In this episode, John breaks down motivation in a novel way you've never seen before. In doing so, he reveals:
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In this episode, John breaks down motivation in a novel way you've never seen before. In doing so, he reveals:
Buy my book! 75 EASY: the ultimate challenge for personal growth
Amazon US
UK
CA
AU
Weight loss coaching - Join the Weight Loss Freedom Academy today
To inquire about 1 -1 Coaching with John - email John at john@oakesweightloss.com
Check out the EASY WAY OUT Blog/Newsletter site
Join the free "Lose Weight with John" community
Watch the Easy Way Out on Youtube
Speaker 1 (00:00:00) - Welcome. Today's topic is going to be shame and how it impacts motivation. Or you could say our topic will be motivation and how shame impacts it. I realize to you that may not seem like an important or intelligent distinction, but for me it's a little different because in the Weight Loss Freedom Academy, in the course the Weight Loss Freedom Framework, I devote two entire modules to these two topics, respectively module two and module three. So they're pretty foundational to everything that comes after as far as dismantling the structures of captivity that are keeping people stuck in emotional eating. And as we'll talk about today, removed from their innate motivation. And quite frankly, even though motivation and emotional eating are the number one and two topics that people who come into my community are interested in learning more about, that's what they see as the biggest inhibitors to their success. And they are they're right about that. But there are so many other topics that this conversation about shame and motivation, whether you're coming at it from either angle, what's at the core of these two topics or these two modules in my course, is essential for discovering the makeup of your inner world so that you can start to influence it.
Speaker 1 (00:01:13) - And hopefully for the parts that are working dis advantageously to your benefit, to your well-being, to your peace, and to weight loss, to dismantle them, which will allow for profound and lasting change. If you listen to this and you're interested in going way deeper on these topics and actually seeing changes in your life that you probably wouldn't otherwise get without the individualized attention from a coach, then hit me up. My email is in the show notes John at Oaks weight Loss and at Aki's Weight loss.com. And if you have a question for the podcast, you can email that to me at the same email address. Or you can ask it in the Facebook group. Just put some sort of hashtag or something that it's meant for the podcast. You'll probably get a lot of interaction and answers before the podcast comes out, but then I will be able to give it specific attention when I record my weekly podcast, because it's always nice to be able to answer someone in a verbal form, rather than just the typed out form.
Speaker 1 (00:02:11) - I feel like I can maybe more fully express myself. I am thinking about doing a live Q&A in the Facebook group or some sort of live webinar in probably early November, so if that's something that would interest you, you can make sure that you're signed up for the Facebook group, Lose Weight with John, or make sure that you're signed up to the email list, which I believe there's a link for that in the show notes below as well. If you're not on the email list, get on the email list. Okay, so let's talk about motivation. Just so you know, I have experienced such severe motivation issues that I have been suicidal, that I have not been motivated to take a single step or to leave bed, or to brush my teeth or take a shower. I have lost such motivation that I didn't want to live. Now that's obviously coming from a lot of different angles, more than just what we're going to talk about today. But what we're going to talk about today was one of the biggest factors in why I was so horribly depressed and unmotivated and anxious, of course.
Speaker 1 (00:03:08) - And anxiety and depression both have an impact on motivation, the same way they both have an impact on emotional eating. And today, I think we're going to talk a little bit about what anxiety and depression have in common. And you may not have ever heard somebody put it quite like this. I don't know if I've even heard anybody put it quite like this, but this is my $0.02 on the matter. So for what it's worth, and I'll get to that in just a second. But when it comes to motivation, I want you to really pull the lens out, right. Take an inventory. Let's think through all your frustrations, the things you want to do, but that you're not doing, the things that you know are good for you, that you're not doing, or that you're not doing regularly. And let's also honor any emotions you have about that. If you're really upset, if you're frustrated about the fact that you're unmotivated to do the things that you feel like, really express who you are at a deeper level, and you feel pretty raw about that, pretty upset, sad, depressed, worthless, anything that you're feeling is okay.
Speaker 1 (00:04:03) - So just trust me that this is important, that we just honor that. Just notice it, okay? Because that's going to help you actually remain in contact with what this issue actually is in your life. We're going to talk on a conceptual level, which will in a way, remove you as the focus and allow us to put the focus on the ideas and the constructs that we're dealing with. Because sometimes when we're dealing with it in our own life, we can feel like we're the only one. We can feel very lonely, cut off, hopeless without the tools or know how to deal with what we're facing and when we can talk about things in sort of general psychological terms that every human can share, it can really help you not feel so alone. But ultimately we want to get back to that, that self focus so that you can get free from the things that are holding you back. And when we come back around, I want you to be able to see yourself in a light of compassion and in a light of full.
Speaker 1 (00:04:59) - Acceptance. Right? So we're not celebrating the fact that you're unmotivated. We're not preferring it. We're just totally accepting the way it is right now and how however you feel about it. And I'd say if you tend to have a take the bull by the horns mentality, or that's at least been programmed into you really pay attention to any voices telling you, oh, I can take care of this. All I got to do is just get disciplined. All I got to do is just get take control. I just got to do it right. And while that's true, in a way, it's not true in any helpful sense. And if it were true in any helpful sense, one of the other 14,000 times you've tried to do that in your life would have worked out. And so today I'm going to say some things that might seem a little bit counterintuitive, especially, are going to go against the grain of what we are taught in our culture. But I'm also going to speak to some giant chasms in the middle of where our culture doesn't speak at all.
Speaker 1 (00:05:51) - And this is the wherever that whatever image you're getting. That's the giant pit that we've all fallen through at some point, whether it's with our mental health, our physical health, weight, fitness, all that. One of the first epiphanies I had on my journey about motivation became clear. You know, as I started to do eMDR and start to see layers of false belief, layers of especially stories I've been telling myself about my childhood, my entire life, reinvigorating reifying the false context that was forced on my view of my life by others who we could say were abusing me, were abusing me. Let's not dance around it simply by coming to grips with the fact that I was an abused child. That was something I hadn't seen for 36 years at the time. And so seeing such a radical epiphany to where when I found that out, when I realized the truth of what had happened, I felt like I was levitating off the ground. It felt like the world was melting around me. It's the most surreal moment I've ever experienced, even more surreal than some of the hellish psychotic panic attacks I've suffered.
Speaker 1 (00:06:57) - The truth, when you're coming out of a lie, can feel disorienting, painful. It can mess you up for a minute. And this is why our willingness to feel discomfort, or to be with discomfort long enough for us to actually process what's going on, is so key to any kind of recovery, any kind of growth, any kind of healing. Because eventually I stopped feeling like I was levitating over the course of maybe 3 or 4 minutes, and then feet on the ground, my mind started to try to catch up to the truth that had been laid out in front of me. So one of the things I realized as I started to look at my motivation issues in the light of what I was learning in therapy and through eMDR, I started to look at motivation in not in the same light, but like holding it up in that light and being like, well, is there anything I can learn about motivation and the way I'm motivated or not motivated to do things in the light of, hey, is there something about this that I just completely misunderstand because of how I grew up, how I've been treated, and how I've basically been treating myself, and how our culture has drummed certain ideas into me about what motivation is and how I access it, and what it means about me if I do that or don't.
Speaker 1 (00:08:08) - And sure enough, it was like tapping on a very old thin pane of glass that just broke. Immediately, I started seeing a lot of different perspectives that no one had ever taught me about motivation, and one of the first ones, I think I was in the parking lot of a Rite Aid waiting for my family. I was having a lot of physical pain, a physical manifestation of PTSD, panic, anxiety, all that stuff. And I was sitting with it and it was the early days of sitting with it, and I it was one of the first times I remember walking myself through the truth of what had happened and being like, okay, this all started somewhere. This didn't come out of the blue. This started, somebody did something and that happened. And it wasn't you who did it. So this isn't your fault. This isn't really about you. This is about what somebody else did. And seeing that context around it was one of the first times where I saw my PTSD, my weight, my pain, all of it.
Speaker 1 (00:09:07) - Just how generally effed up my whole life was. I saw it as almost like a third party, looking at something from an objective remove. And in the same moment I had a few different epiphanies. One of them was seeing myself as someone with motivation, with self-worth, someone with a lot of strength, and seeing those things trampled out in childhood and continue to be trampled up by the cycles of thought and patterns of behavior that were instilled in me in childhood that I've carried through into adulthood, or at least carried until then. I'm sure I'm still carrying a couple. I still always got some things to iron out right, and I still see this image today when I talk to people about motivation. When I first introduced people to the to to my way of thinking about motivation, I see boots stomping out little green plants in a. Harden. So that's where I'd like to start. The idea that you lack motivation because you don't have it, I think is wrong. I think we all have motivation. We are all motivated.
Speaker 1 (00:10:12) - The reason we think we're not motivated is one we think we don't know what we want. Get back to that. Two we see a lack of action in the face of things that we desire to do or that we feel impulses to do. And so we think, okay, I don't have motivation, then I'm unmotivated to do this thing, or I'm not motivated enough to do this thing. Now, again, that might be technically true, but not in any helpful sense, like the same way I was talking about earlier. It's like saying, well, I'm not tall enough to see over a wall. Now, if I said that, you might assume that I'm below six feet tall, maybe below 5.5ft. But what I didn't mention is that the wall is 100ft high in your world. You don't realize that there are four foot walls, that there are boundaries to motivation, that are surmountable. And so it feels like you have a lack of motivation when actually you have a surplus of boundary and wall obstacle.
Speaker 1 (00:11:06) - So first thing I want you to think about is the idea that visualize your motivation, your impulse to get up and go and do stuff and work out and eat healthy and do nice things for people, and be generous and volunteer time all the things that you're currently not able to do for whatever reason, and feel that that inner pressure really focus in on it and feel that inner pressure, that energy that wants to be expressed, even if it feels like it's the size of a pea. Feel like that whole world that's in that energy, and maybe it's locked away. Maybe it's not something you can really feel, but you know that it's much bigger than what is being represented as in your psyche or in your body. And that's because most of your attention is probably falling on the things that are preventing you from expressing that. Most of your attention is focusing on the walls and compared to those walls, your motivation does appear to be lacking, often woefully so. So imagine that your motivation isn't the size of a pea.
Speaker 1 (00:12:09) - Let's say, for sake of argument, that it is a pissed off £600 bucking bronco or horse's £600, let's say £1,200. That sounds more intimidating. It's probably more. I think that's, I want to say £1,200. Siri, how much does a horse weigh? Siri how much does a Bronco way? Not a Ford Bronco, Siri or useless Siri. How much does a Bronco weigh? The animal, not the car. Still with the car? Okay, Siri being less than helpful. So you got a £1,200 bucking bronco right at the rodeo. It's in a pen now. This thing could kill you. It could kill anybody in attendance at the rodeo. There's no question that this thing is powerful and that once released, it can do things that will be felt. It's so good at doing these things that people will travel from miles and miles around to watch it do its thing. But in that moment, it can't do its stuff. The Bronco can't do Bronco stuff. Why? Because it's in a pen.
Speaker 1 (00:13:07) - And when a Bronco is in a pen, it can't express the truth of what it is. If you put a bird inside a box and clip its wings and never let it fly, are you really getting an idea of what that bird is capable of? If you take a person and put them at the bottom of a hill, right. And this is you, by the way, and I'm walking up and I'm saying, hey, why are you at the bottom of this hill? And you're like, well, I just don't have any motivation. Okay? So show me, like, try to get up the hill and you walk up the hill and then you fall down and you roll back to where you started. What I'm saying here is look at the chain around your foot. Look at the things that are binding you to this place of stuckness, of inertia, this rutted path. And this applies to almost everything that's keeping you overweight, whether it's emotional, eating, motivation, etcetera. You do not express the motivation that you have because there are things preventing it.
Speaker 1 (00:14:04) - Thus, you are not without motivation, you are without freedom. So that's a major point I want to put a star next to. I'll say it again you are not without motivation, you are without freedom. And to some extent you're without direction. But really, that's going to come back around to to freedom as well. And I'll explain what I mean here in a second. So if we think about motivation in terms of freedom to express the motivation we have, people have the freedom to express it or they don't. Now, because our barriers to freedom come in a few different forms, it's actually helpful to think about this in terms of what we might call alignment or the bandwidth of a pipe, right? Let's say that you are water trying to fit through a pipe. Do you want the pipe to be really small, or do you want the pipe to be big and wide? You want the pipe to be big and wide. More water can get through, right? There's a bigger bandwidth for water.
Speaker 1 (00:14:55) - Well, the same is true of motivation you have a certain bandwidth for. Shin, and that's going to be widened by three main things desire a sense of permission and ability, or at least your perception of your ability. And it's going to be diminished by three things. Those are shame cycles of failure, fear of failure and obligation. Senses of obligation. Let me go through and explain those really quickly. Ability. That's pretty straightforward, right? Well, yes and no. If you're motivated to jump and touch the rim of a basketball hoop, you may not have the physical capability of that, right. But does that mean you lack the capability? Yes and no. Because today you lack it. But do you as a being, as an entity, lack the ability to touch the rim depending on your age? Maybe like genuinely that's never going to happen. Let's just say let's just say that there was a time in your life when you it was within the realm of possibility. Other people, your size and stature have done it.
Speaker 1 (00:15:54) - So let's just say for the sake of argument, you could do it. Or doing a 20 inch box jump, whatever, running a mile and under eight minutes or under six minutes. If you want to be more ambitious. You don't have the ability to do that today. But do you have the ability to do that? Yes. Do I have the ability to run an eight minute mile? Not today. But do I have the ability? Ultimately, yes. And I know that if I applied myself, I would have that ability in fairly short order, maybe a few weeks. Similarly, if you want to learn Spanish, do you lack the ability to speak Spanish? Yes. Do you lack the ability to learn Spanish? No. But oftentimes we have this cognitive bias where we mistake our ability for our ability. We mistake our current possession of skills, for our potential, for the possession of skills. And because we tend not to believe the things that we can't see right in front of us, we are very prone toward putting more emphasis on our perceived inability rather than our perceived ability.
Speaker 1 (00:17:00) - And the cognitive bias works like this. Hey, I can jump over that fence. No you can't. And so I don't try so I don't jump over the fence. It's not rocket science, you know. We're all familiar with that, but it is still a cognitive bias. If you convince yourself you can't do something, you will never prove yourself wrong. Right. That's just motivational speaker at your high school. One on one. Right? But it's still very important. And this is why if we don't follow through on our impulses, we will begin to have our sense of what's possible, shrink and shrink into far smaller a bandwidth than what we're really capable. In fact, just a tiny, pathetic shadow of what we're really capable of. And that's a journey that we're going to go on eventually in expanding that obligation is related to desire, right? So let's say you desire to kiss somebody and now you feel obligated to kiss that same person. It's a very different emotional arrangement, a very different emotional context.
Speaker 1 (00:18:03) - And all of a sudden the what are the stakes? What are the potential benefits when you want to kiss someone? Well, maybe there's relationship and love and sparks flying and all that good brain chemicals. What's the payoff? If you feel like you should kiss someone, I pat on the back, check the box. It's not very enticing, is it? Now, what if we're not talking about doing something pleasant, like kissing someone that you want to kiss? Let's say that we're talking about moving some boxes out of the garage so that you have space to make your home gym. I should I should really get that project done versus I'm so excited to get these boxes out of here so I can have a home gym. And we've all experienced that, that switch. But just because we've experienced that switch when it comes to healing, when it comes to actually seeing it happen, it's pretty difficult. It's more difficult than rewiring your perception of your ability. That's really a cognitive behavioral thing, or reframing a process of awareness to move obligatory living into the zone of desire to where we actually are, relating to things we want to do via desire rather than obligation, which we're doing that because of a story that's been impressed upon us at some point that we've decided to join arms with, consciously or unconsciously.
Speaker 1 (00:19:19) - So in early days, ability is something that we can see a massive perspective change with, and so therefore a massive shift in relative ability growth, you could say moving from shoulds and obligations back to expression of desire being the main thing, motivating that aspect of your action that can often require a deeper healing to get there. For some people more than others, you may even find just me talking about this helps you see areas where you can start to make changes or start to see things differently, and that's great. Take anything that pops up, take every inch of ground that that is going to come to you easily. But today we're going to be talking about. The third factor. Permission. Now, permission has to do with one of the trickiest emotions for us to for us to grapple with. Nobody really likes a sense of obligation or, oh, I got to do this thing right. We hate that. Nobody really loves feeling afraid that they're going to fail or feeling incapable of doing something, but compared to feeling shame, we would pick those every single minute of the day, every day of the week.
Speaker 1 (00:20:27) - And what that means, reflexively, is that our relationship to permission is the fastest way to see a massive increase in the bandwidth of our motivation. Because one thing you need to remember is that your motivation is not a reservoir. It's not a battery that you are going to run out of. There's willpower, but you've come to associate motivation with willpower, and that's because you've been trying to motivate yourself effortlessly without being in the sort of aligned, easy, flowy space where your actions can just reflect your true desires and your freedom. And you've been approaching every attempt to move an activity from I'm not doing it to I need to do it, so I'm going to move it from one pile to the other via willpower, effortful action. And this is why we talk about the easy way. It doesn't mean that everything is without effort or like I'm going to move the boxes out of the garage. I'm going to burn the same amount of calories whether I want to do it or if I am dragging myself through it.
Speaker 1 (00:21:22) - So it's still the same amount of work. However, have you ever done a big project because you're excited about clearing space to do something fun? Yeah, that does require a lot less emotional mental energy to do. And when you're motivated from that place, you're not having to dip into your stores of willpower to do it. And this is very important for people who are recovering from PTSD, people who have ADHD, learning how to truly be motivated, learning how to truly express the motivation you already have, despite the numerous barriers that your mind is putting up, can have a massive impact on your life. So what I'm suggesting is that if you were to change your relationship with shame, it would massively increase your sense of permission, which would massively increase your zone of aligned action. Your ability to allow motivation through the pipe, to allow your motivation to be expressed in your actions, rather than just through your intent, and then being upset at yourself when you don't do the thing. So, John, you're telling me that shame is inhibiting my motivation? Yes.
Speaker 1 (00:22:23) - But John, one of the first things I feel when I think about my lack of motivation is shame. And that is your first big clue as to why you don't feel motivated. Because the way you relate to your lack of motivation only causes more lack. It just increases the amount of shame that's operating in your life. Now. Shame does a number of things. You've probably heard me talk about the fact that shame acts as a bouncer, which will keep you out of your inner world completely, but in this context, shame is slamming doors in your life and your exterior world as well. Saying you're not allowed to go to these places and do these things for any number of reasons. They can be based on negative beliefs about yourself, about other people, about the nature of the world. They can be based in those old stories cognitive distortions, delusions that have been baked into you via trauma or neglect. It can come from a lot of angles, and we don't need to get into all of those today for you to get something significant out of this idea that shame is shutting down your motivation.
Speaker 1 (00:23:20) - A lot of those boots in the garden of motivation, stomping out the little seedlings that are trying to grow their shame boots. So how do we expand permission and thereby expand our motivation? Expand how much motivation is being expressed in our lives? Right. Because if you feel pulled to do something and you have a genuine desire to do it, and you have enough ability and you have enough permission, it will get done. But if you lack any one of those things, in this case, if you lack permission, it will not get done. So much of the schema of your mind is permission based. I'm not allowed to go here. I'm not allowed to go there. Oftentimes this started in childhood, when permission was doled out by authority, and we have maintained the same relationship without authority, especially if you went through a difficult childhood. The more abuse of your authority figures were in childhood, the less likely you were to be able to evolve beyond that, beyond the reliance on it, beyond the subservience to it.
Speaker 1 (00:24:16) - Your psychological development gets inhibited because of trauma, and one of the major things that isn't allowed to grow is autonomy. Being your own person, independence, questioning authority, or an inability to do those things healthfully. So you do them like completely at at a thousand miles an hour, and you literally can't get through your day without starting the revolution and fighting the system somehow. So for many people listening to this, your sense of permission is going to be related to a sense of authority that you are not allowed to decide the boundaries of your life. You're not allowed to decide the boundaries of your behavior. You may be thinking, well, John, no one's allowed to decide the boundaries of their behavior. Isn't that the basis of morality? Like we don't just do whatever we wanted. Do we do what's right? This gets us into a whole nother topic. Long story short, no. We do what we want to do when we feel the ability and permission to do it. So if you are a moral person and you care about the rights and value and well-being of others, it will not give you pleasure to do things that serve you and only hurt other people.
Speaker 1 (00:25:20) - There's no desire in doing that. So even if you had the ability and the sense of permission, you genuinely would not desire to do so. People are afraid that if they expand their permission, they're going to be some wild person who's out of control. No, you won't be out of control. You will be free. Which in the context of so much suffering that you're in right now, which is coming from captivity, that freedom is not a liability to you, that freedom is actually the source of all of the growth in health that you're going to have in the future. But it's easy when you've been living in a prison your entire life, to see the outside world as threatening to see freedom as, whew, that's too much. That's too much. That can't be a good thing. There's just too many variables out there. I'm going to stay inside the bunker. And we see this in actual prisons. We see this in cults. When people are brainwashed, they even though logically their brains are telling them that they're stuck in a situation they can't get out of, but their brains are also telling them like, oof, I don't know, maybe we should just stay here though, because the outside world outside of this seems a really dangerous.
Speaker 1 (00:26:23) - At least here we know the lay of the land. We know how to stay safe. So we will choose to stay inside of the prison in the name of safety. Picking the devil we know rather than the devil we don't. So this would be a different conversation, really, about about the importance of structure, morality and how you make your decisions. I have a lot to say about that, and I do believe that my perspectives I'm sharing today on permission do lend a lot to that discussion. But today, let's just say, okay, we're not talking about doing anything immoral. We're talking about going to the gym. We're talking about wearing what you want to the beach. We're talking about standing up for yourself to people who you're intimidated by. We're talking about getting up and leaving the dinner table when some family member is out of line and saying hurtful things. We're talking about boundaries. Well, being putting yourself first, all these things that you currently do not feel permitted to do, upsetting people.
Speaker 1 (00:27:14) - Oh man, how many of us do not feel permitted to upset other people and so rather running around making sure nobody's upset or we are making our decisions based on not what we want or what we think we're able to do, but what we feel permitted to do based on the fact that if anybody gets upset, we see this as like the highest form of danger. So we make our decisions based on the whims of others rather than our own whims, our own values. And I think a lot of people get that. And really, when I'm talking about permission versus morality or permission versus personal structure, I'm really talking about that relationship between you and others just on a grander scale. Forget I said that. We've got plenty of to talk about here. So from 30,000ft, people do what they feel permitted. And if somebody has an impulse to do something and these three things align, they're going to do it. If these things don't align, the chances of them doing it go down a lot. If we're only dealing with maybe one of these being a factor, we're probably not going to see it happen because it's two on one.
Speaker 1 (00:28:16) - So let's take that 30,000 foot view and let's go back to you. In your situation, I often use the example of a lady named Cindy like she's my she's an avatar for my average client, right? Cindy is female. She's a mom of kids who are in their late teens, early 20s leaving the nest kind of still around. She's 51 years old, she's £350. She has a job and responsibilities, and she's good at taking care of other people, but she can't seem to take care of herself. Cindy lacks motivation or she thinks she does right without splitting hairs. She doesn't seem to have the motivation to go to the gym. So we have Cindy make a list. Right, Cindy, take a look at your inner world. Look at all the things you're not doing that you have the intention to do. Let's start noticing. Just go through life. Start noticing like a big red flag. Every time you have an intention to do something, and then you don't end up doing that. You don't follow through on an idea that you had, or you want to email that person, but you don't do it.
Speaker 1 (00:29:14) - You procrastinate on a project. All of these are different forms of lacking the motivation to do something, lacking the execution part of action. Right? There's the conception, there's the execution, and there's a spectrum between those two things where we get into like, am I actually planning? Do I actually have the tools I need, blah blah, blah, but just look for things that you're saying I should do that, or I want to do that and then you're not doing it right. This is an area where you likely have a lack of a sense of ability, a lack of desire or lack of permission. Now, in the context of fitness, to keep our discussion focused, let's just think about things in terms of weight loss, right? People need motivation to get up and move. Let's just really focus on that, because that's what a lot of people mean when they talk about motivation. It can be the motivation to say no to pizza or something like that. But let's talk about motivation in the sense of motivation to do things, which I think is the most straightforward way of talking about motivation in a way that will apply broadly and make sense for most people.
Speaker 1 (00:30:17) - So when you routinely notice, okay, I keep thinking, man, I can walk more, I should walk more. I want to walk more, whatever, whatever way you're phrasing it to yourself, if you keep thinking that, but then you're never going on the walks, get out of journal, get out a piece of paper and write this down. Going for walks. I want to go for walks. Why? Write down why? So that you're clear on the fact that. Well, I want this. Am I able to walk? Yes. Okay, so if you have a genuine desire and you have the belief that you have the ability to do it, or you have the ability to do it, then we know that what's stopping you from going on those walks is a sense of permission, which inversely is the presence of shame. Just to note, shame in our inner world tries to protect us from the judgment of others by keeping things hidden. Shame in the public sphere outside of us works the opposite way.
Speaker 1 (00:31:12) - Shame seeks to change behavior. It seeks for the in-group to be more aware of your mistake, right? This is why when you walk around telling everybody the bad thing that somebody did, people say you're shaming them, right? You are spreading the news of the mistake this person made. Why do we do that? Because the more people who know about the mistake, the more psychological weight of judgment the offender will feel, which in a healthy, balanced individual who's not a sociopath or a narcissist, that's going to have a huge impact on them psychologically. And if even if they are a narcissist or a sociopath, having that many people mad at them is a tactical problem. If you get exiled from your group, that's tantamount to a death sentence. You simply cannot afford for that many people to see you as a threat to the fabric of the group, to the health of the group. So we are deathly afraid of shame. We are deathly afraid, especially of public shame. And you may have never really faced the extent to which this fear of shame is preventing you from taking action.
Speaker 1 (00:32:19) - Fear of shame is also known as lack of permission, because it's all coming from this sense of authority. When you're a child, this authority is your parents, teachers, authority figures. But as you become older, authority moves into the realm of the in-group, which was probably a lot to handle when it was like 120 people running around the plains of Central Asia. How much more complicated has it become when we live in cities of thousands of people, when our social circles stretch into hundreds of people easily? In the age of the internet, when news of your crimes can travel around the world in minutes, the fear of shame is at an all time high. So really caring what other people think. You're never going to not care about that. Why? Because it's like saying you're going to not care about eating food or having shelter. This was essential to how we came to survive and thrive as a species. We were really good at altering the behavior of people who were acting as a threat to the community.
Speaker 1 (00:33:21) - Either we change their behavior via shame, or we change their behavior by removing them from the club, from the group. Why? Because it was life or death. We could we simply could not afford to keep someone around who was a threat to the group and to balance so that desire to maintain the good graces of other people. You're never going to get rid of that. That's normal and healthy. That's actually the sign of a person who's not a sociopath. So if you care what other people think, that doesn't make you some some worse, some beta follower, none of that. There are two kinds of people, right? People who care what other people think, and people who tell people that they don't care what other people think. Everyone cares what other people think, and if they don't, they have a a psychological or a personality disorder, a pathological disorder. Not good. Now, people pleasing is when that desire to be in balance with those around us gets twisted to where we feel like we're not allowed to be judged for the slightest smallest criticism, or else that's equal to being exiled when that's not the case at all.
Speaker 1 (00:34:29) - Right? And when we're letting that fear run our lives, we start doing all this crazy stuff involved in people pleasing. So with this context, that caring what other people think is actually healthy and completely normal, let's look at your sense of permission. Let's look at the authority of what people think society. There are a number of things that affect what other people think. The two biggest ones are culture and perceived threats. So if your culture. Baseline says that X behavior is a threat to the group. So we have to stomp this out. Like dancing in the movie Dirty Dancing. That town decided dancing was a threat to our safety. So we're going to stomp this out. And that was really in alignment with their culture, right? Maybe, let's say in the 80s, having an interracial relationship in the Deep South or even today, some places, things where culturally it just wasn't done, it wasn't allowed. There was a weight of judgment baked into the culture. You could think of that as a chronic contributor towards shame.
Speaker 1 (00:35:32) - Then we have acute contributors towards shame. For instance, after nine over 11, all of a sudden being a muslim in America became a more shameful thing. It started bearing a larger weight of judgment than it ever had in American history. So in this sense, acute events that stoke xenophobia or racism, right. Those are clear examples of what I'm talking about. They may be linked to those chronic forms of racism or anti-Muslim sentiment that already existed. But the explosion, right. That really speaks to an acute event. So these two things are separate, but not completely. So when you're running up against a lack of permission, you're either running up a chronic cultural view that anybody who does X is bad, or you're running up against a hot button issue of the day saying, people who do this sort of thing are bad, no matter what you think about it. We've had plenty of examples of that in the last few years. Cancel culture and all that. That's basically using public shame to try to achieve certain political or cultural ends.
Speaker 1 (00:36:33) - Canceling is the 2023 version, the internet version of exiling somebody from the in-group and restricting their access to community goods. So if you find yourself not feeling permitted to go to the gym, you're not going to the gym even though you keep intending to. And it's not for a lack of ability or lack of wanting to go. You realize I when I imagined myself at the gym, I feel like there's ants crawling on my skin. It's because I feel so uncomfortable and unwelcome there. Okay, okay, let's say we're talking about Cindy, right? Cindy wants to go. She actually likes the stair climber. Even. It may seem masochistic to some people, but she doesn't like the treadmill. She doesn't like bikes, but she likes the stair mill and she can go and get a great workout on that thing. Just watch the TV at the gym and just slow and steady. Climb that stair mill until she's just a puddle. But she doesn't want to go because she doesn't want to be that visible. She doesn't want to be up high on that stair mill where everybody can see her and judge her.
Speaker 1 (00:37:29) - And so she stops. She says, okay, but why don't I want to do that? And she identifies that in her head. There's a rule fat people aren't allowed in the gym. That's basically what it all boils down to. So now that she understands the rule, right. What's the rule that's that's related to my lack of permission. You need to find the rule. For instance, fat people aren't allowed to run in public. Men aren't allowed to have a peloton or whatever it is. Women aren't allowed to take boxing classes, whatever it is. These are just very generalized examples. So when you find the rule that's affecting your behavior, now you need to hold this up against reality. So now we ask our fat people allowed in the gym. I could talk about it for hours and I literally do in my course. But one of the tricks you can do to try to see if a rule matches up with reality is ask yourself if I was Queen of the world or King of the world? And somebody came to me and said, hey, I have a great idea for a law, and that law is and then insert the rule that you're currently contending with.
Speaker 1 (00:38:35) - So in this case, I have this great idea for a law. And that law is that fat people aren't allowed in gyms. Would you take that on? Would you enact that law? Does it make sense to you? Well, if you were queen or king for the day, you would consider that and go, okay, fat people aren't allowed in the gym. Well, how do people get fit? How do people lose weight? Wait a second. All the fit people in the gym, how many of them started out not so fit? Hold on. This to this doesn't make sense. Half the people in this gym probably were were overweight at some point. Statistically, it's very likely. So this idea that fat people aren't allowed in the gym is not true, because clearly fat people are allowed in the gym because half of the people here used to be overweight and now they're not. Why? Because they went to the gym. Was that hard for them? Probably. So now you can see.
Speaker 1 (00:39:35) - Ah, my shame about being seen in the gym is the wall standing between me and the success that they've also enjoyed. And now you understand. It's not about all these things that you think you need to do to lose weight. It's not about exercise selection or confusing your muscles or keto or just any of this stuff. Meal timing, meal composition. For you. The number one thing standing between you and losing weight is that you don't feel permitted to do the things that cause weight loss, and once you can see that for what it is, the lie that it's all based in will fall apart. Once Cindy sees like, oh my gosh, if I was queen for a day and somebody suggested this, I would think about it for like nine seconds and be like, that's fucking ridiculous. And honestly, most of the things that hold us captive are that ridiculous. Some are easier for us to admit that than others. Some are easier for us to see in that light, some are more difficult. And it's different for everybody.
Speaker 1 (00:40:34) - Right? So there's no judgment here over like what you find difficult to, to shame in your life. There's no judgment over where you find it hard to expand permission versus what I do or where Sally or Cindy does. Right. Because it's all ultimately relating to what happened to you, what happened to me, what happened to Cindy. And this can help you understand how to how to help other people in your life connect with their innate motivation. We're not trying to pump them up or get them to want to do things because they already want to do things. That's not the problem. The problem is that they don't feel permitted or they don't feel able. And maybe you're not going to convince the person, but maybe you will. Maybe by speaking the truth to them, hey, you are allowed in the gym. That thing in your head that says you're not allowed to go walk outside because people might see you. That's not true. You are allowed to walk outside. This is your planet as much as anybody else's.
Speaker 1 (00:41:24) - And what you judge about yourself is doing way more harm to you than what other people could ever possibly do with their judgment. You might crack something open for that person, and oftentimes it's easier to do this for someone else than it is to do for yourself. So again, another trick with expanding your own permission in order to access more of your own motivation is to look at your life as if you're looking at somebody else's life from an objective remove, say, on paper, okay? Case number 470001 Jones, comma. Cindy. Subject displays lack of permission toward going to the gym. Subject engages in such and such story about what this means, right? You can just write it out in objective clinical terms. And by doing so, what we're really allowing to happen is for awareness to change what we perceive as allowed versus not allowed, as permitted versus not permitted. So really, this is one of the many changes that ultimately comes down to a shift in awareness, because right now you don't feel motivated because you are not aware of the fact that you have total permission.
Speaker 1 (00:42:35) - And when you become aware of the fact that you have total permission, you are free, at least to a large extent. And obviously that freedom is going to be supplemented in a major ways by changing the way you relate to a fear of failure and ability, changing the way you relate to desire versus obligation and shoulds topics for another day. But this is one of the biggest ones you could see in massive change in your life today. If you started really digging in and examining the places where you're simply not doing things because you don't feel permitted, you don't feel safe to do it. You don't feel permitted. You feel like something bad would happen to you. You feel like Mom or dad would be mad at you. You feel like the teachers or all the kids at school would be laughing at you. Anything like that. Anything that's just a reflection of fear of the in-group, fear of the clan, and ultimately fear of exile. And see that fear operating on a twisting of reality is largely responsible for the state of your life and health.
Speaker 1 (00:43:36) - And when you see the truth underneath the lies, those lies will vanish. They may stick around. They may still trip in your ear from time to time, but their power is gone. Once you see the man behind the curtain, the wizard has no power, even if he still projecting himself up on the wall and saying ominous, spooky things. It has no power once you see the truth. I hope you enjoyed this discussion of motivation and my unique take on it, and I hope you found a lot of practical use in this. If you got a lot out of this, I'd love to hear from you. You can email me, you can post in the Facebook group, Lose Weight with John if you want to dig into this, and you want my individualized help coaching you through how to do this and how to see these changes in your life, and helping you find out where you're suffering from a lack of permission. Inquire about coaching. Just email me John at Oaks weight loss. Com subject line coaching interest and coaching.
Speaker 1 (00:44:29) - Something like that. I'll send you some questions. Get to know you, figure out if you're a good fit for my program and then we can move forward from there. If you want to help support my mission, you want to help support me as I grow this podcast listener base. Any sharing you could do telling friends about it would be hugely helpful. Reviews. Reviews are really big. Any reviews you can give, whether it's on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, whatever platform you listen on, reviews are really going to help the reach of this podcast. If you're getting value out of this podcast and it's helping you with your life, then share it with other people. Help them via word of mouth or reviews, posting on social media. And yeah, maybe when we get to a certain milestone, we can do like maybe like a live Q&A podcast. Maybe that would be fun. Let me know what you think would be a good celebration of hitting a major benchmark in weekly downloads, right? And like I said, if you have any questions, you can email me or hit me up in the Facebook group.
Speaker 1 (00:45:26) - Links in the show notes. That's all for now. Have a fantastic week and you'll hear from me soon.