00:00 

Hey there, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 120, "Are You Motivated by Love or Fear?" Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:21 

Alright, hello there. Welcome to the podcast. For those of you who are new, so happy to have you join us. For those of you who have been listening for a while, welcome back. So glad to have you here. I hope that the information I'm sharing here with you is helping you to see things a little bit more clearly, helping you step more into the kind of person and the life that you want to be and that you want to have. This is what it is all about, and I think at this middle-aged part in our life we are perfectly positioned to make this happen, perfectly positioned because we have the the experience, we have the time, we have the knowledge, we have the wisdom that we didn't have 20 years ago to make all of these pieces start fitting together. And I think it's such a brilliant brilliant time in our lives to really start taking a look at all of this work that we have to do. So I'm glad that you're here, and I hope that this is helpful. 

01:19 

It is helpful to me as I work through all of this myself, and I still am very much a work in process. I think some people sometimes think because I teach all of this, I've got it all down. That is so not the case. Wouldn't that be nice though? But I don't. I understand the concepts and I know how to work through it. I know how to help other people work through it. But always seeing it in my own life is kind of difficult, but I'm getting better at it. I'll share an experience at the end here today where I'll show you how I've implemented something from this concept into my life. 

01:56 

So we're gonna be talking today about our motivation. Are you motivated by love or fear? Alright, so if you remember 10 episodes ago we talked about how our reasons behind what we do matter a lot? This podcast is going to be a pretty close cousin to that concept. So here's the question that we may or may not have considered before: what are we motivated by? There we go. In the first five minutes I've made a major faux pas already. 

02:32 

Alright, so I have come to believe that all of our thoughts are motivated by one of two things: love or fear. And what they create is something completely different. So let's start by talking about fear as our motivator. I used to think that things like anger or resentment or frustration could be motivators for our behaviors, and then I encountered the concept that these were actually secondary emotions that stem from the primary motivator of fear. And at first I was skeptical, but as I've continued to look at these emotions, more and more I'm convinced fear is the primary motivator for all of the more challenging emotions that we experience. So let's look at how this all can work. 

03:20 

When we put "angry" into the thought model, it goes on the feeling line or the f line. So all of our feelings are created by our thoughts. So we have to ask what thought is creating the feeling really quickly. If you are new and you want some training on what the thought model is, go to episodes 96 and 97 and that should catch you up to speed on the basics of the thought model, because that's a super important part of the work that I do here. So let's say that somebody close to you, a spouse or a child, maybe a boyfriend or sibling says something to you and you get angry. Putting it in the thought model, what they said would go in the C line, or the circumstance line. It's neutral. K, I know. This is hard to swallow sometimes, but anything anyone says is 100% neutral and always goes in the circumstance line. The anger will be the feeling that goes in the f line or the feeling line, right? 

04:23 

So now we ask what thought about what they said created the feeling of anger. So most of my clients will say something like, "well, she shouldn't treat me that way." Okay. So that's a great start, but let's dig a little bit deeper on the thought. Why shouldn't she treat you that way? So here are some possible responses to that little bit of extra digging: "because I don't deserve to be treated that way," "because I'm really trying hard here and she just doesn't know," "because she doesn't know what I've already done or what I've already been through." Okay, following these kinds of thoughts up, we will almost  inevitably find that these thoughts stem from fear. Fear of not being seen or heard. Fear of not being seen as equal. Fear that we are being unfairly judged. And to top it off, all of these fears are founded in questions about our self-worth. 

05:22 

So here's a fascinating piece of information. I have yet to work with a client for whom the things they are struggling with don't come back to our sense of self-worth at some level. It may take several sessions to get there, but inevitably self-worth is always at the core and not connecting with our self-worth creates fear. Fascinating, right? I love it. I think it's so exciting to watch that. 

05:52 

So when we look at our motivation being fear, the feelings, the actions, the results that are created rarely, if ever, serve us well. They compromise our values, our sense of who we really want to be, and how we show up in the world. So here's another pertinent example. Someone who is working to break the cycle of pornography use. When their motivation to quit is fear, they will see say things like, "I can't look at pornography. I shouldn't look at pornography." Being motivated by fear, this person will find themselves white-knuckling it every time the urge to view pornography comes up. They will fight it and fight it. And the thing is, we can only white-knuckle something for so long before we become exhausted, both physically and emotionally. And fear comes from a place of the possibility of losing their family, losing their reputation, their church standing, maybe their closest relationships will be in jeopardy, or maybe the possibility of future relationships is in question. All of which may be true. But when motivated by fear, we are constantly resisting the change. It's like holding a beach ball under the water. It just pushes and pushes and pushes and eventually when our arms get tired enough, we let go and it shoots out of the water. It's kind of what happens when we're white-knuckling something, when we're holding it under out of fear. 

07:25 

When we can learn to be motivated by love, however, all of the energy behind those same beliefs changes. So rather than the fear that drains our energy because we're white-knuckling it, we create energy when we approach the change from a place of love. So deciding not to look at pornography because of a love for ourselves and for our future selves, because of a love for our relationships, and an honest desire to grow and to deepen them because we want to align our actions with our values. This motivation of love creates a very different feeling, a very different energy, and it's much easier to stay in the place that we want to stay. When we look right now at the political climate going on in the future, we're motivated by fear, whether it be the upcoming elections, maybe the handling of the coronavirus or taking another look at the worth of all people...all of the anger and hatred that is coming forth is being spawned by fear, fear that something will go wrong, fear of death, fear of not being treated how we feel we should be, fear of the future. So much fear and it's destructive. 

08:43 

It can be easy to see how destructive it is on a national level or even on a community level, the trick is to start seeing how this fear motivation is also destructive on a personal level, how this fear is destroying our relationships with those people we most treasure. Because on a more intimate level, these beliefs are tearing apart family and friends when we are motivated by fear. Can you even imagine what it would look like in the United States if all of these issues were being approached from a place of love rather than a place of fear? Because here's the thing: fear destroys and love creates. Fascinating! I love that concept. Fear destroys and love creates. When I look back at my parenting that I did when my kids were young and I was still married, I see so much of it motivated by fear that stemmed from my disconnect with my self-worth. 

09:49 

Being in a marriage in which I struggled so much, I can see how I was not connected with my self-worth as strongly as I could have been. And this disconnect created a feeling of fear within me that became a motivator for so many things that I did as a mother. I became a mom who wanted to do all the things and do them really well because I felt that in so doing I could prove that I was a good person. I was seeking to balance out the feeling like I was a bad person in my marriage. My worth was in jeopardy, right? If my worth was bad in my marriage, so I was trying to overcompensate by being a super mom, okay? So I got pretty good at keeping up with the household chores, cooking really great meals, organizing our schedules, planning trips and decorating for Christmas, and though I loved my children desperately, I can see how so much of what I was doing was motivated by fear and the underlying fear created a space that kept everyone at an emotional distance. We were going through loving motions, but we were all walking on eggshells because we knew the situation was precarious. I was working my tail off to feel some semblance of self-worth and my sweet children were working to not upset that crazy balance that I had going on. In this fear that I was motivated by, I thought that if my children were not happy all  of the time that I must be doing something wrong and gosh darn it, I was not doing anything wrong. I created a space where my children were not really allowed to feel anything but happy. 

11:37 

You can just imagine the mess that that created. But here's the thing. None of the things that I was doing was wrong. Keeping up with the household chores, cooking great meals, organizing schedules, decorating for Christmas, those are all great things if you want to do them. But because my motivation was fear, there was a desperateness underlying all of it. An emotional frenzy, a desperateness that was tangible, and my kids felt it and I felt it. And it did not create an emotionally safe space and it was exhausting to me and my family, both physically and emotionally. Because here's the thing, fear creates manipulation. It creates scarcity mentality. It creates feeling like a victim or a martyr. It creates what I call "emotional frenzy." This place where the drama is high and the emotions run rampant. And our prefrontal cortex, our thinking brain, slows way down or even turns off. We start making irrational decisions. We have unreasonable expectations. We turn off our compassion. We don't see things clearly. 

12:57 

So what if I were to do all of those same things that I used to do, but have them motivated by love instead of fear? What if I still kept up with the household chores and cooked great meals and organized schedules and planned trips and decorated for Christmas from a place of love? Then everything would change. The focus would be on creating relationships instead of not destroying them. See, before my motivation was not destroying my life. But if I can come from a place of love, it comes from a place of creating relationships. The love I would share with my children would be clean love without manipulation and without me needing to feel like a martyr. So when we start standing back a bit and get really honest with ourselves about what is motivating us, everything will start to change. All of us do things out of both fear and love. It's just human nature. And because all of us have some level of disconnect with our self worth, we are all doing things out of fear in order to compensate and feel more worth. That's just how our primitive brain or our lower brain works. But it doesn't work that way. The process, we don't get more self worth by doing these things out of fear. 

14:20 

So how do we start to move out of being motivated by fear and into being motivated by love? Here we go. 

14:28 

Step one: start getting very curious. Start paying very close attention to your feelings because they are amazing information. In general, when we are feeling some of the more challenging emotions, there's a good chance that there's some fear motivation going on. Learn to start paying attention. One of the most amazing ways to really clean out what's going on is to do what's called a thought download. Now I know a lot of us are very resistant to writing things out, but I will tell you what, my life has completely changed since I started writing to figure things out. I used to think that keeping a journal was just for after I died. And then my children and grandchildren could see the kind of life I lived and hopefully they would learn something from all of my experiences. Right? 

15:18 

But now I see a journal as a necessary part of me learning about myself and it doesn't even have to be in a journal. It can be on a piece of paper you turn right around and throw away. But there's something about the process of handwriting things that activates our brain, that allows the spirit to guide us and speak to us. And that helps us to see things more clearly. Some of my greatest personal revelation comes when I'm writing, not when I'm sitting there thinking, because my brain wanders way too much, right? But when I'm writing, it helps my brain to focus in. 

15:57 

So when you're feeling a challenging emotion, write it out. Even if you think it's horrible and mean and super judgmental, it's just so important that you see what's honestly going on inside your brain. When you just think it, it's way too easy to brush those ugly thoughts aside and pretend like they don't exist. But until we acknowledge them, we can't address them and make adjustments. So write it all down. 

16:25 

Okay, step two: go back through what you've written and identify all of your thoughts and feelings and get really clear on what you're thinking and what feelings are being created by those thoughts. Really start taking a look at them and yourself and ask, are they being motivated by love or by fear? If you haven't yet listened to podcast number 92 entitled "Clean Love," go back and give it a listen. It's one of my favorites and it really teaches some concepts about what love really is when it's not tainted by fear. Okay, so check that one out. I love, love that one. 

17:04 

Okay, step number three: don't judge yourself when you see things that are questionable. And you will. You are human. You are supposed to do questionable things rather than judging yourself. Get really curious. Really take those thoughts and dig deep to see what other thoughts lie beneath them. Get fascinated by what's really going on inside of your brain. The mass vast majority of what's happening up there is happening unintentionally in our primitive brain. It's estimated 95% is unintentional thinking. So the point here is to look at it objectively and then have our prefrontal cortex, our thinking brain, start to step in and intervene to create more the kind of person we really want to be, the person that more aligns with our own values. 

17:56 

Because I promise you, none of us live in 100% harmony with our values. It's not that those values aren't important to us, it's just that we're humans and it's inevitable we're not going to live by them. We have thoughts and beliefs that go back to experiences that we don't even remember and they are always running in the background, affecting our whole lives. Only when we take time to draw them out through writing, get curious about them and then step in to change them, will we strip them of their power in our lives. 

18:30 

So let me share with you an experience that I had just a few weeks ago where I used this process. So a friend had presented me with some information about our brains, and I listened to it but I didn't find myself overly fascinated with it because I felt like it paralleled a lot of the things that I already knew about how our brains work. And this person's response to my saying that, however, had my brain start thinking that I didn't think deeply enough about it. And the next day the same person gave me some more information and this information was way over my head and I just didn't really understand any of it. And then I really got what some people call "triggered." So I really started to feel inadequate and insecure in my ability to process this information and felt that maybe I wasn't a deep enough thinker and this really started spinning and spinning in my brain. I wasn't sure where these feelings of inadequacy and insecurity were coming from. I had the circumstance where some information was presented to me and I had my feeling of inadequacy or insecurity, but I was completely unaware of the thought that was in between those, right? I didn't like those feelings. I was very uncomfortable with feeling that inadequacy and that insecurity. And there were times that I even started to get a little emotional from the discomfort. It was bringing me to tears. And I was having a lot of questions about who I was and like, am I not good enough for my whatever, right? 

20:10 

So I decided to really start work working on staying open and figuring out what is the thought that is creating that the inadequacy and the insecurity. So as I process the feelings, I started writing things down. And I remember the circumstance. It just popped into my brain as I was writing from about, I don't know, probably 20 to 25 years ago when someone told me that I wasn't deep enough to understand their depth of thinking and their emotions. And I remember at the time that that was a very painful thing for me and it that it brought up a lot of painful emotions. And when I was told that all those years ago, I took that thought and I've replayed it enough times in my brain that it has become a deep seated belief. So when I was confronted with similar thoughts a few weeks ago, I started feeling all insecure and inadequate because it connected with this previous experience and with my belief that I'm just not a deep person and that I can't connect with other people emotionally because of that. 

21:21 

So then my next step in realizing that that was the thought that was going on, that was creating those feelings. Then I decided to just start getting curious about the belief that I had in my brain that I wasn't deep enough to understand other people's thoughts and emotions. And I asked myself if that was true. And I decided it wasn't because I have many people in my life that I have very deep meaningful emotional relationships with. Right? So I decided that wasn't a true thought. I realized it was a thought that I believed for many years, but that that thought wasn't serving me and that I have evidence to the contrary. And I also realized that I didn't trust the person who told me that either. Even when they told me that, I didn't trust them. Not even just that years later I don't, but even then. And yet I still took that thought and pulled it in and believed it. Right? Fascinating how that works. I've had this belief all of these years seated by someone I didn't even trust and it has impacted my life significantly. Many, many times over the years. 

22:31 

So I've spent some time coming up with evidence that I am a deep enough thinker that I'm deep enough with my emotions. And I've also prayed. And I've asked God to help me heal that hurt from those many years ago. Right? I love that this circumstance presented me with an opportunity to discover some healing that the Atonement can step in and help me with and help me heal that. 

23:00 

So as I process this experience, I've realized that my response to my friend giving me this information, it stemmed from a deep seated fear that I wasn't deep enough that I what that I wasn't enough that my self worth was in question. And when I took the time to get curious and explore what was really going on, I realized that my response was coming from a place of fear of not being enough rather than a place of love for myself. This was such an amazing process for me to work through it took me a couple of weeks and No doubt that that thought is going to surface again, but I'm going to be a little bit more onto it again next time. Next time it comes up, I'm gonna go, "Oh, I know what's going on, because I've discovered this and I don't believe that thought anymore." I can start changing that thought, all the "this person didn't do anything wrong, It was all drama that I created in my own head that was motivated by that fear." 

24:05 

And when I stood back, when I got curious, then I found some answers I found some unhealed pain from years ago that needed to be addressed and I made a step forward in having a better relationship with myself and I protected a cherished friendship from my unhealthy beliefs. I didn't go all postal on this person, right? I didn't go crazy. I I worked through it because that experience showed me where my own work was. So you can do the same kind of thing. You can learn to see inside your brain more and learn to decipher what is fear and what is love and to start choosing your motivations. 

24:49 

Okay, so when first embarking on discovering your motivations, I'll tell you what... it can be daunting and it can be really difficult work. So as your life coach, that's what I'm here for: I can help you see more clearly what is going on in your brain. I ask you the tough questions and I don't let you off the hook when it's difficult. I help you get curious and I remind you not to judge yourself and to be compassionate with yourself. I I'm trying to help you see your brain. None of us can see our own brains as well as we would like to. There are things that I completely miss when I'm self-coaching. I can do a lot with self coaching, and I do, but it moves along a lot faster when I'm working with a coach. 

25:44 

So I would love to help you move forward and see your own brain more clearly. I would love to teach you the skills to coach yourself so that you can move into a healthier version of yourself. So you can contact me at tanyahale.com. You can sign up for a free consult and we can work on this together. Alright. Coaching is not generally an entire life of week to week coaching. My job is to teach you and train you in the skills so that you can coach yourself. And then, like less frequent coaching over the time is really, really helpful. Okay?. So this growing up gig, fascinating. Fascinating to start looking inside our brains and seeing what's going on and to be at this place in life, where we have the stuff to draw from and we have the maturity and the experience and the wisdom to start moving into this healthier, happier place. I love, love being in my 50s. I think it's my favorite time of my life and it by far is the best place I've ever been in my life. We can all get there together. I know it. Okay, that is it for today. 

27:02 

Last thing, podcast listeners. If you love this, make sure you subscribe and then you never miss an episode, right? It always just comes up. You can also go back and listen to all the previous ones that interest you. There's a lot of good stuff there. If you have not yet left me a review, I would encourage you to take two or three minutes, go on wherever you listen to your podcast and leave me a review that helps other people find this content and help other people find information that's going to help them as well. And then last of all, if you will share this with people that you love, people that you know could benefit from this information, that would be fabulous for them and it would be fabulous for me and life will just keep getting better. Alright, I love you for being here. Thank you for being a part of my life and allowing me to be part of yours. I love it so much. I love getting to be a part of your growth and your development. Alright. That, my friends, is the end of what I've got for you today. Wish you all the best. Have a phenomenal week and I will talk to you next time. Bye. 

28:16 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a  more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.