Episode 84: Living in Integrity with Your Highest Self

Welcome to the 100% Awesome Podcast with April Price, you might not know it, but every result in your life is 100% because of the thought you think. And that, my friends, is 100% awesome!

Hello, podcast universe! Welcome to Episode 84 of the 100% Awesome Podcast. I'm April Price, and I am so happy to be with you on the podcast today. And just in case you were wondering, in case you need an update, it is still 50/50 out here. I just got a call from David this morning telling me that he had been in a car accident. He was on the freeway on his way to work, and somebody rear ended him. And so, probably not the easiest morning for him, right? Especially probably not the best morning for the poor guy that hit him. And so, I don't know if you're keeping score out there. You know, if you like marking things off on your bingo card for the Price family, but it wasn't that long ago that my son crashed his car on the freeway. And no sooner had we replaced that car that he was at work, and someone smashed into that new car when it was just sitting parked in the parking lot. So, like, we're going through cars, like other people go through ketchup.

But it made me think like when stuff like this happens, I always think about a do over. Like, if we could go back in time, and change just a few seconds here, or a few seconds there, it could have been so different, right? Like, even with Covid-19, like sometimes I even wonder how, a single, momentary split-second decision, or action like created this experience for the entire world. Or if it had gone a little bit differently, it could have changed everything. And this thought, remarkably, never makes me feel bad. And here is why, because I always think, like, if it was that easy to change, and it could have been changed, then it would have, right? If it was a tiny decision in a matter of moments, then it could have all been avoided, and yet it wasn't. Which gives me an enormous amount of comfort, right? Because I realize that it is all happening for us somehow, some way it is all happening for us. And just because I can't see how, doesn't change that.

And also, this morning, it just kind of reminded me, and made me reflect, and be so glad once again that no mistakes are ever permanent, right? There are no lasting tragedies, there are a million do overs, and repairs, and replacements, and replays available to us. And even things that seem really final here in this life, they never really end, right? We never run out of hope, or chances, we just keep going. And even if things can't be made right here in this physical world, this isn't the end, and it will all be made right in the end. And I love that thought.

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Okay, so anyways, I have been thinking a lot, you guys, about this episode that I've been about to give. And I keep telling myself, like, well, let's talk about something else, and it just keeps surfacing for me, and so we're going to go with it, right? I'm going to share my experience with you, and in this case, it is going to require me to be a little bit vulnerable with you. But I just keep thinking about the things that I'm learning right now, and I think they will be so valuable to you, and your life experience, okay? But in order to do that, in order to show you what I am learning, I am also going to have to show you all the things I don't know, right? I'm going to have to show you all of the things that my brain has labeled as a failure, or a problem, and that feels really vulnerable. So, I mean, luckily, though, if you've been listening to this podcast for any length of time, I'm sure that you are no longer under the illusion that I am perfect, or successful all the time, so I guess we're not really actually breaking any new ground here. Okay, so here we go!

So, I want to start today with an idea that I learned when I was a freshman in college, and I had a job at that time working for a professor at BYU named Terry Warner, and he was a philosophy professor there. And he had also founded the Harbinger Institute, and the focus of much of his work was on a concept that he called "self-deception." And the idea, and I'm sure this is like a really clumsy summarization of it, right? But the idea that he talked about a lot was that as humans, we often make choices that go against our better natures, that they go against our highest self. And so, to do this to like kind of, make these choices against our higher self, we have to participate in a kind of like self-deception, right? We have to deceive ourselves, justify ourselves, and often that means we end up blaming others as well. And he asked like all the time, like, why do we find ourselves doing things that we don't approve of? Why do we alienate others, even people that we love? Why do we do all these things in our life that we think we don't want to be doing? And it's something that I'm sure that you have noticed in your own life, right?

For example, you know that you love your children. They are the most precious thing in your life to you, and yet you find yourself yelling at them, or being frustrated with them, or judging them. You love your husband dearly, he's the most important thing in your life, and yet when he calls you from the freeway needing the insurance information, because he just got into a car accident, you are snippy, and rude, and totally put out. And somehow, instead of being loving, and relieved that he is okay, instead you get all mad, and bothered that he is interrupting your morning. This is just like a possible example you might have. Or like in another way we all set goals, right? Like maybe you set a goal to get up early, and exercise, and read your scriptures. And then, the next morning, the last thing you want to do is get out of bed, and you think there are a million reasons why getting up really doesn't even matter, right? And on, and on, and on. Like, why is it like this, why aren't we living the way we want to live? Why aren't we acting, and showing up in our lives the way we want to?

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So, I want you to, like, think for a minute about why this is? And I like to think about it like this. So, there are two parts to each of us, there is our brain, and there is our spirit. So, your brain is just an organ, it isn't you, is it? It's an organ in your human body that has a specific function in your body, right? And its motives were performing that function are solely driven by survival goals. It's solely driven by increasing the amount of pleasure we have, avoiding pain, and saving energy, and that is the only thing it is concerned about. Now, the highest part of you, your spirit is driven by ideals, by love, by the divine, within each of us, by that need to grow, and stretch, and develop more capacity. And your brain is constantly trying to override that part of you. And to do that, it plays this little game of "self-deception." Every time you want to do something in your life, your brain tries to talk you out of it. It tells you these lies, it tells you isn't that important, doesn't really matter. Tells you that you can't, it tells you that you're going to get hurt, or you're going to fail, or you're going to humiliate yourself. And the more that we listen to, and believe this self-deceptive narrative of our brain, the less we act in the ways we want, and the worse it feels inside of us. Because after a while, it starts to feel like your whole life is out of integrity with this highest part of you.

And so, for me, a few years ago, as I looked around my life, the primary reason that I was so miserable was not that my life was so bad, it was that in so many ways I had just engaged in self-deception. I had just been buying all of these lies for so long that my brain was selling me, and that disconnect that was created between me, that was showing up in my life, and my highest self, like that disconnect, was painfully out of integrity. It felt really bad. And that is the same for every one of us in so many ways. If you look around your life, and notice where you aren't living the way you want, right? Or you're not acting the way that you want, it's just because in some way you are buying the lies your brain is selling you. You are engaging in a kind of "self-deception," and living out of integrity with the highest part of you, and that feels terrible. But the really good news is that as soon as we are willing to expose our own brain "self-deception," and tell ourselves the truth, then we can start getting what we want.

And that is the power of coaching, because when I get coached, I become aware of the thoughts my brain is using me to keep me from what my highest self wants. I find the thoughts that are keeping me from who I really want to be. And when you find yourself not living the life that you really want to be living, it's not even hard to figure out why. Like, it's not as big mystery as the answer is. It just means that you are listening, and believing the deceptions of your own brain, right? That's all that's happening, you're being deceived by your own brain, and it's not a character problem, or a personal failing, or like an entirely hopeless situation. It is just like a smokescreen that your brain is providing as it performs its function. And what I want for each of my clients, and for each of you, is to be able to show you. And beyond to your own brain, right? So, that you can live up to the ideals of your highest self, because that is the only way to find peace. We can't ever be really at peace when we aren't living in alignment with who we really are, with that highest part of us.

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And we just start to notice, like we're unhappy, and miserable, and frustrated, just like I did a few years ago. But it's not because of everyone else, it's not because of our situation. It's not because, like, life is 50/50 and bad things happens. It's because it's impossible to feel peace when we aren't listening to that highest part of us, right? That is how God designed us. We can't feel good when we're caught up in all this self-deception, and living out of integrity with who we really are. So, that means that your relationship with you is the most important one you have. Your relationship with your highest self is way more important than anything else in your life. None of the goals that I set, and achieve are really that important, right? The pounds literally don't matter, the money doesn't matter. The things I do, or don't do don't matter. What matters is that, when I do what I say what I'm going to do, and when I live in alignment with my highest self, it improves that relationship that I have with me.

The more that I don't listen to my brain, the more I listen to me, the real me, the eternal me, the divine me, the better I will feel, even in the midst of a 50/50 world. Meaning, yeah, I'm still going to feel 50% positive and 50% negative emotion, but I will feel a peace, and a connection with me, the highest part of me, with who I am becoming. And that is what is really important for each of us.

Okay, so I want you to think about the mechanism of deception, okay? I want you to think for a minute about the way your brain deceives you, and keeps you from living in integrity with your highest self. And I want you to think about it in a little bit different way today. So first, I want you to think about the brain itself, and ask yourself what tools the brain has at its disposal, right? What power does the brain have? What tools can it use to get what it wants? Our brain can think thoughts, and those thoughts create a chemical reaction in the body that produces emotion. That is the power the brain has, that is the only power the brain has. The brain cannot act without consent, right? Our highest self has to agree. Our highest self has to be deceived by our brain enough to act, because the brain can't act by itself. Okay so, for example, if my brain wants me to eat a snack right now, it could create the thought, and the thought would create a feeling of urgency in my body. But my brain cannot make my body move, and put food in my mouth without my consent. My brain can't override my agency, my brain has to talk my highest self into getting what it wants, into acting.

So, like last Fast Sunday, my brain wanted me so badly to eat, it kept offering me thoughts. The moment I woke up, it was like, "Hey, we should eat something. It doesn't really matter. Let's just eat was forget about this fast, right?" And it keeps offering me these thoughts, and offering me these thoughts, and it keeps creating these thoughts, keep creating urgent feelings in my body, but it can't ever make me eat. The brain can't act in and of itself, and it can't act without the consent of our highest self, and that's why it goes about trying to convince our highest self. Trying to deceive ourselves in some ways so that it can get what it wants. Okay, so that's really important to know, your brain's only tool is thought, and then the emotion that those thoughts create, the feelings that those thoughts create. Now, let's go back, and remember the brain's primary goals, which are to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and save energy, right? That's how it thinks it will keep us alive, and it's doing everything it can to make sure those things happen. And so, it uses its tool of thoughts and emotions. Those thoughts produce to be able to get those things, to get more pleasure, to avoid pain, and to save energy. And so, when we go to do something painful, or something that could put us at risk, or something that could require energy, our brain thinks thoughts that produce a feeling. Most often a negative feeling so that we will stop.

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So, notice that if you are not living your life the way you want, the way your brain is making sure that happens is by producing lots of negative emotions through thought to prevent your action. Okay, so for example, let's say my higher self wants me to exercise, my brain produces thoughts that create lethargy, or dread. My higher self wants to fast, my brain produces thoughts that create urgency, and desire for food right now. The tool your brain has is thought, and the associated emotion that thought creates. And that emotion ultimately is what is keeping you from doing all these things that your higher self wants. In other words, your brain is using your feelings, to keep you from living the life you want.

So, one of the biggest ways that you can overcome your own brain is to embrace emotional discomfort. When we go to do hard things, or pursue goals, or try new things, or love human beings that can disappoint us, our brain makes us feel bad so that will stop. We stop to avoid feeling bad, but what if we didn't? What if we didn't stop? We just felt the emotional discomfort our brain offered us, and kept going anyway. That is the key to getting the life you really want. The greatest self-destructive tool your brain has is negative emotion. Those emotions are keeping you from living up to what your highest self wants. So, as you know, our daughter, Savannah, is serving her mission, and recently we were talking to her on the phone, and she recently got transferred into this new area. And we were kind of talking about the first parts of her mission, right? And she was talking about the emotional discomfort that she felt those first few weeks on her mission. She said "I remember like going in the bathroom, and just looking in the mirror and feeling so terrible and thinking, what have I done right? I'm living way outside my comfort zone."

And her brain is just like kicking up so much negative emotion, like, stop, we should not be here. We should not be doing this thing. And if she gives into that, and she believes her brain, then she might not be able to live up to what she really wants, the life she really wants to have. So anyway, we were talking to her again last night, and like I said, she just been transferred to this new area, and she was having a whole bunch of anxiety about that, and the change, and everything's different, she doesn't know anybody, all that kind of stuff, right? And she's like, "Oh, my gosh, I have so much anxiety again." And her brain is just offering her all kinds of thoughts that are producing enormous amounts of anxiety, in an effort to get her to stop. And I just told her, like, "All you have to do is get good at feeling bad." I just have to get good at being anxious. This is the part where I feel anxious, this is the part where my brain wants me to stop to do amazing things in our life. We have to get good at emotional discomfort. So, you need to remember that the goal isn't to feel good, right? We aren't trying to feel good all the time, Savannah isn't on a mission to try to feel good all the time. What we're trying to do is live in integrity with our highest self, right? To make the most of our time here on Earth. And that's going to require us to feel the emotional discomfort that our brain produces for us.

Okay, so now I just want to share an example from my own life. And I've been thinking about this concept a lot as I have worked over the last couple of months to launch my group coaching program. So, you might not know this, but it takes an enormous amount of courage to start a coaching business, because of your brain self-deception, right? Because your brain thinks this is a good way to die, and so it produces a lot of negative emotion. When I started my coaching practice last year, my brain was just like producing a ton of negative emotion to get me to stop, right? Like every day it's like, hey, here's some fear, here's some shame, here's some inadequacy, right? And it's just like just creating so much of it in an effort to keep me safe, and help me survive, right? But I just moved forward anyway, right in the face of all that emotional discomfort, I moved forward anyway. I got good at feeling bad, and I knew at the time that it was the price that I had to pay for what I wanted, right? And so, I just decided I'm just going to open up to it, and I'm going to get really good at feeling bad. And I try to just tap into the highest part of me, right?

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The part of me that wanted to help, and create, and bless, and use my gifts, and use my time on Earth to grow. And they tried to just constantly, like, tap into what she wanted. And amazingly, the more I ignored my brain's protest, and its emotional discomfort, like the storm that it created for me every morning, the better I got at it, right? And the more purposefully I decided to think about myself, and my work, the better I felt, and the more comfortable I felt, the more in tune with my higher self I felt. And that made me feel confident, and capable, and over time, honestly, my brain just produced way less emotional discomfort.

But recently as I have changed things up, and decided to launch this group coaching program, all of this emotional discomfort has resurfaced. My brain is like, "Wait a minute, this is a new way to die, right? We must stop this. We must stop now." And so, to ensure my survival, my brain has gone to work producing lots of thoughts that produce a lot of negative emotion. It just wants me to stop. It wants me to quit. My brain wants me to go back, and do things the way I've always done them. My brain doesn't want on my highest self-ones. And so, it's using that emotional discomfort to deceive me and let me know, "Look, you're in trouble. You should go back." And so, for months I've just kind of battled all of this negative emotion, and it kept me stalled out for a bit, right? Got me so stalled, in fact, that I just kept adding to my one on one client list until I got over, right? And David was like, I think we're going to need another strategy here.

So, but all of this was in an effort to avoid this emotional discomfort that my brain wanted to kick up about a group. And so, I did a lot of thought work, and I thought about what I wanted to believe about myself. And I tried to channel some powerful emotions to get me into action, and to start creating this group. And that's what I did, right? And that was really good, important work to do. And so, then the first day of the launch came, and I was full of excitement, and anticipation, and expectation. And I just like felt so good about things, and by five p.m. that night, I had one sign up in the group, which was not what I expected right in my brain, which had been so certain that I was going to die doing this new group coaching program. It just went crazy, right? It just started producing incredible amounts of negative emotion. It launched like this barrage of thoughts about my failures, and my inadequacy. And it was like a tidal wave of emotional discomfort in so many ways I felt like devastated, right? And David was like, "I don't understand why you're so upset." He's like, "You got one person to sign up." He's like, "I didn't think anybody would sign up."

Which is like the last thing you want to hear, right? Because my brain was already like, "Yeah, no one is going to want this thing, right?" And I will be honest with you, my brain just started producing emotional discomfort by the bucketful. I cried for days, I couldn't stop crying. I felt so much emotional discomfort, and because it was the only thing my brain had to throw at me to get me to stop, and so, it was going all out. But the whole reason you guys that I'm sharing this with you is that I want you to know that all of this was designed by my brain to get me to stop. Like it wasn't empirically true that I had failed. It wasn't universally true that I couldn't make this work. It's just what my brain offered me to get me to stop, and not grow, and not live up to what my highest self has in store for me. And that is what your brain is doing to you, right? The things you think, and the emotions you feel, you aren't having them because you are a failure, you're having them because your brain wants you to stop.

Okay, and so I talked to my coach about all of this, and you know what she said? She said, "I am so glad this is happening to you." She said, "I am so glad that you have this moment to decide what's true. Is your brain right, or are you?" Okay, so look, notice my brain was trying to deceive me, because it thought that was the best way to ensure my survival. And so, it was providing me all kinds of thoughts about my failure, and inadequacy, and embarrassment to get me to stop. And my coach said, "Now you get to decide what you really believe. Do you believe your brain? Do you stop? Or is this the place where your highest self takes a stand, and gets to choose to move forward anyway?" And I chose to believe my highest self, I decided my brain was lying to me. I decided to move forward, and believe in who I am as a coach, and the skills I have in my craft, and what I have created, and the work that I have to do in the world. And my group has grown into this incredible group of people who are 100% committed to getting the life they want. And amazingly, this group has grown right alongside my own belief.

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And you guys, it can't happen any other way. We can't have what we don't believe in. When we give in to the deception of our brain, we can't have what our higher self wants. And so, for any of you, for any of the goals that you have, you have to be willing to feel the emotional discomfort, and the disbelief of your brain. And you have to decide to move forward anyway. You have to decide to believe something else about yourself instead. And when you stay in belief, despite the emotional discomfort your brain kicks up, your goals will start delivering to you. Like this is going to be the most incredible group coaching experience, and my clients are going to get the very best program possible, because I had to build my belief purposefully in the face of this intense protest of my own brain.

And honestly, I have to agree with my coach, I'm so glad it happened the way that it did. My program will be 100 times as good because of the work that I had to do on my own belief. I know now, like I didn't know before, the value that I offer as a coach. I know now, like I didn't know before, why group coaching is even more effective than one on one coaching. I know now what sets me apart as a coach, and the way I do my job, my clients will get a different coach now, because of my willingness to believe deeply, even through all the emotional discomfort that my brain could throw at me. And this is how I become the next version of myself, and this is how you become the next version of you. My highest self knows this is the next step, this is the place of my growth. And I have decided that I always want to be living on the edge of my growth, right? In that place where my brain is protesting, and kicking up all kinds of negative emotion, for me, that's where I want to live, like I don't want to live a life where I'm not testing the boundaries of my brain's comfort level. And that means that I'm learning again that the point is not to feel good.

The point is to live in integrity with my highest self. The point is to experience emotional discomfort even in order to make the most of my time here on Earth, which is the most precious gift that God gave me. And the better I get at living in integrity with my highest self, the more peace, and self-respect I feel, the more connected to me I feel, the better relationship I have with me. The real me. The eternal me. And the kind of emotional discomfort that growth requires is so different than the kind of emotional pain I was in when I was living in a life that was just like created by self-deception, right? Where I wasn't connected to the highest part of me in any way that I wanted to be. And I am all in for this kind of growth.

Now, I just want to offer to each of you that you're most amazing life is found on the edge of your comfort, where your brain protests, and your higher self- beckons you. That is where you create a life you love, a life you are proud of, the life you came all the way to Earth to live. Don't give in to the deceptions of the emotional discomfort your brain is creating that makes you want to stop going after what you really want. Your brain only has one tool, it thinks thoughts that produce negative emotion, and it's using that to get you to be safe. But it is keeping you from living in integrity with what your highest self wants. You get to believe, and you get to act, and create the life you want in the face of any negative emotion your brain gives you. And that is the key to getting the most out of your time on Earth, and doing absolutely amazing things in your life. And that, my friends, is 100% awesome! I love you for listening. And I'll see you next week.

Applications for my group coaching program Made for More are now open at aprilpricecoaching.com Your brain was program for survival, but you were made for more than that. You were made for more love and more accomplishment and more joy right now. And I can show you the simple way to get all of that. Join me in Made for More where we will spend six-months coaching, and reprogramming your brain so that you can get the most out of this life. And next go to aprilpricecoaching.com to apply. And I'll see you there.