39. What You Want Matters

0:00 Hey, what’s up everyone? It’s Jenny, the LDS mission coach and you are listening to the LDS mission Podcast, episode number 39. What you want matters. I’m Jenny, the LDS mission coach. And whether you’re preparing to serve a mission, currently serving a returned missionary or a missionary mama like me, I created this podcast just for you. Are you searching for epic confidence? Ready to love yourself and to learn the how of doing hard things? Then let’s go. I will help you step powerfully into your potential and never question your purpose. Again. It’s time to embrace yourself. Embrace your mission, embrace your life, and embrace what’s next. Hey, everyone, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for hanging out with me. I love hopping on here every week to just chat with you. And we can talk about some things going on for missionaries. Some things you can expect from the mission from a mental and emotional standpoint. I also love to kind of just give you a little update on what’s going on for us. We are headed straight into spring break here in western Idaho. We aren’t doing too too much, actually, the first weekend of the spring break. My kids begged us to go out of town so that they could have their favorite babysitter come. You see her and her husband, they just recently had a baby. And so they keep saying to me, my kids, hey, please, can you guys go out of town so they can come with their new baby. And they want to be able to hang out with the babysitter, but they’re also excited to dote on that little bundle will be headed to Southern California, which should be super fun, a little bit warmer than here. We actually got above 60 today, though. So we’re on the up and up. I did go outside today and just lay on the trampoline was so nice, just really basking in the sun with the black trampoline and I had on my winter coat. I just laid there for a really long time. And just was like, Oh, hey, spring is maybe close, maybe it’s on its way. So hallelujah, for that. I want to give you a little heads up of something exciting. That’s kind of coming down the pipeline here in the next little bit. It’ll be about mid April, kind of picture right around tax day, I have something super exciting, a new program that I’m going to be launching, and I cannot wait to tell you all about it. I’ve got something in the works for preparing missionaries, that’s going to be easy and digestible, and really give you all of the tools that you need to thrive out there and to really hit the ground running. Once you get to the mission, and hopefully not deal with such emotional strain and turmoil and homesickness. You know, the missions supposed to be hard, I understand that, because that’s the only place that growth happens is when we’re in some difficulty. But what I see so often as missionaries suffering and so I can’t wait to share all of the details with you guys about what is coming up April 15.

3:22 It’s gonna be awesome. Today, I want to talk a little bit about what you want matters. And one of the things that I have started to see a little bit a pattern of is a lot of not wanting. So I’ve noticed it a little bit like we don’t want to feel the way we feel. We don’t want to think the way we’re thinking we don’t want to miss our workouts in the morning. We don’t want to oversleep, we don’t want our roommate or companion to stream in the middle of the night. We don’t want to come home from our missions before our 18 to 24 months. There’s a lot of things that we don’t want, we don’t want what’s going on in Ukraine, at least I don’t really want that. But here’s kind of the trick with not wanting what we’re going to find is it’s not really useful. When we focus on what we don’t want, our brain really has no problem to solve. And our brains are actually problem solving machines. So when we only focus on what we don’t want, they just spin and they scan for more evidence and find even more proof for why we don’t want what we don’t want. In other words, we never get the opportunity when we’re just not wanting to figure out a solution that might get us to what we actually really do want. This is one of the analogies I use is, when we say, I don’t want you to think of a pink elephant. Of course, what we all think of is a pink elephant. Because the brain only can see what we tell it to pay attention to. So this idea of not wanting something is not helpful at all. It also doesn’t create an emotion that drives us forward, when we think I don’t want to miss my workout in the morning. And yet I often do, then I feel discouraged. And of course, that discouragement is like fuel in a car. And that discouragement isn’t gonna get us moving towards anything. So the best example I have of this in my life, every single day, is my kids come home from school, or it’s a Saturday or Sunday and they want a snack, one of my kids in particular, I will, they will say, hey, I want a snack. There’s nothing to eat. Nevermind that I have fooled the pantry to brimming with every kind of snack, and that you could think of in the fridge with every kind of snack that you could think of. So what happens is, I will say, What about string cheese? No, I don’t want that. What about an apple? No, I don’t want that. What about some fruit? Leather? No, I don’t want that. What about a trail mix? No, I don’t want that. But the problem with just not wanting is we shut ourselves down from figuring out what we do want. Do you ever find yourself doing this in your everyday life? Like kind of just scanning your brain like, No, I want that. I want that in my life. Don’t want this not doing that, right? I don’t want that going on. And there’s no judgment here. This is actually just what our brains tend to do on defaults. I could see this also happening on the mission like, we don’t want the number of people we had at church. We don’t even like focus on the people that we did have at church, or we don’t want to come short of our goal. Never mind the progress that we made on the goal. But notice how when we focus on the things that we don’t want, what actually happens is we get more of that our brain starts to pay attention to it, then we get in the spin that can never move us forward. So if we want to get out of the spin, the real question we should be asking ourselves is What do I actually want? So what’s super interesting about this is coming back to the snack example. I’ll say like, Okay, well, anything in the world, if you could have anything in the world for snack right now, what would you want? And usually, the answer for my kids is,

8:07 gosh, I actually don’t know. And if we don’t know, we don’t know what we do want, we don’t we’re not able to work towards it. Or our brain is not able to start to problem solve and make something happen. What if in the snack instance, we even took a little baby step? Like, I know I want something savory. Bingo, the brain can go to work. Okay, savory, let’s find something savory. Or I want it to be a Whole Foods, something whole from the fridge and not out of the pantry. Bingo, our brain can go to work figuring that out. Sometimes, if we’ve been in a place of people pleasing for a while, it is often hard to really differentiate what we really, really want. People pleasing usually sounds like this. I want people to like me. So we change our thoughts and we change our actions. And then we end up showing in authentically to manipulate other people. And that word manipulate probably sounds really strong. But what’s actually happening is we think our brain at least thinks that if we show up a certain way that we can change the way someone else is behaving or the way someone thinks about us. So if you’ve been in people pleasing for a while, there’s a few ways that you can kind of get around this. I would really love for you to let yourself dream and ask yourself, what do I secretly want? Like if anything were possible, really. What do you want, and don’t be afraid to want it. I love that word secretly, because then it’s sort of like we can just want it and no one has to know. And it kind of opens our brains up to not what we should want or what everybody else wants. But what do we really want. The other way you can ask yourself is what do I really, really, really want. And that’s another good way to find out what you want. Because Listen, guys, what you want is really important, it actually is an indicator of what we should move towards. Another name I think of for our wants, is desires. And I really do believe that Emily father gives us desires to kind of as a compass for us to which way that we want to go, and which way would be beneficial for us to go those little wants and desires, what you secretly want. I picture it kind of like a little nudge or a little tap on the shoulder where your brains like, hey, try this, this would be really good for you, this might help you grow into the next version of who you want to be. Did you know that you don’t even have to have a reason for the things that you want. I feel like sometimes we feel like we have to justify it to other people, or explain it to other people. Like why maybe want to take this class, or may maybe why you want to date this person, or maybe why you want to set the school. But you don’t have to have a reason at all. Just that you want it is enough reason. I want to also give you a little bit of insight. Most of the time when I ask people this question, I say, hey, well, what do we want, then if we don’t want that and don’t want that? What do you want? Often, like I mentioned with my kids with the snack, they don’t know, they haven’t taken time and taken a step back to consider what they want. But here’s a little clue. Whether we understand this at first glance or not what most of us really want is a feeling. Everything we do and don’t do as humans, is because of how we think it will make us feel. We go around chasing happiness, we go around chasing excitement, we go around chasing love, when in fact, if you’ve learned anything from this podcast, you know that we create our feelings with the way we think we don’t, we don’t need to chase them any more.

12:55 So instead of telling yourself, I don’t want to feel anxious when I go to class, and all your brain hears is anxious, anxious, anxious, ask yourself, Okay. So how do I want to feel instead? What would I want to feel? Then your brain can go to work, figuring out how to create that feeling? And of course, it’s always your thoughts. But see how we give the brain a problem to solve. This is one of my favorite questions to ask my clients and myself. What is the one feeling that is missing in this situation that I am wanting to create? Instead of walking around thinking, I don’t want to be sad, I don’t want to be frustrated. I don’t want to be angry. I don’t want to be stressed. I ask myself, okay. What’s the one feeling that I missing from the situation that I’m wanting to create? When I ask it this way, I actually get unstuck. I stop the spinning and I get to work creating the emotions I want to create with the way that I’m thinking. I was actually working with a return missionary one time, and she was dating this guy and everything was going really well. And then she came to one of our sessions and she seemed really down. She seemed really upset. And I’m like, Oh my gosh, what’s going on? And she said, we broke up. I said, Oh, I’m so sorry, what happened? And she kind of told me kind of what went down. And then she’s proceeded to tell me this is what he wants. He wants to have kind of a trial separation, where we can just kind of see how it goes. He wants to date other people during that time. He wants to check back in December. He wants us to not text as much so only, you know text on the weekend. or whatever it was, I don’t remember all the details of everything that he wanted. But she had this huge list of things that he wanted. And I asked her, I said, Listen, that’s all fine and good. But what do you want? Because what you want matters. So she and I chatted, we talked about what she would want, in her ideal scenario. How did she want to show up. And then she was empowered to create what she wanted to create in the relationship. Now, I think sometimes it’s easier to delegate what we want to other people to get into people pleasing. Especially if there is someone kind of an authority above us, maybe our parents or maybe a mission, zone leader or sister training leader or something like that. Or maybe it’s like, an older sibling, or whatever the case may be, we kind of it’s easiest for our brain to be like, well, this is what they want. So that’s just the way it is. But I really want to encourage you to have your own back what you want in your companionship, what you want in your relationships, really does matter. What you want in your life also matters. If you’re just feeling a little bit of a pull to do something, or to create something, or to try something new pay attention to that might be just the nudge you need to start on a path that you have no idea where it will take you. When I first started kind of learning about coaching and stuff like that, before I became a life coach myself. I remember I was interested sort of in this podcast, Jody Moore’s better than happy podcasts. And I was listening to that. And then my sister in law, she saw an event that Jodie was doing. And she said, Hey, I think we need to go to this, she felt that little nudge. And, of course, my brain was like, I don’t know, I don’t know if my husband’s gonna want me to go. I don’t know if it’s okay for me to want to go to this event, it costs quite a bit of money. And I just decided, okay, I want this and I don’t need to explain it to anybody. So my sister in law and I went to this event, and it’s put me on a path of so much growth, and so much development, and on a path that I really truly do feel like is what I’m meant to be doing now. So just a couple reminders,

17:55 stop not wanting, instead, ask yourself what you really want. And if you’ve been in people pleasing, you don’t have to be your brain kind of tells you that you can control all the people with how you behave. You can’t. You are the creator of your own life. And all of those, that creating and all that life ahead of you. Starts with a desire first with a want. So dream big. What you want matters and you don’t even need a good reason to want it. Alright, everyone have the most amazing week, we will catch up with you next time. Take care. Thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. Listen, if you are learning a lot from this podcast, and you like what you’re hearing, you will absolutely love hopping on a free strategy call with me. That’s where you and I meet up one on one and talk specifically about what is going on for you. I love teaching young adults the mental and emotional tools that they need to overcome orient anxiety, serve the successful missions they’ve always dreamed of and navigate their post mission experience with confidence. So go to Jennie dildine.com, and click on the work with me link. I would love to meet you. And I would love to get you some helpful tools and strategies to help you fully embrace whatever is next for you. And in the meantime, no matter which part of the mission experience you are involved in. Just know that Jenny the LDS mission coach is thinking about you every single day.