00:00 

Hey there, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale, and this is episode number 87, "The Law of the Lid." 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, my friends. Happy to be with you today. I love this coaching gig that I get to do. I just think it's so amazing and so fun, and I love it, and I'm glad I get to share it. 

00:37 

So first thing I want to say, remember my goal that I told you about that I want to do 300 free coaching sessions by next December 31st? Still working on that. I have been getting some coaching sessions, and I appreciate those of you who have called and who have taken advantage of that. It's helping me so much. I love it, and I love getting to be able to show you your thoughts and show you what's going on and what's happening. So thanks for calling. If you want to do that, get on my website, tanyahale.com, go to the coaching tab, and we can start setting that up. 

01:09 

And also while you're there on my website, scroll down to the bottom of the top page if you haven't yet, and I have a email that goes out every Friday morning. It's called he "weekend win," and it's meant to be read in one minute or less. So it should be super easy to get through, but hopefully some great ideas to help you just process things differently and see life differently in a better, healthier way. 

01:33 

Okay, so today I'm going to talk to you about a topic that I've crossed over from some leadership training I received when I got my life coaching certification from the John Maxwell team. So if you're not familiar with John Maxwell and you're interested in leadership, checking him out is a must. Okay, the title of this podcast is The Law of the Lid, and this comes from John Maxwell. So John Maxwell spent 25 years as a preacher and he built up a huge Christian church in San Diego. And then he decided to move into the corporate leadership world. And I will definitely say that the leadership world is a better place because of what he has done. Multiple times he's been named the world's foremost leadership guru and he's written close to a hundred books. 

02:19 

When I went to my life coach certification in Orlando with him, I was so amazed at the man that he is and I had three really spiritual days learning from him. It was a highlight of my life. I loved that time doing that. Just an amazing man. He's also written what is often referred to as the "Bible of Leadership," a book that's entitled "The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership." This, my friends, is a fabulous book. 

02:48 

So today we're going to talk about the first law, The Law of the Lid, but pull it out of the context of direct leadership and into the context of our day-to-day lives. The Law of the Lid says that an organization cannot move beyond the leadership ability of its leader. So if the leader of a company has a leadership capability of 4 out of 10, everything beneath him is capped at below a 4. This leadership puts a lid on her ability to be effective and successful in her leadership capacity. The lower an individual's ability to lead, the lower the lid on her potential. The higher an individual's ability to lead, the higher the lid will be on her potential. And this lid limits the growth of everything that the leader engages with. 

03:45 

So the more I do this work, the more I realize that the Law of the Lid works in other areas of our lives beyond leadership ability. It is also visible and at work in our personal lives. When my personal growth is capped at a 4, everything else in my life is capped at a 4 as well. Things that I'm involved in will be stunted because not only can I not even envision something  beyond my 4, but I have no capacity to engage in something higher than a 4 because of the lid, right? The lid caps it. 

04:26 

So let's jump into an example here. If my self-love is at a 3 out of 10, then my ability to love is also capped at a 3. My ability to have others love me is also capped at a 3. It's an interesting concept, right? So let's look at it from a client's point of view. So just FYI, these are not their real names. I would never in a million years do that, but I want to share some interesting examples with you. Okay, so while working with Charlotte, it became apparent that she struggled with accepting herself. So our coaching session started off with discussing how she was afraid of being abandoned. If her husband died, she was afraid her children would not want her around. So abandonment issues there with her husband and with her children looking at the future, right? 

05:21 

She kept saying over and over that she knew she was different from other people. She was weird or that she was odd and that she knew a lot of people looked at her this way. And because she felt she was so weird, something that she seemed to repeat over and over, probably six or seven times in the first few minutes of our session, she also thought that people just tolerated her weirdness and didn't fully accept her. And these thoughts led her to fear being abandoned and all on her own one day with no one to turn to. So rather than continuing to focus on the abandonment, I helped Charlotte to start looking at the thoughts that she is weird or odd and that other people couldn't accept her. 

06:05 

So the thought model looked something like this. In her circumstance line, she would put any social situation, alright? "I went to a party," "I went to a church function," whatever, right? Circumstance: any social situation. Then her thought about that circumstance was, "I know I'm weird and I don't fit in." The feeling that that created was one of loneliness. The action that that loneliness created was that she would distance herself emotionally from the people that she was around. And the end result would be that she didn't fit in and she would feel weird. She didn't fit in because she was distancing herself, right? 

06:49 

So in this model, we can see how she created a situation where her results created a weird place where she didn't fit in. But she wasn't fitting in because of the strange or weird behaviors. She wasn't fitting in because she was distancing herself from others. What Charlotte was doing in effect was putting a lid on her relationships with these other people by distancing herself. And that was what her lid created for her. And she distanced herself because in her thoughts, she was labeling herself as weird. She was really struggling with accepting herself for who she was and seeing herself as an amazing person with a lot to offer that was different than other people, just as every one of us has different things to offer, right? 

07:40 

Now, it's not that she couldn't see any good in herself. She definitely could, and she has tons to offer. But this thought that she was weird was capping her engagement with other people. As much as she could accept herself, was as much as she would allow other people to accept her before she would back off. It's not that they wouldn't want to accept more of her, but she was not allowing them to because of her own self-limiting beliefs and because of her distancing. So, Charlotte automatically puts up roadblocks when she thinks that she's weird and that other people perceive her as weird. She limits how close she will allow others to get by her own disengagement when she feels her weirdness is peaking. 

08:30 

It's actually quite fascinating how we create our own lids, our own limitations with our thoughts, because our thoughts create our feelings and our feelings create our actions and then from those actions we see the ultimate results in our lives. In the case of Charlotte, she was creating the result of not fitting in with others by distancing herself emotionally from them. This distancing came from the feeling of being lonely, which came from the thought that she was weird and she didn't fit in. So her level of acceptance of herself was the lid for the level that she would allow others to accept her. 

09:14 

I just think this is so interesting when we start looking at how we limit everything in our lives, how we put a lid on our lives by our own personal level of self-awareness and acceptance. The thing is, it can be so easy to blame other people in our lives for all of these situations that are happening when actually we are the ones creating them. It would be so easy for Charlotte to believe the thought that other people thought she was weird and she would totally believe that it was their thinking that was creating that, that the other people are the ones who were distancing themselves because of their thought that she was weird. So she could go on blaming others for her lack of feeling accepted and her inability to feel deeply integrated with people around her. But in actuality, Charlotte is the one who needs to take responsibility for the level of engagement because she is the one with the lid on their connection. She is the one limiting the depth of the relationship. 

10:19 

Alright, so now shifting to the other side of the coin, you could be working with someone who has a lower lid than you, in which case the relationship will be limited by their lid, not yours. So your relationship with this person may be stranded at a two, but with other people you could have relationships that are five or seven depending on where your lid is, right? But this particular person would be limited by their lid. And this might be a frustrating situation for you, okay? So let me share with you a situation from another client where this was the case, where someone had a lower lid than them and how she continued to grow and work through this situation. 

11:05 

So this is a younger woman and I'll call her Denise. So growing up, Denise had always been very close to her father. He had coached her sports team for many years and so they had spent hours at practices and games together as well as the time driving back and forth. So a lot of hours spent in the car talking the sport. But as Denise got older and moved away from playing the sport, she found that she and her father had less and less in common. In fact, she was often frustrated that she would try to have conversations with her father about things that really mattered to her and he seemed to have an inability to engage in that type of conversation. And this is when Denise and I did some coaching about this particular situation. She had noticed that her dad could talk about sports, he could talk about weather, he could talk about politics or gospel doctrines, but that seemed to be all that he would want to talk about. Any other topic breached by Denise would bring silence, it would bring a return to one of the other topics, or some sort of a rebuke, she felt. He just didn't seem to be capable of discussing anything that delved into the heart or into feelings, and Denise was feeling really frustrated with this. 

12:25 

She was desiring to have an eight or nine relationship with her dad, and she felt completely capable of that. But her father, to her, only seemed to be capable of, let's say, a two relationship. And let's say that this is the case, let's say that because of his thoughts, he literally was only capable of a two deep relationship. So as long as Denise was wanting an eight relationship, she was going to be disappointed, because there's a six point disparity there. Because really, her father was only capable of a two. He was actually giving Denise his very best attitude. 

13:08 

So Denise could either be completely frustrated with her father for only giving her a two, or she could be grateful that he was giving her his very best attitude, even though she wanted like an eight. So Denise's father's personal development was capping him, his lid was at a two, which meant his ability to engage in this relationship was capped at a two. The law of the lid was doing its thing. But this is where Denise had the choice to either accept that her father was doing the best that he could, and feel gratitude for what he was capable of, or she could continue to feel angry that he wasn't giving her an eight. 

13:53 

But here's the really cool part to this concept here and to Denise's experience. As she explored her own heart and got to a point where she could embrace and feel gratitude for the level two that her father was capable of and truly accept him for what he could ultimately offer, her own personal growth began to move forward. She started to grow into a deeper level of herself with understanding how to love more unconditionally, with being less judgmental and being more accepting of many others, not just her father. Her lid lifted a little and she was able to grow into a bigger space. And taking responsibility for this aspect of the relationship, she couldn't control whether that relationship went beyond a two, but she could control how she responded to that and how she reacted to that. So Denise was then able to grow and develop and move more deeply into the kind of person she really wants to be. And it actually created a more healthy relationship with her father because she could let go of the resentment and really appreciate that he was doing the best he could with what he was doing. 

15:19 

Okay, so I wish that we could just open this up right now and have a discussion because I would love to find out your thoughts of what's going on here. But I'm wondering, are you seeing this, either side of this scenario play out in your own life? Are you seeing situations in your own life either where you have capped relationships or where other people have capped it with the Law of the Lid? Okay, our own personal growth and development level is capping everything in our lives from our relationships to others, to the relationship we have with God, to the relationship we have with ourselves. If we want a closer relationship with God or with ourselves, it is imperative that we also start to grow into the person who is capable of having that closer relationship. 

16:10 

Okay, so I find that this concept of the Law of the Lid is also at play in the growth of my life coaching business. Before I started on this journey of building a business, I thought that there were just some business things that I needed to learn and then pieces would start to fit together. I would start doing the business things that needed to be done, some marketing stuff, and the business would start growing. But here's what I've personally learned about going through this process: it's not necessarily about how much business and marketing stuff I know. How many business or marketing majors do you know out there who are not finding success in that area? They probably know tons more than people who are having a way more successful experience. But this is why: it's not about the marketing stuff. It's about the personal growth. It's about becoming the person who can is capable of implementing those ideas and processes. 

17:15 

Right now for me, I'm not that person. I have so much growth to still go through in order to be the person who can implement those processes when and where I need to. To have the discipline to be the successful business person I want to be, I have to develop into the person who will do the things that successful business people do. So the growth of my business is completely capped. There's a lid because of my own personal growth. If I was that person already, my business would already be reaping the benefits of the type of discipline needed to create that level of success. But I'm not that person yet. However, I am learning to grow into her. And as my personal growth increases, so will my ability to be that kind of successful businesswoman. I've already started to see that as my personal growth is developing, so is my business. 

18:20 

I saw the exact same thing in my middle school teaching. As I started to grow more as a person, the more I understood and accepted myself, my ability to connect and interact with my students grew as well because I could then understand and accept my students more. It's really quite fascinating when we start to explore this idea that our personal growth puts a lid on everything we touch. We can't accept others more than we accept ourselves. We can't love others more than we love ourselves. We can't have compassion for others more than we have compassion for ourselves. 

19:08 

So what does this mean for us? And why is this even an important concept? Well, first of all, it's important to realize that we are 100% responsible for what we are creating in our lives. 

19:23 

Every result we experience is a culmination of our thoughts, our feelings, and our actions. When we start taking responsibility rather than blaming other people or circumstances for where our lives are, then we can start to see the areas necessary for our growth. Because until we see these areas, until we're aware they even exist, there can be no growth. Awareness is always the first step to growth. Once we become aware, then we can start moving in a direction that will begin to lift our lid and create more space for greater relationships, for a more successful business, for greater self-love and compassion, for a stronger relationship with our Heavenly Father. 

20:15 

And here's some really good news: though the growth may be incremental and almost imperceptible at times, just the fact that we are here, that we're exploring these concepts, that we're seeking for ways to improve and be healthier emotionally and mentally means that we are in a growth pattern. We are slowly but surely nudging that lid a little bit here and a little bit there and we are making progress. It seems that sometimes, our personal growth is like our hair, right? The hair on our head. Day to day, we don't see the growth. We don't wake up one day and go, "oh look, I can tell it's longer today than it was just yesterday." We don't do that. We just see it every day and the growth isn't even noticeable from day to day. So we don't even really pay attention to it. But then it seems like all of a sudden one day we look in the mirror and we realize that our hair is too long and it really needs to be cut. 

21:14 

And we have these types of growth ahas in our lives as well. We don't see the growth because it's so small from day to day, but I promise you one day you will respond so differently than what you've been capable of in the past. You'll have more patience or you'll have more empathy or you'll have more compassion than you ever have been able to have. And it will probably shock you a little bit, but it happens if you will just stay the course. 

21:46 

So my friends, keep pushing up against that lid. Keep learning. Keep thinking and processing and reflecting. Just keep focused on your growth and eventually you'll see that you've outgrown your current lid and space and that everything in your life has a greater capacity for growth. You can do this. I can do this. I know that. And this is the beauty of middle-age, right? The capacity to do at a level that we've never been able to before. I love this middl- age growing up thing. I think it's amazing. I think it's so fun to be at this place, okay? 

22:36 

If you want some personal help from me working through some of these concepts, stepping into pushing that lid, contact me on my website. Let's set up a coaching session and let's get you started. Also if you want one more little place where you can get some good stuff from me and contact me, go on my Facebook page, Tanya Hale LDS Life Coaching, and you can follow me there and get some good stuff. I send out stuff every single day. So something's always coming out to help you change your perspective and see things a little bit differently. 

23:11 

Okay if you love this podcast, share it with somebody. This is how it grows. This is how we help our friends to get into a better place, and our family members. So share the podcast, please, if you will and let's keep this growth going. Let's help everybody lift the lid on their lives and create what they want to. 

23:31 

Alright my friends that is it for me today. Love you being here. Thank you so much really and I wish you all the best and I pray that you'll outgrow your lid, and you'll move into the next size. Have a great one. Talk to you later. Bye.