren’t usually things that we can get instantly with instant gratification. There are things that are harder to achieve that actually create much more long-lasting sustainable joy for us, feelings of accomplishment, feelings of pride, all of the things that come along with these types of goals, take some time.

Not only is it challenging sometimes, to figure things out, but it takes some time to evolve ourselves to become the person we have to be to genuinely have that result in our lives. We have brains that are neuroplastic, they change, but they don’t change instantaneously. They don’t change at the speed of Amazon Prime and fast food. They change at the speed of a human being, of evolving a human being.

For example, I lived in Salt Lake, back before I was married, I lived with some girlfriends. It was after college, we lived in a big house, bunch of girls. It was super fun. At one point, we moved to another house still in the same neighborhood, this was in the Sugarhouse area of Salt Lake. The new house wasn’t very far from the old house, and so when I would drive home from work for the first few weeks, some days, I would accidentally go to the old house, or at least, I would start to go to the old house and get off on that exit or turn down that road and realize, “Oh wait, I don’t live at that house anymore. I’ve got to go to the new house”.

It took several weeks, if not more, for my brain to retrain itself to, without me consciously paying attention to where I’m going, just drive home to my house. It happens, right? After a while, I didn’t drive to the old house at all, I totally lost that neuropathway that took me to the old house, and I gained the one that took me to the new house.

That happens in our brains for all of us – it happens a lot faster for kids, but it happens for us as adults as well, but it takes some time. It takes repetition. It takes being willing to re-direct your brain enough times over and over again away from the old pathway to the new pathway to do it. This is the way that we accomplish things. This is the way we achieve goals in our lives, this is the way we change results.

Whether you want to stop yelling at your children or you want to stop arguing with your spouse or you want to stop getting defensive when your mother in law does whatever she does, or you want to learn to make more money or lose weight, all of those things are going to require a bunch of different neuropathways in your brain, right?

If I’m going to stop eating a loaded breakfast burrito from Carl’s Jr – which I’ll tell you, those are really good. I have this neuropathway in my brain that’s like, “Morning! We should go get a loaded breakfast burrito from Carl’s Jr. It will be delicious! We can get a diet coke while we’re there!”. That pathway is so strong, it creates desire because I think that thought and if I want to get rid of that pathway and start drinking my isogenic shake instead that I feel physically so much better after, then I’m going to have to redirect the brain as many times as necessary until the loaded breakfast burrito pathway erodes and the isogenic one becomes stronger. That’s what we do. I can’t imagine craving it like I do a breakfast burrito, but I have grown to love them a lot more than I did at the beginning. I don’t know. Maybe it’s possible. That’s one tiny example, but all of the other things you’re trying to do in your life and trying to achieve takes some time.

We are not patient. Back to what I was saying originally, we are not patient, we don’t want to wait and so the brain says, “We just shouldn’t even bother with this. We shouldn’t even bother staying conscious about it. We shouldn’t bother trying to do this difficult new thing that’s uncomfortable and unknown and not as pleasurable, and maybe even painful because the old one is so easy. Let’s just go back to that, and then we can delegate everything to do the lower brain”. But if you’re willing to be patient, and you’re willing for it to take time, you’re willing for it to take as long as necessary, then you really are capable of making amazing changes in your life.

What do we do about that? As we talk about reasons why we give up, I want to give you some tips and tricks, maybe we call them ‘brain hacks’, ‘human being hacks’ to help you circumvent this part of being a human being. We’re not going to get rid of Amazon Prime. Do not cancel your Amazon Prime account. Keep it. It’s an amazing part of being alive today. You don’t need to stop with Hulu and Netflix and fast food and everything else you want to have instantaneously in your life.

 

But what I recommend is that you have a way for you to see progress. We like to see progress. There’s just something about us as human beings. Again, the brain that doesn’t want to do this difficult, new, challenging thing is going to really fight against you if it doesn’t think it’s ‘working’.

Maybe you can relate to this. If you’re trying to lose weight and the scale isn’t moving at all, it’s pretty hard to keep going. But if you see little incremental bits of progress, then it’s more motivating, we’re more willing to tolerate the discomfort of the change and keep going. Create ways with whatever it is you’re trying to do in your life, create ways to see progress.

I was thinking about this because my family and I were travelling recently, all four of the kids and my husband and I, and we were at the airport and the line to go through security was so long. I’ve never seen a security line this long before. It also moved so fast. I was like, “This is amazing to me. I don’t understand how this line is moving so quickly”. Getting through security, everybody has to take off their shoes and get out their laptops and all of that. It tends to not be the fastest-moving line. But this one was super long, and it moved super-fast.

I was talking to my son about this. I was like, “Isn’t it crazy how, like, I don’t even mind being in this long line because of how fast it’s moving?”. For us to get from the back of the line up to the front where we were actually going through security probably took 20 minutes, but considering how long that line was, I was shocked. I thought for sure would have taken us at least an hour when I first saw the line.

I was asking my son, “Do you think it’s easier to be in a long line that’s moving pretty quickly like this, or a short line that moves very slowly?”. We both agreed we would rather be in a long line that’s moving, even if that short line only took ten minutes to go through that short line, I would have been more frustrated if I were in a short line and it was barely moving, moving inconsistently, at times doesn’t feel like it’s moving at all, than to be in that long line that moved pretty quickly, because our brains like to see progress.

My brain wants to know, “I’m going to get to the front of that line”. Of course, I’m going to get to the front of the line no matter what. If it’s a short line moving really, really slowly, I’m still going to get to the front if I don’t leave the line at some point, but my brain doesn’t believe that. It’s like, “You’re not going to make it in time,” or, “This is going to take forever,” or just doesn’t like not knowing about how long it’s going to take. We like to know what to expect. With a long line that’s moving faster and more consistently, my brain has an idea of what to expect and it believes that we’re going to get there and thinks it knows about how long, and it just much prefers that to not knowing and not feeling any progress. I want you to think about this with your goals.

Again, with money and weight loss, the goals are easier to define. If I have a business or I’m trying to make money in some way, then the progress that I want to see is money coming in. Sometimes, it takes time for that to even happen. What are some ways that you can monitor progress that aren’t money, if that’s not happening yet, if you’re not to that point? Can you monitor and take a look at things that you’ve learned that you didn’t know before? Can you look at where you’ve come compared to where you were when you started, and show yourself the progress that you’ve made.

I see a lot of entrepreneurs who have made incredible progress, but they haven’t seen the money in the bank yet, not to the extent that they want to, and they give up because they think ‘it’s not working’. What if it is working? What if you’re moving forward in that line, you’re just not paying attention because of the way you’re monitoring ‘working’ isn’t really the best measure yet? We’re just not to that point yet.

It’s like if you turn on the hose for the first time in the summer and the hose has been off and the water has to go all the way through the hose, around and around in circles, before it finally drips out the end. If you turn it off right before it gets there, that’s a bummer. I see a lot of people do.

This is true with weight loss, too. You might not see the scale move for a while. You might just be getting your body used to different kinds of foods, you might be detoxing from the kinds of foods that weren’t good for it. You might just be getting yourself in the routine of putting on some tennis shoes and jogging on the treadmill a little bit each day. Maybe creating new neutral pathways in your brain that are really serving you well, and it might not show up on the scale yet, but can you acknowledge and monitor and feel that progress and feel like you’re in a long line that’s moving instead of telling yourself, “It’s not working and I’m not progressing”. That’s really, really hard to overcome.

Same thing with any of your other goals, with your relationship goals, your self-confidence goals, all of it. You’ve got to find a way to monitor and acknowledge progress.

One of the things I like to do is steal what they do in the medical industry. If you’ve ever been in the hospital, the nurses will ask you, “What is your pain level on a scale of one to ten?”. If I say my pain is at a seven, then they make a note, maybe they give me medication or something, but at any rate, they’ll come back and ask me later, “What is your pain level?” What they’re looking for is to see, “Is pain decreasing appropriately?”. If they know it’s going to increase because of something going on, then maybe they know that and they know that’s appropriate. They’re looking for me to give them some kind of a quantifiable measure of whether or not there’s progress happening.

The only way to do that sometimes is a scale of one to ten. You can ask yourself that. “What’s happening on a scale of one to ten? What is my anger level like on a scale of one to ten?”. Again, there might be times when it goes up and then it goes down, it’s not always linear, but is there an overall trend of things heading in the direction that we want to? That’s what we’re looking for, and that’s what your brain wants to see with progress in your goals. Can you show yourself that, and own that, and be proud of that, and be grateful for that, and feel the progress of your goals before you get to the end? It will help you tremendously to not give up.

The second reason we give up is because we’re not willing to fail. I kind of touched on this a little bit in the beginning. Failure is part of being a human being that I wish we could teach our kids when they were younger. I really wish there was a way. I feel like in school right now, we teach them not to fail: “Don’t get an F. You’re penalized for that. You don’t get to be on sports teams, you don’t get to progress to the next grade, maybe”. I get why. I’m always trying to send the message to my kids that failure, because the subject is hard for you because it’s really challenging you because you’ve never done it before because you’re not good at it yet, is not a problem. It doesn’t mean anything bad about you.

Failure because we just didn’t try, failure because we didn’t show up, failure because we walked away, is something that we want to consider and understand and we want to improve upon. There’s a whole other world of failure that’s actually really, really good for you. It’s the way that you learn, it’s the way that you become better at things that you’re trying to do in your life.

There’s so many people out there that aren’t willing to fail. They want the magic solution. We want to know, “How do I do it so that I don’t fail and I just move forward and get to the front of the line right away?”. Occasionally, that might happen, but the majority of the time, the things that really create extraordinary lives for us, I find that failure has to be part of the road. I really wish this weren’t true.

I have tried my darndest to help people exactly what to do. I have a lot of friends and family members and people I work with in my business and everywhere else who are trying to achieve goals, some of which I’ve already achieved myself, and I always say, “Oh, no. It’s simple. Just do this, this, this, and then you get there”. Sometimes, they even try to do those things, but you know what? That’s the way that worked for me. It might not be the way that works for them. Sometimes, there are subtle nuances that I didn’t explain in the right way because I sort of took for granted that I did that part.

As much as I wish I could just tell people the way, and I wish other people could tell me the way to achieve my goals, I’m all ears. Tell me the steps A through Z and I will follow them and not fail, and that sounds amazing, doesn’t it? But if that worked, everybody would be achieving their goals because in today’s world, the steps A through Z are so easy to find, anybody can find them. They’re all available online for free.

The truth is that we have to fail because we have to try it ourselves first and we have to be not good at it first and we have to figure out the subtle nuances of us doing it our way for our goal or whatever it is we’re trying to do in order to get there. So many people aren’t willing to do that, so they just give up. When they start on the steps A through Z and something goes wrong, they turn around and walk away and go home.

The way to brain-hack this one is to remind yourself that failure is not a problem until you make it mean something really painful. Failure is part of the deal and that you be willing to fail as many times as possible, as quickly as possible in order to get better at what you’re doing. Don’t give up.

The third and final reason I’m going to give you today about why we give up on things… This actually came from a call that I just did this morning in Be Bold. We do a ‘how to grow your side gig or entrepreneurial’ coaching call once a month. It kind of made me think about this that I wanted to add to this podcast episode, which is that we don’t set clear benchmarks for ourselves before we second-guess our decisions.

Pursuing a goal means a lot of decisions you have to make. Not making decisions will slow you down every time. I see this happen over and over again where people are stalled out, they’re not moving forward, because they are telling themselves that they need to think about something. They need to decide, they need time to decide. I always say, “No, you don’t. Let’s just decide right now. What do you need to think about? Let’s make the decision right now”. The faster you can make decisions, the more action and progression you will make on your goals.

What happens is we get a little ways into things and then we start to second-guess those decisions that we made in the past. We second-guess decisions like whether or not this is really the right eating plan, whether this is doable, whether or not we want to charge that much for our product or service, whether or not we even want to do this thing anymore, whether or not this is even the right goal, whether or not we’re the kind of person who is capable of doing it.

I dare say 99% of the time, your brain is going to go through that journey. You’ll probably start out really motivated and excited, but at some point, you will get to the point where you will second-guess everything. You will say, “This is not possible for me. I made the wrong choice. I’m charging the wrong amount. I have the wrong online scheduler, I just need a different scheduler,” whatever it is. If you do that, it’s giving up basically on your goal. Sometimes, it’s literally walking away. Other times, it’s spinning and stalling out in that one point of where you are in your progress.

What I recommend as the solution to this is that you set a benchmark goal. I just had my client in a call this morning. We decided together. Her goal was going to sell 500 of this video course that she’s creating. She hasn’t created the course yet, but she knows what she wants to teach and who it’s going to be for, and we made a decision just today about what she’s going to charge. I said, “How many do you want to sell before you reconsider your decisions?”. Decisions like, “Do I even want to do this? Is this the right topic to sell? Is this the right price?”. All of those decisions. You’re not going to second-guess any of them until you sell (and she chose the number) 500.

When you pick a benchmark goal like that, then every time your brain wants to second-guess decisions, you just tell it, “No, no, no, no. We’ve got to get to 500, then we can reconsider those things. But we’re not going to reconsider until we get there”. If you’re willing to stick with it, to stay through the discomfort of it, to figure it out no matter what, figure out how to get to that goal no matter what, and you don’t change anything about it until you get there, then it forces you to change yourself. Instead of just changing things outside of you over and over again, you’re going to have to change things internally. You’re going to have to change who you’re being. You’re going to have to change what you believe about yourself and your product and your clients, and all of those other things.

That’s the reason for setting goals in the first place, because of the change. Otherwise, it’s way too easy for us to just change our mind, decide we don’t feel good about it, decide we’re not passionate, decide we don’t want to do it, which is the same as giving up.

Hopefully, those are some tactics that you can take and implement in the right way because we’re coming up on the time of year when people start to want to give up on their New Years’ Resolutions. If you have a reason that you love that comes from you at your highest self to walk away from something, I’m all in. But if you’re giving up, I want you to own the truth of it. Again, it doesn’t mean you have to beat yourself up, I just want you to note, “Okay, I haven’t overcome that part of my brain yet,” and know that it’s probably a lesson you’ll want to revisit at some point in the future, and when you do, know that you have your own personal life coach, Jody Moore, right here, to help you through it. Go check out my Be Bold program that will guide you through not giving up so you can create the exact life that you want to.

Thanks for joining me today, have a beautiful, amazing rest of your weekend. I’ll be back next Friday. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode. Take care.

If you have a question about something you heard me talk about on this podcast or anything else going on in your life, I want to invite you to a free public call, Ask Jody Anything. I will teach you the main coaching tool I use with all of my clients and the way to solve any problem in your life, and we will plug in real-life examples. Come to the call and ask me a question anonymously, or just listen in. Go to jodymoore.com/askjody and register before you miss it. I’ll see you there.