Thrive Beyond Pornography (Formerly The Self Mastery Podcast‪)‬ Zach Spafford

Hey, if you are ready to get started on your journey to quit porn and start thriving, go to zachspafford.com/freecall and register for a live webinar this Thursday.  You’ll be glad you did. 
When I struggled with pornography and was attending the 12 step meetings regularly, one of the things that was the most difficult to deal with was the idea that any missteps meant that I was starting back at zero each time.  
The whole idea, especially with 12-step meetings where you would get a token or a chip for each period of sobriety, as they called it, and if you messed up, even one time, that meant that you would go back to zero.
It was discouraging and depressing.  
Each time I went back to zero, I felt that I was a complete failure. That was how we treated it at the meetings, it was how I treated it in my mind, and it was how Darcy treated it in our conversations. 
In today’s podcast, I want to teach you how you can set yourself up to never fail again as you overcome pornography. 
Imagine you are working on eating healthy and working to make your weight more reflective of a healthy body as well as eating according to that ideal. 
Each week for ten weeks you eat the things on your plan. You feel good.  You’ve lost 20 pounds. You’re doing well.  
Then, on a regular old Tuesday, with no special meaning and no reason to celebrate, you decide to eat everything in sight.  Nothing is on your list and none of the things you eat are what you might call “good for you”. You feel like you can’t help yourself.  
The next morning, you wake up and you’ve gained a pound.  You are 19 pounds lost instead of 20.  Are you back to zero? Are you starting over, are you a complete failure?  
I know that if a friend of mine called me that Wednesday morning and said, “Look, I failed.  I gained back one of the 20 pounds I lost and I’m just so ashamed of myself, I think I’m going to quit on my goal of eating healthy.”  I know what I would say to them.  
Hey, you have something to be proud of.  You’ve done 10 weeks of healthy eating.  Paying attention to your mind and what it is offering you around your food habits.  You’re doing so well.  You’ve lost 19 pounds.  You’re healthier than you’ve been in a while.  
I think we all would. 
But, for many of us, that is not how we approach pornography. 
So, today, I’d like to offer you two ideas that you can use to help you never fail again. 
First, Progress trumps Perfection. 
When we think about our struggles, we tend to think of them in terms of “have I arrived yet?” Have I overcome porn entirely yet?  Have I lost all the weight I want to yet? Do I make enough money yet? Do I have a degree yet?
In life, progress is more important than the place we’ve arrived at. When we value progress, we value ourselves as we are.  
You might be listening to this and say, “I don’t want to be who I am right now. I want that person to be gone. I want to be someone who never views porn again. I can’t value who I am.  I must be someone else.” Or some version of that. 
Here’s the problem with that.  When we believe that we aren’t enough, it shows up in our actions.  It shows up in our attitude.  It shows up in our results.  
If you think about your experiences with little children who are learning to walk, you might have noticed that they simply accept the things that happen as a matter of course.  And If they get sad or frustrated, when they fall or fail to make the progress they feel they would like to, and start crying, what do we do?  We pick them up and tell them it’s ok and that they are doing a good job and to keep trying. 
We value their progress, regardless of how...

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I had a call with one of my clients today and he asked a really interesting question.  He had just been called into the bishopric as a councilor, he’s not chosen to view pornography for about 6 months, he is a business owner, a husband, and a father.  
He said, I have 2 things on my mind but let’s start with this one. “how do I get my mind right with all the stuff coming down, all the different roles and actions that need to be taken?” 
What was weighing on his mind is adding this new, demanding challenge of being in a bishopric to his life and he’s worried that he might fall back on old coping strategies to deal with his increased responsibilities. 
I think a lot of people have this come up, especially as they find that they are more successful at not choosing pornography.  How do I position myself to continue this success? Is essentially what he is asking and what you might also be asking. 

So, today, I’d like to share with you what I shared with him.  While this may not be the exact right answer for you, or for every situation, I think these are universal ideas that can help almost anyone and will probably help you, as you put pornography behind you and start creating the life you want and Thriving Beyond Pornography. And if you are ready to put the things that we talk about in the podcast into practice and are committed to not simply overcoming pornography now, but also building or rebuilding your relationship, then sign up for a free consult at zachspafford.com/workwithzach.  

One of the biggest reasons men and women struggle with pornography is that it has been a reliable way to mitigate and manage emotions, stress, and other discomforts.  

So, when my client asked me the question of how to keep his mind right as he takes on new roles and responsibilities, it was pretty obvious that his concern was that he didn’t want to fall back on his old ways of dealing with new stressors.  

When new stressors come into our lives, our old ways of dealing with stress can easily come up as our mind tries to figure things out.  Having taught him the key skills that he needs to address when his mind offers him pornography with his old urge patterns, it seemed likely to me that, while he had started to become master of the behaviors he had previously turned to, he wasn’t yet creating a fulfilling life. 

Creating a fulfilling life is one of the surest ways to move beyond your old patterns and never go back. 

Think of an old job you had, that met your needs financially, but that was maybe too easy, not fulfilling or even horrible for whatever reason.  When you leave that old job, finding one that better matches your skill, helps you feel fulfilled and drives you to be a better employee by challenging you to grow and learn and solve problems in new and interesting ways. 

When that is what your job situation looks like, it’s pretty unlikely that you will want to go back to the old work environment. 

The same is true with your old habits.  Going back seems silly, when you’ve created a more fulfilling and enriched way of living. 

So, to assist in building this new life, I want to offer 2 simple habits that will help you build a more fulfilling life. 

The first is to say, “No”

That might seem too simple or even counter to creating a fulfilling life.  A lot of us were taught that service is the highest ideal and doing everything we can to serve will be meaningful.  I would simply say to that, yes, and saying no to doing everything you’re asked to do can help create balance in a busy, stressful life. 

I like the phrase, “If it's not a...

Darcy - Webinar Thursday at 6 pm mt. sign up at zachspafford.com/freecall
Zach  - If you have a pornography struggle in your life, either as a spouse, an ecclesiastical leader, or the person who chooses pornography, you’ve probably run into this issue. 
I ask clients daily, “Can you tell me what happened the last time you chose porn?” The most common answer they give is, “I don’t know”. 

What is clear to me, over the many conversations that I have had is that those who are struggling because they choose pornography contrary to their moral values is that they don’t all have degenerative brain diseases.  

So, how can this be such a common refrain, why don’t these men and women know what is going on, when the fact is that they are the ones engaging in the behavior?

Darcy - As a spouse, you might find yourself frustrated with this kind of response.  

Zach -   But there is actually a really good reason why we say, “I don’t know” when it comes to our behavior, with this issue so often.  

Zach  - “In a series of experiments (conducted at the University of Chicago), participants were asked to evaluate the likelihood of themselves or others to do various moral or immoral behaviors. Respondents did not rate themselves more likely to do good works. Yet they regularly assumed they were more likely than others to avoid immoral acts. They also deemed instances of others’ unethical behavior as more extreme and memorable than their own choices.”

Darcy - All of us believe in our own inherent goodness and when our behavior does not reflect the sense of self that we believe to be who we are, we tend to both discount the facts and distance ourselves from them. 

Zach - I don’t know anyone who has not done this.  When we drive and cut someone off, most of us will justify our behavior or say it wasn’t that bad and actively try to put the incident behind us as quickly as possible.  Especially if we feel bad.  When, however, someone cuts us off, we, many times, ascribe malicious intent to the other person.  

In a real and meaningful way, this may be happening in your head around pornography.  

For those who are choosing pornography, the act of distancing ourselves from the behavior, putting it behind us as quickly as possible, and seemingly scrubbing our memory of the incident is an act of self-preservation in a way.  It helps us maintain our sense of self, in the face of behavior that contradicts our belief that we are “good”.

Darcy - I think it’s also really interesting how the research showed how when we see someone doing something and we don’t like it, we will assume we would never do anything like that.  

This really speaks to our desire to see ourselves in a certain way.   People want to see themselves as good.  

Zach - When we choose pornography, there is a tendency to do our best to distance ourselves from the choice because it contradicts the sense of self that we have and that we want to maintain. 

Darcy - as a woman I always saw myself as a brunette. I would dye my hair, color out my grey, and work to maintain my look as a brunette.  I had a sense of self that was not reflected in my hair color.  We’ve all seen that person who is not fooling anyone with their hair coloring.  In a way, this is what is going on for us when we fail to see our behavior and are unable to deal with it meaningfully.  

Z - Right, what we are doing is we are not seeing ourselves clearly. Almost a willful blindness to our choices. 

D - How can we mitigate this issue as we reflect on our choices?

Z - The three stages...

This is a presentation that I made for the lds life coach directory. You can enroll for this and about 30 additional speakers by going to this link. https://summits.ldslifecoaches.com/?ref=6e42d0

Join us at zachspafford.com for help to overcome pornography forever.

Really quickly, before we get started, I am going to be part of a Courageous Discipleship summit put on by the LDS life coach directory.  You can have access to it for free if you sign up in the next week.  Check the show notes for the link. https://summits.ldslifecoaches.com/?ref=6e42d0
It is going to have some amazing speakers, many of whom I know personally and can highly recommend, including my friend Joey Mascio over at firmlyfounded.com


You might be familiar with the famous marshmallow experiments of the 1960s conducted at Stanford University.  If you’re not familiar with it, it is an experiment that gives a marshmallow to a child and then promises them a second one if they wait to eat the marshmallow until the experiment facilitator comes back.  The experimenter walks out and hilarity ensues.   Kids do all kinds of funny things when they are trying not to eat a marshmallow.  They lick it, they play with it, they roll it around, they sing, and they close their eyes.  One even took small bites over and over until the marshmallow was finally gone. The look of disappointment on that kid's face was priceless.  It was the look of surprise that the marshmallow was gone and that they weren’t getting a second one. 

There have been a number of conclusions drawn about this study, including the long-term success of those who ate the marshmallow vs those who didn’t and how successful that single act would make that child in the future.  

I want to talk about why it is so difficult for those kids to keep from eating that marshmallow.  You could call it willpower or a lack of willpower.  But what is willpower really in this context?

Well, willpower may be nothing more than the capacity of the child to accurately recognize and account for the value of waiting in order to receive the promised reward. 

This concept is called, among other things, future discounting. 

Future discounting is an entire discipline in economics that, if I took the time to explain it to you in-depth, you’d be bored out of your mind.  It involves a set of mathematical equations, properly inserted into other math equations, that allow an economist to value an outcome over time based on real human behavior. 

But understanding this concept will open up a whole new awareness of your pornography struggle that may help you finally take hold and overcome porn now and create the thriving life you want. 

So, rather than give you math, I’m going to explain with food.  You can insert porn in place of food in any place you like in this conversation.  But dieting is almost universal and it parallels pornography nearly perfectly. Please be aware, I’m not making a moral equivalency between porn and food.  But the brain chemistry is pretty close. 

In our decision to eat healthily and lose weight, we begin to do the math of now vs later vs never. 

Essentially, the thought process might look like this: if I eat healthily now, that will cost me.  But if I start on Monday, or the first of the month, or the first of the year (whatever timeline you usually use), for me, it’s always Monday, then it will be a clean start and it will actually be easier.   If I never start, that would be bad, so I will start for sure.  

Demonstrated numerically, the equation might turn out that starting now is worth -2, starting later is +1 and starting never is 0.

First, let’s start with starting never.  We are going to start.  We have to.  It’s essential, so we discount the idea that we will never start and feel like we are left with just 2 choices.  To start today, right now, or start...