Thrive Beyond Pornography

Check out our webinar at zachspafford.com/freecall

First, we want to announce here on the podcast that this is the year!   Darcy and I have built a world class membership for you and your loved ones to come and make 2021 your year to finally put pornography behind you and as a special offer, you can be a founding member for less than the cost of one date night each month.  Get a year pass as a founding member, lock in this price forever, and make 2021 the year you stop feeling so frustrated and overwhelmed and start feeling more confident, fulfilled and successful!   We can help you do that. We are going to get you there and have fun in the process.   We are going to have seven different ways you can get help in the membership.  We are going to have a monthly workshop, where we take a deep dive on one of the skills you need to get pornography out of your life.  Then we are going to have six monthly calls for coaching and Q&A. 2 for those dealing with pornography, run by me. 2 for spouses and 2 for parents.  IF you are dealing with pornography in your life, in your marriage, or in your household , this is the perfect moment to set yourself up so 2021 is your year.  We can help you do that.  As part of our last webinar we had two very interesting questions come up in our discussion and I wanted to highlight them here with the help of my sweet heart What is the catalyst that gets the wife to jump over the anger and betrayal issues, my wife has been upset and angry for 11 years now. I’m a wife. I’d like to know how you rebuild trust, when lying is such a big part of the pornography compulsion addiction or problem? If you would like to come to our next free webinar, you can by signing up at zachspafford.com/freecall or click the “Free Webinar” link at zachspafford.com We love having people come to our calls and work through some of the very deeply held difficulties that have been part of their struggle to overcome pornography use in their marriages. These calls are free and are so helpful at getting people started on the road to a life where pornography doesn’t intrude on their happiness.  These two questions boil down to essentially one thing.  “How do I trust and even love my spouse again?” Darcy: I think it’s really important to recognize here that no one is requiring that you stay.  You can choose to leave this situation.  You may not like what that looks like for any number of reasons but staying or going is 100% your responsibility and your choice.  -       That perspective is essential to building the life that you want, not just in terms of a marriage where pornography has been present.   -        Zach: I think it is also really important to see that the men who are struggling with this issue are almost invariably, earnestly trying and have desire to eliminate it from their lives.  -       I’ve spoken to so many men and women who struggle with pornography use in their lives and not one that I’ve come across has said, “I don’t want to give this up, but my spouse says I have to.” -       Their struggle is real and they are trying to be the best they can.  -        -        1.     The behavior of an individual is about that person trying to feel good.  a.     We’ve talked about this on the podcast before, but maybe we’ll just put a fine point on this.  b.     Our lower brain is geared toward helping keep us from feeling bad and is not very good at distinguishing between actual physical danger and the pain of feeling lonely, sad, stressed, tired, hungry or...

Join the Mastery Membership at Founder Pricing by going to zachspafford.com

This interview with Ashlee Ayre is meant to give hope and a path forward to anyone who is dealing with pornography use in their life as a teen.

zachspafford.com/thestuff for the mini course for wives mentioned in today's show.

Your brain is probably lying to you One of the things that happens when we start down the path of buffering is that our brains will tell us things that are not true.  It will try subtle phrases that it knows have worked in the past and that have taken you down the path of your buffer before.   It does this because a little lie is ok most of the time and especially if it is said to make someone feel ok.  You know what I mean if you’ve ever told your spouse that you loved her in that dress when you really hated it.   Little white lies are actually pretty normal, simple stories that we all use to grease the wheels of social interaction.  You wouldn’t tell your boss that you absolutely can’t stand being in meetins with him because he never shuts up.  So when he asks, “do you think we got the message across?” rather than saying, ‘yeah, you repeated yourself about 8 times” you say, “I’m certain the team knows what you were trying to convey.” We also do this with our kids, we indulge them with stories that, while not strictly true, help us and help them navigate the world around us.   The easter bunny and santa claus are examples of this, but also when we are encouraging our children to accomplish something they’ve never done before we tell them, “I know you can do it” when you know no such thing, but you simply think it will help them try.  what we say to others, while not about being deceitful, can often be construed as not quite truthful when put under strict scrutiny.  Our brains use this same capacity to keep our external interactions running smoothly on our internal dialogue as well.  The phrase my brain used to tell me “This is the last time” I remember distinctly being upstairs in our Chugiak Alaska home as a kid, tucked away in the cubby under my parents water bed.   It was always warm in there and since we lived in Alaska, it was a great place to hang out, read a book and be alone.  By that point in my life I had been taught that masturbation was to be avoided so there I was, warm and cozy and wrestling with the hormones of a pubescent boy.  I told myself, “this will be the last time and then I’ll never do it again.” It made my decision to masturbate easier.  It was a final farewell. It made it so that immediately afterward I felt good about myself.  I felt like I was going to follow through with that promise I made to myself.  We do this with food too. “I’ll start my diet on Monday.” You’ve already not followed your diet today, it’s ok if you don’t follow it the rest of the day.  These are some of the things it says to help us feel better when we are not doing the things that we said we would. These are the little white lies that grease the wheels of feeling uncomfortable.   The simple thoughts that, when you examine them closely, often turn out to be only partially or completely untrue.  Our brain lies because it wants us to feel good.  It wants us to know that we are going to be ok, that we are safe, that we will survive.  When we choose to believe these stories our brain tells us we get immediate relief from the discomfort that we are feeling by saying yes to a buffer that we may not really want in our lives.  For instance, it’s the holidays, I have a bag of white chocolate mint pretzels in the house. I also have been working on not eating mindlessly and eating healthily.  When I see those pretzels my brain will tell me, “it’s not that bad, you’ll just have one.”  I grab one and chomp it down.  Then, to keep me from feeling the discomfort of having to stop eating them and the discomfort that will come because I now have eaten something that wasn’t really going to help me reach my goals my brain will offer me

An interview with Eric and Jackie, a couple who has been coached by Zach and Darcy through pornography issues in their marriage. https://www.zachspafford.com/freecall https://www.zachspafford.com/workwithme https://calendly.com/masterycoach/30-min-consult-darcy?month=2020-11

Motivation and willpower aren’t enough.  When I was about 14 years old I told myself that I wasn’t going to do this any more.  I knew what I was doing was not really something that I wanted to be doing but felt like I had to just get the right motivation and put some willpower to it and it would be done.   I could quit this.  I wanted to be the kind of kid who didn’t have to feel ashamed of who I was when people weren’t looking.   This was around the time I went to my first youth conference, I’m pretty sure it was in Seward Alaska, at some high school and it was a blast.   The theme song was Fly like an eagle by the steve miller band. Pretty sure that is a not so veiled reference to getting high from the same band that brought you the line, ‘some people call me a space cowboy, some call me the gangster of love’  - but as kids we just went along with it and enjoyed our time learning about the gospel with our friends, meeting new friends from around Alaska and singing along whenever the leaders played the song, “time keeps on slippin into the future.” I came back more motivated than ever to be done with masturbation. The thing about motivation and willpower are that they are unreliable partners.  I’ve talked about willpower being a trap and how it is the wrong tool in episode 38.   Let’s talk about motivation.    Motivation is fleeting, it comes, it goes. It usually only sticks around for a little while until some other emotion takes over our current moment.  Anyone who has dieted knows this.  We are forever fighting the battle of the bulge in this country and part of the reason is, we use motivation to start strong and then, when that motivation is all used up, because emotions all fade eventually, we haven’t built the habits that we need to behave the way we think we wanted to when we were motivated toward the end result.  As I have been reading the book, tiny habits by bj fogg I have noticed that is what I was doing as a young man working to eliminate a behavior that had been keeping me from being my best self.   This problem didn’t go away as I got older because, as BJ puts it, my behavior “was a design issue, not a character flaw.” What I needed to do, and what I eventually did, long before I read BJ’s book was create a series of habits that crowded out my pornography and masturbation habits.  I undermined what they were giving me by creating habits that gave me more.   And, just like the examples that BJ uses in his book, when I lapsed back into old habits, I didn’t look at it as a failure that impugned my character and made me irredeemable and broken. I saw it as a moment to learn how my designed behaviors had worked and how they could be improved.  I’ve always felt like a tinkerer.  My wife is often amazed at the things I do when it comes to building and creating and fixing the things in our home.  I love to use tools and build and create, design and refine.  When I stepped back from 12 steps and councilors about 8 years ago, that was the same attitude that I brought to my pornography habit.   So, I want to give you two, tiny habits that I have identified from those years that helped me create new habits that helped me so I could see pornography as a problem I had outgrown and no longer needed to help me feel better.  If you are someone who needs help with a pornography habit and wants to work with me on it, go to my website, zachspafford.com/workwithme and set up a consult with me.  I can tell you how you can get the one on one help that you want to get to being worthy and free and clear from this trial in your life.  The first habit was a really simple phrase.  Whenever I would begin to feel the urge to use my phone to look at...

Welcome to another beautiful mastery Monday, this is the Monday before election day.  Please go vote.  Regardless of what your political views are, be a part of the conversation, vote.  Our 4 year old, Felicity came to me and said “My belly is saying food, I listened and I  can hear it talking inside my body.  It says it wants pasta or a sandwich” ·      When felicity said this my mind immediately turned to how applicable this story is to all the different behaviors we use to feel something different. And how when we are buffering we are not allowing ourselves to connect with what we really want and need. Felicity in that moment was so in tune with her body and what it was she truly needed and that was food to fill her hungry belly. ·      If I take this idea one step further and ask myself what is it that my husband truly wants when he looks at pornography. I can without a doubt say that he is not looking at pornography to hurt me, make me feel betrayed or cheated on, make me feel not good enough, to ruin my girl time…You name it I can keep going of all the things I would make my husband looking at pornography mean to me and about me. The truth is the reason he was looking at pornography was because he didn’t love himself, he hated who he was, and that he wanted to feel good in the moment.  When felicity came to darcy asking for dinner, she was listening to her tummy tell her what she really wanted.  For many of us when we have urges to view pornography we are actually not listening to our true needs. Partly because we are adults and we have learned to set our needs aside.   Most of the people I work with are avoiding feeling lonely, sad, frustrated, angry or stressed.  The question we want to talk about today is, are you listening to what you really want, rather than trying to avoid what’s going on for us really, in an effort to feel good now at the expense of feeling good long term.  I recall a particularly difficult summer when darcy and the kids went to Wisconsin for three weeks and left me in California to work at my ladder climbing job at a large insurance company.  In my mind it was two months and darcy had to remind me that it was only three weeks long.  So, that might tell you how big this was to me.  It holds a big place in my mind. Because she was leaving and I wanted to stay away from pornography, we had put in place some really good, quality measures to keep the internet from creeping into my loneliest times, late nights at home.  We locked down my phone so it wouldn’t be a temptation.  My company computer was going to be left in the car at the end of the day.  And the only way I could get on the internet would be to go to the MacDonald’s half a block away.  With all the precautions in place, Darcy set off on the 33 hour drive to Wisconsin from Thousand Oaks CA.  We were ready.  We thought.  Darcy, what were your thoughts as you left? ·      In that moment I was hopeful that he would be about to stay away from pornography while I was away. In my mind I was thinking about how this would be a great opportunity to prove to me how I could trust him and that he could “behave” while I was gone. I remember being anxious about what might happen while I was not home but, I wasn’t willing at that point to not go visit all my family for a few weeks. For me this was my moment to show that I could do it.  I could spend the 3 weeks alone,  and show Darcy that I wasn’t going to be viewing pornography forever and that I had grown.  So, I was setting myself up to go it alone, make my mark and show how good I could be.  What I really wanted was connection with my wife, self...

Have you ever been upset by someone who wasn't behaving how you thought they should. Take a listen to this week's Mastery Monday. Sign up for the webinar zachspafford.com/freecall

Abdication v delegation I’m releasing this while I’m walking down a slot canyon somewhere in southern Ut so if you want to get together with me while I’m here, feel free to message me on Instagram zachspafford.theselfmasterycoach I love angelicas, the peruvian chicken place or even the Indian place.  On Friday two weeks ago I was in my weekly meeting with my friend Jody Moore, talking about interrupting mirroring and anthropomorphizing and all the fun stuff that we coaches talk about behind closed doors and as the discussion progressed a really interesting topic came up. We were talking about abdication vs delegation. This is something that I work on with my clients all the time.  Although I wouldn’t have called it this until we discussed it the other day.  All of us do some form of either of these at various times.  So, what is the difference between abdication and delegation.  When it comes to how we interact with our agency this distinction can really make or break your path back from an unwanted habit.    Our oldest has been learning to drive and as a result I have been learning to relax.   As I have been learning to relax I have been thinking about this relationship between abdication and delegation as it relates to my son and as it relates to our habits.  A couple of Sundays ago the oldest half of my kids and I went to church and left the younger ones at home with mom.  My oldest got in the driver’s seat and we headed off on the 8 minute drive.  Along the way he made a wrong turn and I gave him direction on how to get back on track.   As he drives, I pay attention to what he is doing with his hands, his eyes, his feet.  I help him with proper technique and sometimes I even yell stop when I think he’s going to hit something because he is driving too close to it.  All along the way I am still taking responsibility for the path we take and even how he drives.   Let me tell you about a different driving experience.  On the way to Utah Darcy and I took turns driving.   While she drove I would try and get some sleep because I knew that it would be my turn soon enough because we were going from Milwaukee to st George a 24 hr trip that we wanted to do in one shot.   As she drove I rarely paid attention.  Obviously, I would sleep at certain points so it was entirely her responsibility to get us from point a to point b.  I took no responsibility for how she changed lanes, where her hands were posisitioned or whether she was watching the road.   Abdication is giving up the responsibility for the decision making.  Delegation is retaining responsibility for the decision making.  Each has it’s place in our lives. But what I find when it comes to certain habits is that we are often abdicating when delegating would yield better results and more closely yield the outcomes we are striving toward.  When I talk to clients, often they have abdicated their agency on certain topics.  Pornography is one of them.   We think, I can’t ever look at pornography because it is unacceptable. Or with weight loss, we think, I can’t eat certain foods because they will make me gain weight.  What we are doing when we do that is relinquishing our capacity to choose and allowing our lower brain to drive decisions based on the motivational triangle rather than what will be fulfilling for our long-term happiness.  Listen to the following phrases, “I’m powerless against my addiction” or “I can’t stop using pornography” or “I shouldn’t look at pornography”. Each one of these phrases places the responsibility for pornography viewing outside of our immediate control. And therefore outside our responsibility to choose.   I’m...

Learn Something, Move Forward Taking stock of lapses by learning something and moving forward is the only way to put it behind you. Each time we do the thing we promised we would never do again we tend to beat ourselves up. We often treat it like we are never going to get past it, we think we are lost, unworthy and powerless. That wallowing and self pitying approach keeps us from learning. It keeps us from figuring out the next thing we need to learn to move forward with life in a way that creates the person that we want to be.  The moment you let yourself be the object of your own pity and scorn you've lost the opportunity to learn from what happened and you're likely to make the same mistake in the future.  Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. ― Thomas Edison This is where the purposeful practice of Learn Something, Move Forward comes into play. When mistakes occur, because they will, take the time to learn from them. This practice is one of self reflected love. Viewing our mistakes the way our parents would have viewed our stumbling baby steps as we learned to walked. With eagerness for us to learn and grow. Not with scorn, derision and shame.  In my program I often have people work through one of the many micro courses I teach to learn something and move forward.  Often their response is, “I know that I’m not supposed to use pornography already” or “I already know that I want to stop this habit.” What they are looking at is the end result, expecting that they already know everything they need to know about the way they are thinking, how they are processing their emotions and how they are required to behave so they can feel worthy, strong and lovable.  Let’s take the example of a baby learning to walk.  8 kids Baby sees running, starts to run and falls on face and cries No inspection of movement, No testing of skills No trial and error Just “I’m supposed to be able to run” Falling on face and crying How long would it take for that baby to learn What will that baby miss How will that baby learn Questions you can ask yourself.  What did I view and how long that wasn’t planned?  2  What was the Situation that started this lapse? What was the feeling or desire I had? What was the thought that caused the desire or urge?  Did I try to resist or did I just react?  Did I try to allow the urge? What worked and what didn’t?  6  What did I learn?  What will I do next time?  How can I let this go now?  How do I want to feel about this moving forward?   

zachspafford.com/freecall How can I tell that I’m ready to change? Costs outweigh the benefits.  -       Buffering provides something -       Acknowledge those benefits. -       How do you want to feel when you think about pornography -       “Client said, I want to feel disgusted.” -       That doesn’t acknowledge what pornography has done for you -        -       That also doesn’t acknowledge what it is costing you -       It is just a judgement that makes you feel disgusted because you like pornography -       So, honestly acknowledging the costs and the benefits of use will allow you to make the cost benefit analysis  -        Wanting vs commitment -       For the better part of 25 years I wanted pornography out of my life.   -       I pleaded with Heavenly Father to take this problem away from me -       For lots of years it was just a want, the way a little girl wants a pony.   -       I would ask and think that I just deserved it because I asked for it.  -       .   -       It wasn’t until after we got married and Darcy found out about my pornography use that I really got committed.  -       It wasn’t until it was costing me my self confidence and I was desperate to stop feeling like a terrible person who was never going to get rid of this problem that I started to take action.  -       I started with bishops, who were great and loved me.  -       They didn’t have the answers, they were there for me to confess but not to give me tools.  -       They sent me to counselors who were there to hear where I was and witness my struggle and validate my feelings, but didn’t have any answers, didn’t have any real world idea of how I was doing and why I was where I was.   -       They just told me I was an addict.   -       So that lead me to the twelve steps… which was full of earnest men, trying to move forward with their lives.  -       but  that time only served to reinforce that I was “powerless against my addiction” -        -  -       Then when we had the twins, I took a step back. I saw that none of this had gotten me where I wanted to go. -       So I committed to figure it out by looking into my own mind, true principles that I could see from a gospel perspective and all the things I learned that made sense from what I had done before.  -        -       This is what being committed looks like.   -       Trying. -       Trying again,  -       Trying something new -       Trying something different -       Trying anything I hadn’t tried before   -       Trying things that were harder than anything I had done before -    &nbsp

Webinar: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/1016012548152/WN_9v9d7yYxTtyZ9RVzLRmJ3g How much power does pornography have? So many of us want pornography to have no power over husbands, over our children, over our own lives. Yet, so many of us allow pornography to have so much power over us.  Why?   Let’s just talk, for a minute about the attractive capacity of pornography.  Let’s be honest – the human body is beautiful, arousal feels great, climax is enjoyable.  When we see others doing something that is beautiful, arousing and enjoyable even outside of pornography, that fires all kinds of empathic receptors in us.  As humans, part of this group of creatures that our Father in Heaven has put on the earth to learn and grown, empathy and mimicry are key components of our survival and success.   We are also creatures of comparison.  We look at someone and we think about how we compare to them.  Are we taller or shorter, better looking or not as handsome, stronger or weaker, all of that is part of the game our brains play to determine if we are sexually compatible with or mating rivals with others.    Add to that the human sex response, which is one of the strongest drives within our system, and you can see how pornography might draw you in and keep you entertained for a long time.   When I think of all the things I just mentioned and how so much of our biology drives us toward this highly pleasurable, highly rewarding, low cost option, it’s no wonder that the statics show that in one study of 18-35 year olds over a six month period, 98% of men and 73% of women reported internet pornography use.   That is astounding.  I would hope that the figures are lower among LDS Men and Women, but without data on that, I’ll just say that these figures give us a picture of it’s overall usage within society.  So what does someone get from viewing pornography. And again, my goal is to be clear and honest about what I perceive to be the realities of the issue.  Just as we discussed on my podcast “get on the map” you need to know where you are so you can get to where you want to be.  From my perspective the number one and most significant reason, and possibly the only reason many people who have a moral objection to pornography viewing continue to view pornography is, pornography relieves uncomfortable or negative feelings.  I want to note that I saw a post on social where a wife was saying that the husband was viewing pornography occasionally but that they were unclear why he kept going back to it.  It was something they had tried to figure out, but had no success doing.  This is why coaches often say, it’s hard to read the label from inside the bottle.  This is one of those things that demonstrates to me why everyone should have a coach.  Tiger Woods has a coach, Tom Brady has a coach, CEO’s, business leaders, world leaders and presidents all have coaches because they want to be the best they can be.  And even the most brilliant among us sometimes has trouble seeing how our swing might be adjusted, how our actions might be improved, and how our thoughts are creating a result that is no longer serving us.   For those men and women who are dealing with pornography use that they would rather not have in their lives, most often they are doing so as a way to address the feelings they are untrained in dealing with.  What I mean by that is, all of us have coping mechanisms that we use to feel more at ease in various situations, some of them create long term positive outcomes and others create long term negative outcomes.   For most pornography users that I work with, they feel the momentary and immediate relief created by arousal and as a result their...

If you’ve ever been to a 12 step meeting you’ve heard the phrase, “Hi, my name is Zach and I’m an addict”. ·⁠ Almost everyone I’ve worked with thinks they’re “addicted to porn”. ·⁠ What if, instead of believing, “Hi, my name is Zach and I’m an addict” we believed something else.   ·⁠ I used to think that I was addicted to pornography, there was something in my brain that made it so I would return to pornography because I was “powerless against my addiction”.  ·⁠ I hated it.   ·⁠ I felt like I was trapped, incapable of real change because I would always be an addict. I felt like I would be forever at the mercy of this problem and I would always have to be on the look out to keep it at bay.  ·⁠ It was exhausting.  ·⁠ Eight years ago, after we had our twins, giving us six kids seven and under, my wife said to me, “I need you at home and if all these meetings you are going to for 12 steps and counselors aren’t making this better, I would rather have you here to help me with the kids.” ·⁠ It wasn’t a demand, but it was pretty close.   ·⁠ As I looked at the previous years and took stock of what I had learned and the progress I had made, I knew I had plateaued.   ·⁠ Now was the time to try something new, something different, something that I didn’t know how to do and that I had never done before.  ·⁠ I took a step back and started to look at my brain differently. I started to ask myself questions about what I was thinking and believing and doing that was keeping me tied to pornography viewing. ·⁠ In that work, something occurred to me.   ·⁠ At every meeting I had ever been to with the 12 steps the prescribed phrase to introduce yourself to the group is “I’m an addict”.  ·⁠ But not everyone uses that phrase. Some say, “I’m a recovering addict” and some say, “I used to be addicted.”  ·⁠ I realized that what they were really saying was that being an “addict” means I’m stuck, a victim, unchangeable.  ·⁠ What if you could believe, “I used to look at pornography, but now I don’t”? ·⁠ Your brain will find evidence that it true. Your emotions will drive actions that make it true.  ·⁠ Most importantly, you’ll begin to become free.  #theselfmasterypodcast #realrecovery

This episode we talk about the most important turning point in our relationship. How things changed for my wife in a way that allowed her to be there in a moment that previously would have been a blow out fight.

Download the roadmap free here: zachspafford.com/roadmap Sign up for my free webinar here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/1515981173927/WN_9S9QoOmaQwW8fiFYXFYE8g Get on the map Free webinar on Sunday Sept 13 at 830 Mt time.  When I lived in Alaska my friends and I loved to go out into the woods and camp I loved the ferns. I loved the birch trees that had such great bark for starting fires.  I loved four wheeling and snow mobile-ing with my friends.   But, on occasion I would go out alone.  I would test my capabilities. I would camp on the side of a mountain alone.   In those moments I needed to rely on my ability to read a map and orient myself on the map.  One of the most important skills in reading and following a map is knowing where you are.  Knowing where you are is the very first thing you must do if you want to end up getting to where you want to go.  If you don’t correctly identify your position on the map you are trying to follow, you will invariably end up in a place you were not intending to go.  The same is true of pornography use  In fact, just this week I had a conversation with someone who enrolled in my individual coaching program who was very frustrated because he had done so much work, put in so much effort in so many important and critical ways. Yet, he didn’t feel like he was succeeding.  As we spoke it became clear to me that he had not yet admitted to himself that he had been using pornography because it had helped him deal with his stress and with his loneliness.  That’s right, I said it helped him.  In those moments when he had been stressed, it had provided relief.  In those moments when he had been lonely it had given him a break from his feelings.  So many of us would just like to demonize pornography and users of pornography.   It is a convenient and easy story that makes it so we stand on moral high ground, seemingly above the problem.  We say things like, pornography is just the next step toward infidelity. We believe that people who use pornography are addicted and powerless.  We hide it and hide from it whenever people discuss it because that kind of person is disgusting and they look at things that are disgusting and everything about pornography is disgusting.  When this is what we believe about pornography and by extension, inference and explicitly users of pornography we are creating shame that withholds from the users and from ourselves the love that we all truly crave and wish for all of our HF’s children.  -       Just ask yourself, where did Jesus spend his time? -        -        -       Moral high ground doesn’t help anyone What I really find interesting about this is that it is not just the wives who think and believe and behave this way.  It is the user’s themselves.  Just like my client who had up to that point, not really accepted where he was on the map, we all try to pretend that things are different than they really are.  We do this so we can feel good about ourselves. We do this so we can feel good about our judgement of ourselves and others.  Strange right: Pornography users judge themselves for using pornography the same way non-users do.  Here’s the problem.  None of that helps you become the person you want to be.  None of that helps you find the path away from pornography.  None of that is even true. All of those thoughts actually hold you back from becoming the person that you want to be, if you are the user, and can hold your spouse back from being the person they want to be, if you are...

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https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/1515981173927/WN_9S9QoOmaQwW8fiFYXFYE8g Mastering pornography means dealing with discomfort A lot of my clients come to me with this one question, why do I behave one way, when I believe I should behave another.   A lot of you are listening to this podcast because of pornography use, but this work and all the principles apply to any unwanted behavior that you might be engaging in.   But I’m going to use the example of pornography. We ask, “why do I turn to pornography, when I know that it is against my values, I want to stop using it, and I am causing myself so much shame because I use it?” They never ask it like that, but essentially that is what they are all asking, in one way or another.  They ask that because they feel stuck in one way or another.  They often feel like there is no way to quit this habit because they go back to it time and again.  At its core pornography use is an escape from discomfort. that goes against our values, damages our sense of self confidence and leaves us with a sense that we lack control over our own behavior  Why do we use pornography when it goes against our values? Because it helps us escape discomfort in a moment. Why do we use pornography when we want to eliminate its use from our behaviors?  Because it feels good when we are feeling bad. Why does our pornography use go contrary to our sense of control of how we want to behave? Because we tell ourselves that we should behave differently than we are.  So, if we are using pornography to escape discomfort and feel good, while simultaneously telling ourselves that we should behave differently, it’s no wonder that we might feel stuck and trapped by this behavior. We believe one thing, we do another.  So, in order to reconcile that disconnection we have to rationalize what is happening.  Sometimes that means that we call ourselves addicts.  Sometimes that means that we say we are powerless.  Sometimes we tell ourselves that we deserve this indulgence because someone or something outside us made it our only recourse to feel good. No matter the exact way we do it, in some way or another, in order to maintain our sense that we are a good person we tell ourselves a story that makes what we are doing somehow ok, at least for a moment.   Then we beat ourselves up. We tell ourselves that we are stuck in this decision because we aren’t making a different decision I had a client this morning, talking about his career said, “I know I’m not gonna quit, so that puts me in this box of not having a choice.” His statement there is really telling.  He says, “I know I’m not gonna quit.”  Which is a statement that shows that he is making this decision.  If he had stopped there and been ok with that statement, then he would be in a position of power over his choices and fully realizing his ownership of where he is.  But the second part of his statement, “that puts me in this box of not having a choice” which he believes, makes him a victim of his own choice.  He is his own captor.  Partly because he is telling himself a story that the decision he made is now not his.  He externalizes the cause of why he feels trapped.  It’s subtle, but if you listen closely, he says, that now he’s in a “box of not having a choice.” We do this with pornography, we do this with food, we do this with anything in our lives that makes us feel trapped or stuck because we see it as detrimental to our long-term happiness.  For example, “I can’t believe I ate that entire thing, but it’s just so good I couldn’t stop.” This story tells us that the thing we ate made us a victim because it was so good.   Take out the can’t and the couldn’t and the story...

Join this month's webinar, Register Here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/6615948536985/WN_mO3BbHAVQH-ja0W_oXUfJA Let me tell you about the day I lost my job.   It was Mother’s Day and the person that let me go was also my best friend.   He let me go because he had hired me to do a job that I wasn't qualified for and I didn't provide him any real value other than he liked having me around.   Now his company was going through a rough patch and I needed to go, since I was the least useful person on his staff making the most money.   It was a relief.   The truth was, I had been moving away from working with him for a few months.  I was not just there to provide value, I was there to babysit my friend who wasn’t very self motivated.   Don’t get me wrong, he had a good income and a great life and that is why he could and did hire me.  But he also needed someone to sit next to him while he was on the computer and watch his screen so he wouldn’t look at pornography while he tried to work.   Once I made the mistake of working on my computer, facing the same direction as he was, arm’s length apart from him but looking at my own computer and not his.  He was at a standing desk, I was sitting.   I was working merrily along, trying to build us a new company.   He walked out of the room, I assumed to go to the bathroom or talk to his kids (we worked at his home office).   Suddenly his wife came storming in and said, “you need to put your computer up on his desk so you can see his monitor at all times, because he can’t be trusted.” My friend, sheepishly, came back to his desk, right next to mine, an armlength away from me and started typing while his wife stood there with her head practically in flames.   He had been looking at pornography right next to me.  He had been flicking back and forth from what he was doing for work and what he was doing to feel arousal.   That moment was one of the last times I actually worked side by side with my friend.  It was probably the beginning of a rough patch in our friendship and certainly the beginning of the end of our business dealings.   You see he had been using me, as he had been using so many other people and things in his life, to keep him “safe”.   Once he no longer felt that I was able to keep him safe while he worked, we only worked together maybe two more times in the next 3 months.   I had watched and studied my friend for years at this point and I knew a few things about him.   Part of the reason I believe he had hired me was that I had been open with my struggle to overcome pornography use in my life and he desperately wanted to stop using pornography himself.   There are a lot of reasons he probably never will. He has, by his own estimate and his wife’s, had an episode a week on average for fifteen years with little change.   But that moment, the moment he viewed pornography while I was sitting next to him made me think of a moment in my own past that I feel so ashamed to admit.  Until now, I’ve never told anyone, not even my wife.   I had done the same thing years earlier, on a sleepy road, in a little duplex, sitting on my couch with my friends in the room, facing me, while I was on my laptop.  I looked at pornography while I was chatting with my friends in my living room.   Until this moment, no one else but me knew it.  My friends, whom I love dearly and still keep in contact with have no idea.   In writing this, I feel empathy for my friend more than anything.   I am disappointed for my friend, not in him.  I am sorry that he is dealing with this, not angry that...

Register for this month's webinar: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/6615948536985/WN_mO3BbHAVQH-ja0W_oXUfJA zachspafford.com There are three natural roles that we tend to gravitate to in our relationships with others.  Steven Karpman codified these in what he called the drama triangle.  Understanding how these roles work can really help each of us figure out where we are in this space and then, ultimately move out of the triangle into the fourth role that is where we all want to be.  The thing about these roles is that we tend to occupy each of the roles at some point or another.  When it comes to our behavior, and especially addictive behaviors that we want to stop, this can be a real stumbling block to real progress in the search of becoming the best person we can be.  The other thing is that how you move from each of the roles in the drama triangle to the role that you ultimately want in order to maximize fulfillment and minimize the pain that you are creating and feeling is slightly different.  The three roles in the drama triangle are – victim, villain or prosecutor and hero or rescuer.  The role that you want to have and the one that will bring you the most long term satisfaction is that of what I call the owner.  Let’s take a look at each role and then we’ll talk about how you can move out of the drama triangle and into the owner role.  Victim –  This is probably the most self-explanatory  role.  When you are the victim you feel powerless, helpless and stuck.  For someone that is dealing with pornography use as the user, they might think, “I’m an addict” or “I’m powerless against my addiction”  For someone who is working at a job they might think, “This is the best job I’ll ever get, I can’t leave it”  For a spouse of someone who is overeating they might think, “I’m stuck with this person forever.” At it’s most extreme These are people who believe that the world is happening to them.  Nothing goes right in their life and nothing good ever happens.   You might describe them as an energy vampire.  Always sucking the energy out of life and unable to give anything back.   The issue with being the victim, as you might have surmised, is that, in their mind at least, nothing is their fault, nothing is in their control and they can do nothing to make their life better.  Villain/persecutor –  This is the person who is self righteous and can even show up as a bit of a bully.  In this role the person taking responsibility for the actions of others.  They do this from a judgmental and self-satisfied tone.  In a marriage this person might believe, “my husband just needs to stop looking at pornography, it’s that simple” At the office this might look like, “If accounting doesn’t like the way we are doing this, then they can come up here to sales and do it themselves.” As a parent you might get something along the lines of, “I saved your butt once before on this, you never learn, I don’t know why I even try” In that last one you can see how fluid these roles can be, in that you see someone might have been the hero before, but now they are really laying into the other person.   Hero/rescuer –  This is a person who takes responsibility for other people’s problems and make it their own, even though, in their own life they may not have their own life together.   This is the person who will come in and spend a lot of energy in a short period trying to fix someone else’s issues, often at the expense of their own  So this is a person who may believe something like, “if I help this person they will appreciate me” When spouses fill this role it often looks something like being in charge...

Follow this link to get the download Zach Takes about during the podcast. https://www.zachspafford.com/podcast-freebie (https://www.zachspafford.com/podcast-freebie) Join us for this month's free webinar : https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/6615948536985/WN_mO3BbHAVQH-ja0W_oXUfJA who we think we are, Who we are and who we want to be.  This week one of my clients was talking about his life and the choices he had made His story, the thing that he believed about his life was, “I didn’t have the courage to make a different choice” He wasn’t talking about pornography, he was talking about his career choices.  He comes from a family where what his parent’s want for him is extremely important.  His values make it so that deferring to them is part of his culture and his identity.  He also wants to be successful.   It is part of the fabric of his community that he needs to be able to provide for his family, be a pillar in his community and to give back.  He actually chose to be a doctor.  He is practicing medicine every day and questioning it, questioning his fellow doctors if this is what they really want to be doing and wondering if he can last.  Now before you judge him and say, ‘well he’s a doctor, he has it great, why should he complain’ I want to take a moment to explore this thought that he has from the lens of these three ideas: Who we think we are Who we are And who we want to be.  Let’s start by going back to the story he is telling himself.  “I didn’t have the courage to make a different choice.’ This is the story of who he thinks he is.  What does that thought mean? It means that he failed, that he wasn’t who he wanted to be, that he wasn’t even who he chose to be.  It’s a story of a victim.  A victim of circumstances someone who was pushed in a direction he never wanted to go but found himself there because of forces beyond his control and at the behest of others with no capacity to decide for himself and only responsibility for what he didn’t choose.  Often when we look back at our lives, the story we tell ourselves is one of regret and disappointment.  Things we didn’t do, things we shouldn’t have done, or things we wish we had.  We might believe this perspective is objective, valid and helpful in driving us to greater heights, better outcomes, and more effective decision making.  But take a look at how you feel when this is the story you tell yourself.   Disappointment Most of us know what that feeling is like.  Even if this isn’t the story you tell yourself, yours might be, “I wasn’t as go a missionary as I could have been.” Or “I should have overcome this problem sooner.” Whatever the story, ask yourself, is this version of my history helping me become the person that I want to be by creating the feelings that drive me to improve, focus and succeed.  I can tell you how it worked for this client.   His disappointment brought him to second guess himself, avoid his thoughts about his career and how he might change his life, tell himself that he stunk.  He also treated others differently, he would second guess his friends choice of career, would be abrupt with his patients and be unfriendly and unengaged.   This creates a world for him where not only did he not have the courage in the past, but he also doesn’t have the courage to do what he wants now. Keeping him a victim of his circumstances and beholden to the past, his perception of his family’s wants and his perceived inability to become the person he wants to be.  I can tell you I have seen myself in this exact place.   At one point when I was in my career I felt trapped and incapable of moving forward.  I had to be someone I...

Register for the webinar on August 19 at 7 pm Central. https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/6615948536985/WN_mO3BbHAVQH-ja0W_oXUfJA 17TH ANNIversary edition.  Happy anniversary,  This week, in honor of our anniversary, 17 things we’ve learned in our marriage.  1. Number one marriage takes work a.      2. we can do hard things    3. It takes commitment 4. stay calm 5.  follow your path 6.  assume the best 7. : support and encourage your partner.  8. believe in yourself 9.  Everything is figure out able 10.   work on your own stuff 11.   do what you feel needs to be done  12.  own your mistakes. say sorry  13.   you are not responsible for the happiness of your partner  14.   dream big, failure will happen, don’t let it hold you back or keep you down 15.   empathy and compassion are invariably better than judgment and purposeful misunderstanding  16.  the shower is a great place to talk 17.  You never know when your greatest trials will become your greatest triumphs until you’ve made it all the way through  18.      Number 2: 8 kids is a lot of laundry #addictionrecovery #latterdaysaintsdealingwithpornographyinmarraige #LDS #latterdaysaints #pornographyrecovery

This is how you can register for the webinar.  https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/6615948536985/WN_mO3BbHAVQH-ja0W_oXUfJA (https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/6615948536985/WN_mO3BbHAVQH-ja0W_oXUfJA) or you can go straight to my website: https://www.zachspafford.com/freecall This is the link to Brene Brown's YouTube video.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EXMsKZAeL0 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EXMsKZAeL0) -       Brene brown is talks about this in her SUPERSOUL SESSIONS: THE ANATOMY OF TRUST . -       First, Brené references Charles Feltman work on trust and uses his definition.  -       Which is, ‘trust is choosing to make something important to you vulnerable to the actions of someone else’ -       In the case of pornography use, what is it that we spouses making vulnerable? Darcy:  -       For many women, this is right at the top of the list for what they would call a nightmare scenario.  -       This is probably something that many of them worry about because of how they anticipate they will feel  -       I think the moment you get married you have placed this all important and sacred eternal life in the hands of a partner -       I think the thing that feels most vulnerable when you find out that your husband is using pornography is that you may have just lost everything  -       That’s devastating.  -       For members you are committing to eternal marriage -       You feel vulnerable -       Wonder if your marriage is in jeopardy Darcy: What about the users, what are they making vulnerable? Zach: -       I think this is, for so many men, their greatest failing and for many of us a huge source of shame -       Which, when we are either found out or confess, is a huge moment of vulnerability to the actions of the non-user -       What will they do? -       How will they react? -       How much should I tell them? -       Are all questions that run through our minds.  -        I think its also important to touch on what distrust is as well.  ‘Distrust is what I have shared with you that’s important to me is not safe with you.“  again from Charles Feltman This is really important when we take a look at the two things that are vulnerable for the two parties.  For the men – They have probably just participated in talking about the thing that they are most ashamed of For the women – they have had the thing they hold most dear ripped up in front of them.  The thing that the men hold dear is their ability to be a worthy, loving husband.   The thing the women hold dear is their ability to have a worthy, loving husband.  Darcy: So, I think this is a moment where, wives react in a way that takes what the husband has done and puts her in a position of distrust as well.   He has acted in a way that creates distrust by taking the spoken or unspoken agreement that he would not use pornography and not kept it safe.   So, this moment is where she now has his most vulnerable and important sense of self in her hands.  I’ll be honest – the thing I did and the thing so many of us want to do is to tell him we’re leaving or if you keep doing this we are...

Pain that we feel often drives us to pursue pleasure.  dianaswillinger.com

-       Do you really want to or is there a part of you that isn’t willing to let it go yet? -       Choosing to do this on purpose. -       Not waiting until you never look at porn to have the confidence to be a free person -       Commitment vs wanting – if you want something that doesn’t mean you will be able to get it. -       To want is to desire or wish for something – there is no action required – it is passive -       Wanting is really easy – all you have to do is think “I want this” -       There is no risk involved.   -       It doesn’t require anything of us. -       Saying “I want to stop looking at porn” isn’t going to get it done -       It increases desire without any positive results – which can create a negative result in that you think you are doing something without results –  -        -       When we think we  are doing something without results we are creating failures -       This is proof in our heads that we are failing.  -        -       When we want something but aren’t doing anything to get it we are creating a gap that our brain tells us is insurmountable.  -        -       When we are committed we promise to do something.  -       Have you ever said to someone, “I’m going to get this done”.  Whether is was, going into a certain profession or building something that you had no experience doing? -       As you go through that process, in your mind, you never waver. -        -       You know it is going to happen no matter what.  -        -       That is committed.  -        -       Action is required – until you get to the place you want to be. -         -       You aren’t waiting for it to happen before you believe in it.  -        -       Being committed is uncomfortable and challenging.  -        -       It also gets results -        -       You will have to do things differently and think about circumstances differently -       You have to see the world differently than you do now to make that thing happen -       A really simple example of this in my life has been becoming a podcaster.  -       I had no idea how to podcast 6 months ago.  -       It wasn’t even on my radar.  -       Then I wanted to be a podcaster because I thought it would be a great way to get the message out that there is help and there is a way forward for people who struggle.  -       But that didn’t make me a podcaster. -&n

#addictionrecovery zachspafford.com/workwithme 1.     Write down the websites you will visit that day a.     Writing down the websites gives your higher brain control over the situation.  b.     Why not just write the sites you won’t visit – there are too many to count c.     If that day you visit a site that leads to pornography use, evaluate that site for tomorrow.  d.       2.     Only visit those sites a.     What if I have to visit a site that isn’t on my list for the day?                                                i.     If it’s for work, then you do it.                                               ii.     If it isn’t for work, then you need to make a judgement call. You are the owner of this process and when you are free of pornography then you will be making these calls all the time.                                               iii.     You may decide that if there is a site you need to visit, that you will have your spouse do it with you                                             iv.     Or you may decide that it can wait until tomorrow.  b.      3.     Allow urges a.     What is an urge? b.      4.     Repeat  #masterymonday #addictionrecovery #theselfmasterypodcast #latterdaysaintsdealingwithpornographyinmarraige #LDS #latterdaysaints #pornographyrecovery #sarecovery #ldssa #12steps

You can set up a consultation with me here: zachspafford.com/workwithme Here's the link to the webinar for July 2020: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/3515928863411/WN_OJSUbCHSQGi0Ap7WPDC8jg #masterymonday #addictionrecovery #theselfmasterypodcast #latterdaysaintsdealingwithpornographyinmarraige #LDS #latterdaysaints #pornographyrecovery #sarecovery #ldssa #12steps

register for this month's webinar https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/3515928863411/WN_OJSUbCHSQGi0Ap7WPDC8jg http://zachspafford.com.safechkout.net/pricing (http://zachspafford.com.safechkout.net/pricing) https://www.zachspafford.com/workwithme (https://www.zachspafford.com/workwithme) -       What about, giving him sex so he doesn’t act out? o    Control v partnership o    -       Seeing other women and being worried it will lead to pornography? o   The beach o   The fro yo place  o    -       Controlling devices and checking up o   Accountability partner – webinar question #addictionrecovery #theselfmasterypodcast #masterymonday #addictionrecovery #theselfmasterypodcast #latterdaysaintsdealingwithpornographyinmarraige #LDS #latterdaysaints #pornographyrecovery #sarecovery #ldssa #12steps

https://calendly.com/habitcoachz/30minconsult Join my Monthly webinar: zachspafford.com/freecall #addictionrecovery #theselfmasterypodcast

If you want to register for the webinar to help decondition urges and stop using pornography follow this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZItcu2vqz4iEtwha5erXQmdgBu9xHjMWQwr If you want to set up a free consult so you can be in the July 1 Group Coaching Program follow this link: https://calendly.com/habitcoachz/30-min-consult-clone 1.     Choose love So often those who are dealing with spouses that have chosen addictive behavior feel like we are supposed to punish their behavior.  In doing that, we lose the perspective of love that we once had.   Choosing love doesn’t mean that you need to allow your spouse to abuse and overrun you.  It also doesn’t mean that you give in to the demands of a spouse who is manipulating you.   Choosing love does mean that what you say, what you do and who you show up as come from a place of love.  In place of saying things like, “I hate what you are doing in our home and what you have become” you can say, and mean, “I love you. This behavior is not ok.” Choosing love is for you.  It is so you can be the person that you want to be in the moment of your interaction.  It is so you can lead your relationship by example.   Being the  person you want to be in your relationship will help bring your entire marriage up, not just changing you but also, indirectly changing your partner.   Love is what you experience toward another.  Other people don’t feel your feelings.  You feel them. Which means, how you feel is how you act and how you act creates your results.   Choosing love does not mean we allow others to break the boundaries that we have set within the relationship.  If you have set a boundary that for 48 hours after your spouse looks at pornography sexual intimacy is off the table, then hold firmly and lovingly to that boundary.  Be clear, keep it simple and love without condition.   2.     Give up the need to be right a.     No real benefit to being right b.     Need to be right is misguided c.     When you do, tension will dissipate What has being right ever given you?  Has being right ever taken something from you? In a loving, committed relationship being right at the expense of the other person doesn’t bring us together, it usually creates an unnecessary wedge.   My parents have this running bet.  Any time one feels they are right about some inane thing and the other is not relenting, they will say, “I’ll bet your $300”.  No one keeps score, no one knows who is ahead, no money is ever passed to the “winner” because there is never a winner. It is their way of saying, “it doesn’t matter, let’s move on”.   When it comes to pornography use, you may believe deep down that you are right about what is happening. You may “know” that if your partner would just stop doing x or start doing y that they would be able to move forward and stop regressing to unhealthy buffering with pornography.  The question you have to ask is, “is being right making my partner change?” The answer is invariably, “no.” I’m also not saying that you have to be wrong.  You don’t have to give up on your opinions or act as though your position is unimportant.  If you love the person, being right doesn’t make them love you more and doesn’t make you love them more.  Give up being right and you will find yourself free from so much conflict.  3.     Stop trying to control the other person a.     We want others to do things b.     Adults get to behave however they want c.     We can’t control others without creating problems...

Every time I meet with a client I hear something along these lines.  I try to stop but I just can’t – I have been fighting through this my whole life – My whole world is burning down because of this addiction.  I am keeping it at bay, but I want to be free from this. This is the place most of us go to when we try to stop a habit in our lives.   Most of us try to use willpower to change our habits In fact, I get comments like this on my Facebook page all the time.  They say things like, “just stop it”  Maybe you’ve heard something similar from a friend, spouse, bishop This kind of language is the language of going into battle.   It is that keeping it at bay and believing you could lose everything as another client put it that is hindering your progress That is not going to get you all the way there.   So many of us have put our fullest attentions and greatest efforts into quitting pornography only to be drawn back into it after a period of sober living.  That is because we used willpower to fight what has become our most difficult habit. Willpower is a recipe for short gains, long term struggle because willpower is a trap, great book “change anything” talks about this in depth . It talks about how we may have half a dozen things influencing us to continue a habit while employing just one strategy to negate it. The book also demonstrates that it is not about some innate ability or capacity that makes us stronger than our friends or peers.  “…people (often) believe that their ability to make good choices stems from nothing more than their willpower – and that their willpower is a quality they’re born with or they’re not – they eventually stop trying altogether.  The willpower trap keeps them in a depressing cycle that begins with heroic commitment to change which is followed by eroding motivation and terminated inevitably by relapse into old habits. Then, when the built-up pain of their habits becomes intolerable, they muster up another heroic but doomed attempt at change.” Willpower is what we think we lack when we tell ourselves that we just didn’t want to quit bad enough Willpower can only take you so far because your brain is not designed to use willpower for lasting change.   Willpower is strictly a short term tool The problem with willpower is that it is a power of struggle.   When we use willpower we are simply fighting, battling out against the one person we can’t beat, ourselves.  There is this new will smith film called Gemini man where I think that is essentially the premise of the film.   That resistance, that battle, that warrior mentality, it is costly in terms of energy.  In change anything, the premise of the book is that you can change anything you want in your life, if you have the right skills.  In my individual coaching sessions I teach people a lot of skills. The webinars I do, are about teaching people skills.  Today I’m going to teach you the first of three essential skills that I will be teaching live on June 17.  If you are interested in attending that, please go to my website, zachspafford.com and click on free coaching call. That will take you to a zoom registration page where you will get all the info you need to join the call.  If you want to stop using pornography, you need to know how to do these three things. I only have time for the first today, but this skill alone will make a huge difference in your life.  One of the most important skills you can learn is how to say, “no” to your urges to go down the rabbit hole.   Think about how you say no, when you really mean it. Especially with something that might frustrate you.   If someone is repeatedly trying to get you to do something that you don’t like, you say, “NO!”  There is abruptness, there is a clenching, there is a tightening against the thing...

Pain now or later.  Almost every time I get a new client the first thing that they learn is that they have been putting off their pain.   Each of us has discomfort that we deal with on a regular basis.   Pain comes in lots of forms, some more painful in a moment than others.  Some are physical pains like going to the dentist and others are emotional pain like loneliness.   The thing is, that when we avoid painful things in search of short term happiness and pleasure, we are usually setting ourselves up for long term pain that is worse and more damaging than the pain we were avoiding.  A perfect example of this happened to me at the start of this covid quarantine.  Darcy had noticed that one of my front teeth was looking funny, which it turns out was a cavity behind a filling that had come loose. Immediately I thought, “oh, how much is this going to cost.” Being an entrepreneur I pay all my own dental bills.   You can see my dilemma, put it off, don’t deal with the cost of fixing the tooth now and keep my, what turned out to be $300, or pay for it now, get into the dentist even though there is this new order to stay home and they aren’t seeing anyone for hardly any reason.  There were a lot of good reasons to stay home, there were a few good reasons to go to the dentist.  Having worked in a dental office, I have seen first-hand what happens when someone neglects dental work. Anything from needing heavy duty cleaning with a machine that basically jackhammers your teeth with sonic waves all the way up to pulling everything out because not a single tooth has enough integrity to stay in the mouth without the possibility of getting infected.  Had I left it for a couple of months until things opened up again there very well could have been the need to put a crown on it or worse, do a post replacement of the entire tooth.  Which would have cost a lot more money.  A lot of what we do in life is a trade off.   We work out knowing that a little pain now will help us be stronger in the long run.  We get shots knowing that the vaccines, steroids and even pain killers that hurt some going in, will help us avoid worse, even excruciating pain in the long run.  When it comes to pornography use and the struggle that you have been dealing with for years, ask yourself, am I willing to take a shot now in order to avoid an even more painful future.  What’s the value of that to you?   What’s the cost of continued therapy sessions for both you and your spouse before finally resolving this issue?  What’s the cost of all the time you’ve spend doing something that is tearing at the fabric of your self-confidence?  What’s the cost of sleeping in your car because your spouse has asked you to leave?  What’s the cost of the hurt you are putting into your relationship and the trust you are breaking because of pornography use? What’s the cost of a divorce?  What’s the cost of living separate lives?   Just like dental work, working on our self is something that if you don’t get in as early as you can, the cavities in your capacities can fester, grow and get infected.   The emotional pain that you feel when you are frustrated, stressed, lonely or even just bored are all types of immediate pain that if we choose to ignore it, we are creating a long-term pain that will eventually become unignorable.   When I was deep in my pornography use, there was this huge gap between how I felt and how I wanted to feel.  I struggled so much to feel wanted and loved and worthy that I would have done anything to get those emotions in my life.  But, like so many of us, I didn’t know how.  I thought that when I was lonely that no one wanted me.  What I...

Why we use pornography even when we don’t want to. When we try to control our feelings the results begin to overwhelm us.  The paradox of control On a personal level, it refers to the phenomenon by which the harder a person tries to control something, the more difficult it becomes to exercise that control. Examples that are often given of this phenomenon are: (1) the harder you try to fall a sleep, the more difficulty you have actually falling asleep; (2) the harder you try to stop thinking about something, the more you think about it; (3) the more you try to control negative emotions such as fear, the more powerful those emotions become. There is another paradox involved in this phenomenon: we get a sense of well-being when we feel we are in control, yet we do not actually have the power to control very much. The question then arises, why one or why the other. If we cannot have control over very much, why do we get a sense of well-being when we have the illusion of control? Conversely, if we have a sense of well-being when we have the illusion of control, why is it so difficult to actually exercise control? The two things seem to work against each other, and therein lies the paradox. On the interpersonal level, when we try to control the behavior of those around us (or the things that happen to us), we find that our attempts rarely succeed. Only when we stop trying to exercise control that we are able to get the results we desire.  The paradox here lies in the fact that in order to exercise control, we have to stop trying to exercise control.  I like to illustrate this with sand.  If you have ever picked up a handful of sand and tried to hold it you know that the tighter you squeeze the more the sand just falls through your fingers.  Eventually you will hold a tiny amount in your hand but the rest will just fall away because you can’t get a good grip on it.   On the other hand, if you scoop up a handful of sand and just hold it there, letting it rest on your hand, you will find that you can have a lot more sand in your hand with very little control.   In connection with the paradox of control, it is sometimes said that we cannot control what happens around us, but we can control how we respond to what is happening. If we shift the focus from external control to internal control we will get better results.  That is, if we come to terms with the fact that we do not have control over the external world, we can have better control over a given situation by controlling the way we react to what is happening to us in that situation. This is especially true of the wives of pornography users.  If we are looking for inner peace and to feel in control, exercising control over the way we choose to think about the situation, which gives us control over our emotions and our actions is the most effective way to get to the peace, love and self confidence we are all looking for. 

What is, not what should be All good stories start at 330 am right. September 15 2001, just a few days after the September 11th terrorist attack, my missionary companion, the other two elders in our apartment and I were sound asleep in our seventh floor flat two blocks from the piazza garibaldi train station in naples Italy.  On the minds of each of us was this great tragedy that had just changed the face of the world and as we slept we subconsciously thought of all the loss and fear and hatred and pain that were at that moment permeating the lives of americans 8 time zones away.  A rainstorm had been pounding the city for hours.  Deep in sleep four missionaries heard a desperate thunder banging through our apartment and in our slumbering ears our 60 year old landlady crying “fate presto!” “Come quickly!” As our feet hit the floor, something was clearly wrong. Where there should have been only tile, there was water.  At the door, our landlady begged us to shut off the water, which she was certain was coming from our apartment. It was, after all full of boys barely old enough to vote, so obviously they must have broken something.  Stepping out and standing on the landing of our top floor apartment I could see a cascade of water, careening toward the earth and crashing at the bottom of our large stairwell. The door to a second apartment opened to reveal our neighbors across the hall bleary eyed and confused. Offering no answers, we all looked at the third door on this level. An empty apartment that had been unoccupied for as long as anyone could recall.  I tried the door. Nothing. But I could clearly feel the flow of water gushing between the door and the floor. The landlady had no key as it was a private apartment. From the landing there was no way in.  The balcony of that empty apartment and the adjacent missionary apartment was separated by a stone wall with only one way around it. Over the edge of the wet balcony with only a slippery rail seven floors up to hold on to.    In a moment ‘I put on my raincoat, went onto our balcony and climbed to the flooding one where I found the only drainage hole blocked by a wayward mop and a random piece of plastic.’ Crisis averted, time to clean up. Sometimes I have conversations with spouses of pornography users who come to me at the moment of crisis. They have just found out about the pornography use of their spouse. Many are distraught, unbending and unable to look at this as anything other than betrayal. They believe that their marriage is over, their spouse is broken beyond repair and that they are a failure.  They are focusing on what should be and not what is.  Let’s talk about the differences between how we act when we focus on what is vs what should be. “What is” creates possibility. “What should” be delays possibility. A high school graduate might say, “my gpa will get me into these colleges, I’m ready to make a choice” Or  when the think about what should be, they might say, ‘my gpa isn’t good enough to get into the school I want. I wish I had studied harder.’ A business person might say, ‘our sales were 93% of target, let’s evaluate our process to see if there are any adjustments we can make for the next quarter’ Or ‘if only I had made one more sale. I missed my bonus, this is the worst, I should have worked harder’ A pornography user might say, ‘I see how I have behaved, I understand the choices I made that brought me here. I am going to learn as much as I can from this.’ Or, ‘it just happened, I don’t have control over myself and I’m an addict.’

Making decisions from a place of fear.  What is fear and why do we often make decisions from a place of fear rather than from a place of abundance? Fear of missing out Not having enough Failure Not being conservative enough How is fear different than caution and how can we tell the difference? What is it about making a decision from a place of fear vs abundance that makes our lives better or worse? What is good about fear? What can be bad about fear? If you knew this was going to work, what would you give up to get there? Matthew 13:44 – the man who sold everything and bought a field. “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” He didn’t think, what if someone discovers it before I get back?  what if I can’t raise enough funds? The reasons we use for a lot of our behavior are often contrived out of nothing. Book – the art of possibility talks about “experiments with people who have suffered a lesion between the two halves of the brain have shown that when the right side is prompted, say, to close a door, the left side, unaware of the experimenters instruction, will produce a reason as to why he has just performed the action, such as, “oh I felt a draft.” …It’s all invented, so we might as well invent a story or a framework of meaning that enhances our quality of life and the life of those around us” I don’t know how the experiment conducted, possibly through visual input to one side of the brain or a physical stimulus that only would show up in one side of the brain and then the other side creating a reason for it.

Why Would my Husband Lie to me? And other questions Wives ask when their spouse uses pornography. Over the last couple of weeks my wife and I have had a number of conversations with a new client and his wife. They had enrolled in my 13 week course and after one session she hadn’t felt like she had seen any changes. This was hard for her because she was dealing with so much pain, so much frustration and so much heartache that his recovery from pornography use was eating away at her.  She described him as unemotional, uncaring and disconnected. Their story is so similar to so many stories that I decided to share with you some of what each of them are asking for themselves and for each other. Let me just give you some background. I have known this couple for almost 20 years. About 2 weeks ago she reached out to me on Facebook and asked me to call her about her husband and my business. They decided to enroll in my course because they felt it would give him the best chance to change and become pornography free.  As we spoke on the phone she told me of the difficulties that he was having. He had been laid off due to Covid-19, he was using pornography and he was hiding extra cell phones around the house.  To her the biggest issue had been that he lied.  He had lied to her and he had lied to their children. She loves him and wants him to get better. For his part, he is an amazing man who has done so many amazing things in his life. He has always been there for his kids and his wife. He works hard. He doesn’t want pornography to be what he does to feel better but he also doesn’t want to feel so bad all the time. And right now he feels like he has a lot to feel bad about. Their story is not unlike my story or the story of so many people who struggle with addictive behaviors. So, let me share with you some of the questions that she was asking, some of the questions he was asking and some of the essential information I shared with them and would recommend for anyone dealing with something like this.  “Why would he lie to me?” Darcy -      In the thick of it the lying hurt more than the pornography use.  -      I also didn’t understand why zach would lie to me. -      When truthful I would react poorly -      Angry, cry, call names -      Throw things, threaten to leave. -      His brain wants to do tree things -      Pleasure -      Pain -      Conserve energy. -      Honesty causes pain -      For me -      And for him -      His lying is him trying to protect his feelings and mine. -      Lying from kids perspective. -      Not get in trouble -      He’s lying to avoid pain -      It conserves energy because avoiding external consequences -      Lie because we don’t want to hurt others feelings -      Hey guess what so and so said about you. -       What would you tell a wife who is being lied to on how to handle this situation? -      Remove the emotions -      Look at the facts -      When your child is doing this it isn’t to hurt you -      Same true with your spouse -      They are just trying to deal with their own emotions -      Don’t accept/believe that you

-      The sun is setting and the kids are out making the gleeful noises that signal an amazing day is ending. -      It’s about bed time and I am sitting down to record -      Thinking, what is the skill the thing that my audience needs help mastering this week?  -      What can I bring to them. -      That they might have joy – 2 ne 25 -      Opposition in all things 2 ne 11 -      Taking new meaning -      Ask clients, what percentage of life should you feel good? -      90%, 75% 60/40 -      Major reason we fall into buffering or addictive behaviors – avoiding negative feelings -      Avoiding feelings leads to doubling down on negativity. -      Lonely leads to drinking, pornography whatever, -      The lonely doesn’t really get addressed and in the end it doesn’t go away -      Then after the temporary pleasure fades, the loneliness comes back and -      On top of that we add guilt -      So now we’ve doubled the pain -      Problem is we can make it even worse. -      We can double again and choose to think, not, “ive done something I don’t want to do again and I will take responsibility for it and stop” -      We some times choose to think, “I’m bad, broken or irredeemable” which is shame, -      So now we’ve tripled our pain. -       -      On the flip side, when we have great things in our lives happen, we look for problems. -      Or we diminish the value of our accomplishments or our contributions in the world -       -       -      4 ways to create joy in your life. -       1.    Seek the good in your life a.    Consciously observe the wins in your day                                                        i.    Dinner table question b.    avoid seeing problems where there aren’t any c.    Believe what you want to believe about yourself d.     2.    Become willing to feel your feelings all the way a.    Practice b.    Self confidence                                                        i.    Feel any feeling 3.    Remember you are learning a.    Ability to trust self 4.    The atonement has bridged the gap, you just need to

-      The more accountability we take for our experience here – what happens to us, what we create, what we see as external or internal struggles – the more choices we have o  This is about ownership o  Ownership creates power and choice -      This isn’t about what you’re not o  Come from negative place o  Not strong enough o  Not smart enough o  Not disciplined enough o  That is all blame and fault finding o  Blame and fault finding are shame based o   -      Here’s the real difficulty, sometimes we judge ourselves for the things that we are taking accountability for o  Then we look to see how we can deflect that judgement o  When we beat our self up that often leads to deflecting which doesn’t feel good o  This goes wrong in the way that people/humans don’t like to be blamed or at fault so then we look to explain away the results in our life o  She didn’t meet my needs o  This just showed up on my screen o  There was a link in my feed o  That food wasn’t supposed to be in the pantry -      You try to deflect judgment -      In the process of deflecting judgement, you relinquish accountability. -      Here is one of the secrets that I want you to take away from this, You can be accountable without judging.  -      There are two words that you can eliminate from your vocabulary to help you do this. -      Should and Shouldn’t. -      You’re a human, you’re going to make mistakes -      Saying I should have done this or I shouldn’t have done that -      I should be more -      I shouldn’t be so bad -      I shouldn’t have slipped up -      Taking should and shouldn’t out of your vocabulary all together will help in this process of taking accountability without judgement. -      You aren’t perfect, I’m not perfect, no one is. -      Take accountability without taking blame. -      Let’s talk about areas where we can take accountability -      There are three areas -      Some call it the cognitive triangle – -      Brooke Castillo calls it the Model -      – most of us just know it as the things we have control over in our lives - -      Thoughts, feelings and actions -      Elder Uchtdorf had a great Instagram post where he was writing on a sheet of paper just a quick reminder, it seems -      I have control over my: Thoughts, Feelings, Actions. -      So, 3 questions: Why not always take accountability for these three things? -      How do I take back accountability for these three things? -      And why will that help me have greater self mastery? -      Let’s quick define Actions: o  Every one of my clients comes to me with one of two problems o  I’m doing but I can’t stop o  I want to start doing but I can’t § I’m using pornography and I can’t stop § I want to stop overeating § I want to get more things done § I want to stop sleeping in so I can get my exercise in -      This is all stuff we do or don’t...

Does it matter whether you are an addict? Does it abdicate your agency? Does that thought serve you? - Does thinking it make you more likely to stop using pornography?

The urges are taking over my life – or that is kind of what a lot of us are feeling right now. For a lot of us this last 2 weeks have been really challenging. A lot of us are feeling trapped, stuck, and cooped up This is driving a lot of behavior that we have not used to buffer in a long time. For some of us it is eating – A lot of people are going to pornography – the data indicating that people are visiting illicit  sites indicates a huge spike since the beginning of the covid outbreak. A lot of that is driving overwhelm, frustration and shame Our brains are really interesting machines. They do a couple of things really well and then they miss a couple of other really important things if we don’t manage them. So, the first thing our brains do really well, is they see danger in bad feelings.  But something that is not a strength of our brain is distinguishing between bad feelings.  Being chased by a bear feels bad.  Being bored also feels bad. Which one is going to kill you? Your brain doesn’t know. So it throws something out there to keep you from feeling bad.  In the case of being chased by a bear, people have been known to lay down and play dead as well as run screaming or even to stand up and face the bear, dealing with it head on. In the case of being bored, you have essentially the same three options, you can lay down and play dead, for me this looks  a lot like depression. You can take off running, which is looking for adrenalin. So, food, pornography, social media Or you can stand up and face the boredom, feel it and deal with it head on. The big difference here is, when you face boredom, you know that eventually it will go away. That is not always the case with a bear.  Now, if you were faced with a bear and you did any of those three things no one would judge you So, don’t pile shame on to your choice of how you choose to behave. Figure out how you want to behave ahead of time. Build in time for boredom Create. You have projects that you have been putting off.  Engage your family

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Love – As papi to 8 children I have been regularly faced with a significant load in trying to connect with my kids. There is a lot that happens in life, there is a lot of living that 10 people do in one house, so there is constantly something to wash, clean, pick up, put back, get out, fix, make, build, take apart, and leave alone.  The other day my oldest was really upset that he was having to participate in the chores around the house because he felt that it was unfair, he hadn’t created any of the mess and now he was being asked to clean up. This is the part where I probably would have gotten mad at him, escalated the… we’ll call it a discussion, and told him off for how ungrateful he was being, how he was acting entitled and life just isn’t fair so stop whining about it and get it done. For me, my children’s behavior has often been a point of both pride and a source of deep frustration. It has meant that I was either a good parent or a bad one. It has meant that I was doing it right or that I was failing miserably.  We used to go out with our 4 or six kids ( we don’t go out with all 8 at the same time these days partly because they are all at such different stages of life and the older ones often have activities). People would stop us so often and tell us what well behaved children we had. Sitting at dinner in a restaurant or grocery shopping was usually a high point because, in public our kids were kids, but the best behaved kind.  They did what we asked, they sat nicely and had conversations with us and we all enjoyed being out together.  These days we are all getting a lot more time with our children because of school closures and work from home or work shutdowns.  For us, even though I work from home and we homeschool our kids, our lives have shifted dramatically from one of going to sports activities, church youth activities, seminary at 5:40 AM, our oldest going to work, our littles playing with the neighborhood kids and all the normal stuff that you do when you are a large family of highly social people.  We now stay home more, our kids interact with outside people a lot less, practically not at all, in fact and we see a lot more of the inside of our home and each other.  All of this leads up to the moment two nights ago when my oldest was what I would call excessively upset over being asked to clean up a mess that he didn’t make.  As I stood there, tired from a day of work, with a tube of caulk in my hands because I was putting it on the baseboards that I had just replaced on the entire main floor, I looked at my son with anger and frustration welling up in me.  I wanted him to just help, to just get it done, to just stop complaining about the work that was obviously going to need to be done by someone. I didn’t understand why he was acting like this and why did I have to deal with his bad attitude. I could feel myself getting warm and I was seeing red.  At that moment I realized something that I had been trying to do for a few months now. I was trying to see my children and everyone around me the way I wanted to be seen. And trying to eliminate what felt like near constant bickering among my kids when they are home.  I realized that this was that moment where I could change the whole situation. I realized that love was the one thing that I needed to bring to the equation. So, I just stopped running around applying caulk, even though it felt like there was a time crunch because that stuff dries, and I looked at my baby boy who is now the size of a grown man and I said, “It’s ok, I’ll do it when I finish this. You don’t have to.”  Then I put my hand on his shoulder with love in my eyes and went back to what I was doing.  I had peace, in that moment. I knew that I might have to go back and clean up, but it was ok. I realized that no...

Victim-hood and the blame game. -      Not too many people think or express that they are the victim. -      Not weakness, just our brain justifying our behavior -      Indicators of victim mentality. -      Blame o  If my spouse would just meet my needs better o  If I just hadn’t looked at porn that first time o  If my church leaders would just help me more o  The house clean on ramsey – o  If only the circumstance was different o  Ask yourself, do I blame anyone else for things that I don’t like about myself or my behavior? -      Defensiveness o  Byron Katie talks about defensiveness as the first act of war o  That person doesn’t know my situation o  My life is different. o  No one else can understand what I’m going through o  No matter what I do it’s never good enough o  Zach driving o  This is a place of defending your actions even though you might want to change but think you don’t know how o  Ask yourself, is there someone in my life that is causing my pain? o   -      Complaining o  I just can’t catch a break o  Also, just plain negativity, o  this is never going to work, nothing I do works o  You feel sorry for yourself and feel trapped. o  You know this person in your life, they are constantly looking to engage in a conversation that is negative.. o  Building a business has really challenged me in this area o  I just have to ignore those thoughts and move forward with my best plans. o  Ask yourself, do I complain    , do I excuse my behavior, are my thoughts and words negative? o   -      Key indication is that the stories that you tell involve “someone did something to me” “it happened to me” -      “I was reading the news and the site showed an article that made me want to click further and that took me down the rabbit hole” – it just happened to me -      Be careful about your words – look for a victim and villain

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Action bias We act in order to gain some sense of control or even to eliminate a problem -      1 - Doing something is better than doing nothing o  We see this in business where we begin looking for solutions before we have even fully developed what the problem is. o  This is what we do when we are dealing with addictive behaviors. o  Giving in to our urges is an action that we engage in for a variety of reasons – sometimes because we think it will make the urge go away or because we want to do it regardless of the consequences. o  This also comes into play when we engage in distracting ourselves. o  Keep ourselves busy – go run rather than deal with the urge, get busy with work rather than deal with the urge other distracting behaviors. o  Or the classic, “im craving this, so I have to eat it.” o   -      12 - Others expect me to do something. o  Soccer goalies jumping left or right when statistically they should stay in the middle of the goal o  White knuckling is a form of action where we exert extraordinary effort to keep our urges and impulses at bay. o  Others expect us to just do it, or in this case not do it.  o  The action we are taking is fighting the urge o  Holding it at bay. o   -      There is an alternative. -      David Attenborough – iguana chased by killer snakes video.  -      Narrates very little, at end says in a chill voice – a near miraculous escape. -      That’s it, -      Allowing the urge – -      Just sit and watch it -      Do nothing, -      Observe – feelings, thoughts, urges -      

Battle of the brains - why your lower brain hijacks your best intentions and you still buffer So you have a problem. We all do.  We are trying to survive in a world where survival is virtually guaranteed Infant mortality is down across the world Life expectancy is up. Since 1950 when life expectancy was 45 years old to 2020 we’ve added nearly 30 years to the average life of a person. Yet, with this survival going on we are also getting into things that are quote bad for us, like pornography, excessive eating, video gaming, over spending, and so many other buffers that keep us entertained in the very short term, but that bring a host of negative consequences in the long run. Why?  Because of the thing that got us to this point. Our lower brain and it’s effective use of the motivational triad. Ok, yes, all those words. What ‘s the lower brain, why does it have a triad and does that involve nuclear arms?        -      Lower brain o  Conservation of energy o  Seeking Pleasure o  Avoiding pain

Podcast - pain, process it so it doesn’t turn into buffering ·     We’ve talked about life being 50/50 ·     Episode 12                   ·     unhappiness is half of life ·     I’m going to talk about pain – really, all negative emotions, lonliness, sadness, tired, upset, whatever you think of as negative emotions ·     Pornography users, over eaters, over spenders, video gamers ·     We do those things to buffer the feelings ·     Lower brain doesn’t understand that momentary dopamine leads to increased pain ·     Here’s what happens o  Something happens to trigger the pain § – wife goes out for girls night, so you’re lonely § – you’re on a business trip, so you feel like you have nothing to do (translated – bored) § –  something happens at work, so you feel like a failure § Your kids behavior is bad, so you feel like a bad mom §  o  You don’t know why you are feeling this - not because you don’t know what happened, but our minds are pretty good denial machines. o  And we usually have habits that buffer away the moment so we find ourselves removed from the situation before we reflect on what went on. o  Pain runs through your body o  You resist the emotion by using– § Pornography § Food § Excessive spending § Social media scrolling ·     Using these to avoid feelings creates additional negative emotions o  Pornography – guilt, shame, self-loathing, disconnection from partner o  Food – guilt, shame, self-loathing, overweight, o  Overspending – guilt, shame, financial worry, out of control o  Social media scrolling – disconnected, envy, unconfident, depressed ·     All of these tactics create a long-term increase of pain, they don’t help you avoid it.  ·     We don’t usually think of the long-term consequences of our actions, especially when we feel pain.  ·      ·     Just like pulling our hand away from a hot stove, we react to pain in a way that provides immediate relief - ·     I took my youngest two to get vaccinated and they screamed and fussed and cried because they knew that getting a shot was going to hurt.  ·     What they didn’t think about and what they don’t have the capacity to understand yet that adults do is that momentary pain will greatly decrease the likelihood that they will get polio or measles or some other disease with long lasting effects. ·      ·     Now that is physical ·     But our brains don’t easily distinguish between physical pain and emotional pain. ·     When we feel emotional pain our lower brain wants to avoid it just as much as it does physical pain. ·      ·     We don’t usually choose to feel pain. ·     choose to avoid pain in the moment and magnify it long run. ·     Overeaters see this in their physical weight. ·     Pornography users see this in their self-confidence and in their relationships with their spouses. ·     When we scroll social media to excess we see this in greater depression rates and lower life satisfaction. ·     You can avoid the pain in the moment with a quick hit of dopamine, but that doesn’t remove the underlying...

Becoming the person you want to be is an infinite game. -      Finite and infinite games are an interesting subject -      I was listening to simon sinek and he talked about the difference between the two. -      Finite games have set numbers of players, specific rules and an end point. -      Infinite games have rules that may change, the number of players may change and the purpose of an infinite game is to keep the game going. -      One night while traveling home from a single adult activity when my pornography use was weighing on me heavily, I looked out at the dark road and the distance ahead and felt a deep longing to be better. -      As the highway hummed along under me and the solitude of the car pulled my thoughts deeper into my actions I prayed as earnestly as I knew how that if I could just not have this one problem, I would be a pretty amazing person. -      What I didn’t see from that point in my life that I see so clearly now, is that becoming the person I want to be is not an arrival at some particular set of attributes -      It involves so much more than that. -      To become great at life we have to stop thinking about what we are doing in terms of arriving at an end -      We have to think of long term, continued, and sustainable growth and learning. -      So how does an infinite game work and how can you become a great player becoming the best version of your self that you can be.  -      Five things have to happen to play in the infinite game according to simon. -      1. You have to have a just cause. -      2. You have to have trust in teams -      3. You have to have a worthy adversary -      4. You have to have existential flexibility -      5. You have to have the courage to lead   1 – just cause – you have to have a cause that is so just, right, or important that you would willingly sacrifice for it. -      As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day Saints there is a lot of moral guidance about the cause we work for. -      Eternal life is a just cause that we look to willingly sacrifice for. -      An eternal family is another. -      The just cause for most of us is our desire to be in concert with our Heavenly Father.  -      We believe that is the most important thing we can do, because we believe that it will bring joy into our lives. -      There are lots of great just causes. The work you do could be considered a just cause. -      The United states was founded on a just cause – it is about an ideal, so amazing, so important that we may never achieve the ideal in this life, but we will give our all to it while we can. -      This is what give’s us purpose. The striving toward an ideal. Sacrificing for a greater state of goodness. -       Simon talks about it this way, he says, “imagine a world that is different than the one we have now, that you believe if everything that you did in your organization went perfectly, that you would contribute to the building of that world.” -      Moroni or Ether not sure if Moroni is just quoting Ether here or inserting his commentary on what Ether wrote but this is...

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