Lessons Learned from Better Than Happy Live

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Hey there

It’s Jennie Lakenan, certified life coach & consultant for your web design strategy needs. Over the last handful of years I’ve designed dozens of websites for coaches. My mission is to get more coaching into the world and help elevate the quality of life of humans at large by delivering expert custom website design and strategy to coaches.

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The Life Coach's Tech Roadmap

The only 5 pieces of tech a coach needs to set up an online business without overwhelm.

In this post I’m going to share my lessons learned from Better Than Happy Live. It’s a live event hosted by Jody Moore, powerhouse coach, podcaster, and business woman.

I hope that my takeaways will be useful to you, too, as you navigate your life and as a coach and business owner.

Jody hosted this event in the Garden Room at Thanksgiving Point, a gorgeous venue in the mountains above Salt Lake City, Utah.

The tulips were in bloom, and it was glorious.

Tulips at Thanksgiving Point during Better Than Happy Live

Packed to the brim doesn’t even begin to describe it! There were over 250 eager podcast fans in the crowd, and the energy in the room was just awesome. I loved, loved being there and meeting so many amazing people and coaches.

But enough with the travelogue. Keep reading for my take-aways from hearing Jody Moore speak and coach at Better Than Happy Live!

Lesson 1: The accurate R line in the thought model is MY result, not anyone else’s.

If you aren’t sure what the “R line” means, go check out Brooke Castillo’s model training. But the crux of it is that our thoughts create our results, and that’s what the “R” or results line stands for.

Someone asked Jody about whether or not having someone else’s action in the “R” line is a helpful way to write out these models during self-coaching.

Jody offered this: the “R” line in the thought model is actually YOUR result. It’s what’s happening or going to happen in your life because of your thought.

Putting someone else’s decision or action in the R line isn’t helpful. We can’t determine what other people will do with our thoughts and actions.

This was a big break-through for me. I’ve never felt my models were totally effective when it comes to my “R” line. Here’s an example of an R that I’ve written in the past that WASN’T really helpful because it wasn’t about MY result:

C – consult call with a potential client
T – I’m not sure I know how to help her
F – aversion (to acknowledging my ignorance)
A – don’t be proactive about how I can help her
R – she doesn’t want to work with me

In this case, this R line isn’t very accurate. Whether or not the client ended up working with me is HER result, and I can’t determine that. I think a more accurate R line would have been that I just didn’t know how to help her.

Whether or not she decided to work with me didn’t really belong in my R line.

Now, not knowing how to help her will make me show up differently – which may alter whether or not I get the project. But for that model specifically, the result wasn’t quite accurate.

Just in case you’re curious, here was the  more intentional model for this particular scenario:

C – consult call with potential client
T – avoiding facing this thought is leaning OUT, not leaning in
F – resolve
A – self-coaching
R – decide for good if I actually can/want to help this client

So, when you’re coaching yourself, just remember…your R line is about the result for you, not for anybody else. This was the first of my lessons from better than happy live.

Lesson 2: I have to be willing to give up my “winning strategy” to achieve the impossible goal.

This lesson is from a book called “The Last Word on Power” that Jody said she’s reading. The author says we all have a winning strategy that we’ve implemented in our lives that’s gotten us to where we are now.

But to get to a higher plane, we need to be willing to give up what’s worked for us and experiment with new ways of thinking and acting.

This resonated with me specifically about money.

There are money thoughts that I’ve held onto for a long time. Those thoughts led me to be super frugal and tight-fisted with money, which served me well while we were students and just getting our feet under us as a newer family.

But now I’m growing a business, scaling it and blowing my own mind. And I must be willing to let money flow in and out of my life in meaningful ways that invest in my personal and business development in order to nurture that process.

That means giving up my historical “winning strategy” – penny pinching money thoughts, telling myself I can’t afford that course or this tool – and loosen my grip by adopting new ways of thinking about money that serve my life better.

For example, buying a $2,000 Surface Pro so I can work more efficiently and build better websites for my clients.

It’s an ongoing process. If you’re struggling with money thoughts, too, I highly recommend a book called Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by Harv Eker. It’s helped me immensely.

Let me know if you decide to read it – I’d love to corroborate.

Lesson 3: My brain’s favorite software to run is the one that says something’s gone TERRIBLY WRONG.

Onto the last of my lessons from better than happy live. During the event, one woman shared a very personal thought she was facing about a struggling adopted child.

Jody shared that instead of thinking, “My child isn’t having the experience she supposed to have,” the thought is available to her that, “This is the experience my child is supposed to be having in her life – this is all happening for her.”

Because it’s OKAY if our children struggle.

It’s OKAY that they experience negative emotion.

That’s PART of living in this world.

But our brain’s favorite software to run is that it’s not okay, that it means something is terribly wrong.

The beauty is if we can just realize our brains natural response is to see the awful, it makes it a lot easier to offer it counter thoughts when our brains freak out. (I know mine does, daily.)

Or, if your brain can’t really buy that what’s happening right now is exactly what’s supposed to be happening (for you, your kids, or anyone in any situation), here’s a thought from my client Candice Toone

We live in a fallen world and (insert troubling thing) can happen. So who do you want to be when it does?

Love it. Who do you want to be when troubling things happen?

So that’s it.

Those are my lessons from Better Than Happy Live with Jody Moore.

Thanks Jody for showing me that my results are always about me, that I need to be willing to give up my winning strategy to get to the next level, and that my brain’s favorite software is ALWAYS going to be that something is terribly wrong.

I hope sharing this was helpful. Thank you Jody for hosting this event, it was such a privilege to meet you. And thanks to all of you who were there and said hi!

Jennie

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