#88 Overcoming Doubt, Discouragement, Distraction, and Disobedience

Rachel Denning (00:01.486)
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of the Extraordinary Family Life podcast. Man, it's a great day to be alive, isn't it? love life. Love it. It's just, and it's, you know what? We get to choose. We get to choose if we're going to be excited or not. In fact, we get to choose whatever emotion. You've heard me say this before, and I want to challenge you and remind you to do that. Choose your emotion. If you're going to be alive, might as well be excited to be alive. Be all in. Just go after it, man. Just have to.

fun, make life exciting. Sometimes life just loses its excitement because we neglect or forget to make it exciting. So let's make it exciting. Let's make it fun. Make today matter. Make today count. Do something fun and exciting in your relationships and for yourself and just, just bring back the excitement spark to life. So I received a little, a message from a friend this morning and I've been, I've been thinking about,

I love how this happens. And so I've got a couple of podcasts lined up here that it's so fascinating. Don't you love when this happens? When you're thinking about an idea and it starts to come from multiple directions and then all of a sudden it just starts to click and you get this clarity and it just feels so good. And it all kind of just comes together and it came together this morning for me and it was a message from a friend and he was sharing a list of, of words, D words.

So I'm going to call them the dreadful D's and their words that start with a D that just derail us. There's another D word. They really derail us. They throw us off from life. And as he shared this list, he had received it from a mentor many years ago and he just kind of passed it along to me. And as I looked at the list, I was like, yes, like spot on. This is the kind of stuff. These, these D words I'm going to tell you about right here. These are the kinds of things I see every single day.

as I'm doing mentoring and coaching and meeting with wonderful people all over. And you guys, I love you guys and I love people. People are good everywhere and you guys just filled with awesomeness and doing great things. And the people I work with are some of the best people on earth. I love it. And yet all of us, the best of us are derailed sometimes by these, these words and these problems. And so I wanted to share them today. And then,

Rachel Denning (02:30.638)
this burst of inspiration hit me this morning of replacements of ways to overcome these words. And guess what? All those words start with D as well. So we're going to use the letter D a lot here in today's episode, but I think it's going to be really insightful and powerful for you. And I want you, as we go through, just look how, look how you're being affected one way or the other. And if you're, if you're playing the victim,

to one side, the dreadful D's, or if you can choose into the other D's. So without further ado, let's dive in. The list he sent me included doubt. And it's fascinating how much we doubt ourselves. And almost everyone I work with has some form of self doubt.

plaguing them. In fact, I had another new coaching, session just this morning and the primary pain point was self doubt and definitely not alone, right? This, this is a very common thing and you're probably experiencing it as well. And as you, especially as we want to level up, as we want to pursue new goals and remember the dumb goals, the demanding, unrealistic, meaningful, bold goals.

It's scary. We started doubt ourselves when we're trying to move into a new position, even move to a new area. We're trying to introduce ourselves to new people. We're trying to level up our own lives. Many of us get plagued with doubt and doubt is the biggest traitor. It cheats us out of so much potential and robs us of so much greatness.

how many times I've met with people and observed people around the world. And then in reading throughout history, people who had so much potential and actually had the greatness, had the talent, had the skill, had the ability. And the irony of it all is that they often didn't think so.

Rachel Denning (04:51.79)
and their self doubt just kept them back. Think about that my friends. Is self doubt holding you back? Is it robbing you of things you might achieve because you're hesitating with doubt? let that sink in. Let that sink in. Our doubts are traitors like Shakespeare said.

And we've got to overcome our doubts because again, and we'll get into this. We're going to get into this with the replacement D's, right? So I'll go through the dreadful D's first, then we'll come back to it. So doubts, the first one, the next one's discouragement. How often do we get discouraged? How often, how do you respond to discouragement? How do you respond when things don't go very well? That's another thing that comes up quite frequently in coaching is this idea. It's what I call recovery. It's like, man, how do I.

How do I respond when something negative happens, when things don't work out how I want, and when I fail, when I make a mistake or when other people are mean or just things happen that kind of throw you throw you off. Like, how do you, how do you get back up? And that's, that's where the recovery methods, like I call them are so critical. And I've trained myself for years to do this. I can recover so fast. Whoa, I get back up, get back in the game, just off and go. And you've seen, I've seen.

unbelievable races, Olympic racers and other great racers like literally fall or catch a foot on a hurdle and just go down and get back up and bounce off the track and they get back up and even win the race. I remember seeing years ago, a runner in the Olympics fell down, got tripped up, went down, scraped up the leg bad, popped back up, gave it everything and ended up winning the race.

coming back from behind. But too many of us, we just get discouraged. We get discouraged pretty quickly and pretty easily. And the first sign of inconvenience, the first sign of difficulty, right, when things don't go as smoothly as we would hope, right, you start something and we all have, I do this all the time.

Rachel Denning (07:18.702)
I'm like, let's just do this. It's gonna be so easy. And then of course it's not, obviously it's not, right? Anything that's worthwhile takes some serious work and effort. But sometimes we have this erroneous idea that if we just wanna do something, it's gonna be so easy to do. And my kids are doing it. They're going through this phase right now where they'll come up with a business idea and I'm like, that's a great idea, let's go. I'm like, it's gonna take a lot of work. And they're like, yeah, I got this. And then they.

Like they'll make some flyers pass it out and nobody calls. And they're like, I did all that work. Why doesn't he even call him? Like, because it takes, it takes more effort. It takes a lot of effort to get somebody to say yes and to make a sale and to get your business launched and to influence others. Like it just takes tons of effort. And we often think it's going to be a lot easier than it is. And so many of us get discouraged at that first sign of effort or the first obstacle, the first stumbling block.

The first no, right? We go out, we try something, somebody's like, no. we get discouraged and we give up. We fall short. And often right when we're so close to success, we get discouraged and discouragement just literally takes the wind out of our sails and pulls, pulls the plug on the energy that we could bring to it. Discouragement.

even that word discouragement, it's just as a low energy word. It just drains it out of you. The next D is distraction. And you guys have heard me say we live in the age of distraction, just constantly bombarded with distraction. And it's having a way greater effect, far, far greater effect than most people realize. And even this morning, coaching sessions and almost always in my coaching sessions, one of the first thing we look at is like, how is your life being robbed right now? How is your time?

and your life being hijacked by distraction. And that can be from people, it can be from music, any kind of media screens, big distractions right now with movies and TV shows and these episodes and just scrolling endlessly all kinds of videos. I mean, there's an unending stream of visual trash out there.

Rachel Denning (09:36.91)
and audio trash, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, there's so many ways to get distracted. And sometimes we get distracted even by running errands and all these little to do's and all the little demands here and there and other people's agendas. Always like, come do this, do this, I need this. And we're just constantly distracted. Whether it's at home, we're not really fully present. Even with ourselves, we're distracted. Isn't that crazy and ironic? Even with ourselves, we can get so distracted. Our mind can be all over the place.

And then we can be, you know, doing this and doing that and think we're multitasking, but we're not really actually getting anything done. And it happens in work. It happens in anything we're trying to do. Distraction is a big problem. Again, all of these, you notice how all of these, these dreadful D's, all of them are just, they're thieves and robbers. They're just holding us back and preventing us from, achieving what we might. Right. And then the last one is disobedience. And it's interesting when I, when I heard that one,

I immediately thought of like the laws of success. There is a formula. There's a recipe. There's a law for success. And as I have devoured this now for 26 years, 26 years, I've been voraciously studying personal development and peak human performance, studying the lives of great men and women. And it's just across the board. There is a recipe. There's a formula. There are laws.

Like success leaves clues and all we have to do is follow those things. And in fact, if you haven't, if you haven't gotten the, the extraordinary family life formula yet, go to, go to gregdenning .com. It's right there on the homepage, put in your name and email and get that, watch those three videos. Cause it's a formula. It's a formula for family success. It's like that there's business success and marketing success and health success and family success and marriage, marriage.

success, man, this is hard to say. And all these, every area of life, literally every area of your life has laws. Like I like to say it every kingdom, every little kingdom has laws from thinking to emotions, to keeping your grass green and like growing food, like, like everything has laws. And if we don't,

Rachel Denning (12:01.518)
obey those laws, then we just can't have the result. I love, love, love this principle because I can take, I can sit down with anyone with just about any problem and just say, well, here's the problem you're struggling with. And right over here next to you, you're not that far off, but right next to you are the laws of success in that field. So you literally take any area of your life.

and say, let's take finances, for example. Say you're struggling finances. And so you might say, well, we've got these debts and I want to earn more income and I'm working here and I'm just, you know, we're having trouble, you know, staying on a budget or, you know, living within our means, whatever, whatever the problem is. Right. And you just say, well, okay, what are the laws of success in that thing? And then what you do is you just align your life to those laws.

and it's for health. Again, we can go through everything. It just applies to every single area of your life. And this is so beautiful. So I invite you to do that. See where you're in. And most people, well, I don't know. A lot of people are doing it unknowingly because they just don't know. They don't know the laws of success. But then very often when I meet with people, I'm like, hey, what do you need? I'll ask them, what do you need to do differently? And they're like, yeah, I know what I need to do. And I know I'm taking myself. I get that all the time.

In fact, I had a new coaching client sign up last night. And that's one of the things he said. He's like, I know what I have to do. I just am not doing it. I need the accountability. I need somebody to hold me to it and the motivation and inspiration. Right. And so sometimes we don't know, we don't know the law and we need to study and find out. And that's where coaching can be super helpful and reading can be super helpful. And this podcast can be super helpful. Sometimes you just know, you know, you're not living the law. And so you just.

you have to buckle down and do it. And you know, you're clearly aware that your own disobedience is creating your own results. You guys know that, right? And so that hits home. So there, there are those are the dreadful these. So let's take those and let's flip them. Let's, let's give a response to them. Now, how can we overcome the doubt, the discouragement, the distraction, the disobedience? So the first D I want to hit is determination.

Rachel Denning (14:30.158)
I have a friend who, when I met him, I mean, millions and millions of dollars already had been super successful in several different businesses from retail clothing to construction to storage units. I mean, to renovation, like super successful. And when we heard their story, it was amazing. It's so inspiring. When they first got married, as I recall, they were living in a barn.

They had a room in a bar when they first got married and they just had like downstairs and as part of the bar and like a cold shower. That's, that's how they started their married life. He's like, yeah, we're going to scrape this together and make this work. And as I asked him, I'm like, Hey man, what, what would you, what would you say attributes to your, to your success? And without hesitation, I mean, it was immediate. He said, determination. That's it. Determination.

Wow, yes. And that's it. Determination, my friends, will overcome doubt. Determination will overcome discouragement. Determination will overcome and push through just break through all the noise of distraction. And determination will push through disobedience. I mean, we could use that one D word determination to push through all of those.

And so I want to invite you and challenge you to take that determination knob and crank it up.

Where do you need more determination in your life? To push.

Rachel Denning (16:19.246)
and just say, I will.

make it. I will figure this out or I will die trying. Right that kind of determination, the kind of determination that got Julius Caesar to cross the Rubicon. It's that whole conquer or perish determination. Like we are going to make this happen. Like when when you know with absolute certainty, you know that something is right.

and true and good and you want it to be a part of your life, get that level of determination that you will figure it out. You don't have to know all the answers. You don't have to have all the best skills. You can figure it out, right? You can find the answers. You can get the skills. You can hire somebody with the skills. You can get the consoling. You surround yourself with people, find answers to the questions, but you've got to have that.

pig -headed determination to get it done.

Where do you need more determination in your life? The next D is discipline. And think about that one. I love this one. Discipline can be a hard one too, because at some point we run out of discipline, right? Like you just get tired, you get fatigued, and that's why it's so important. Rachel and I talk about this a lot. It's so important to have systems in place, because your systems actually help you keep your discipline.

Rachel Denning (17:58.382)
But if you have to rely on discipline all the time, you're going to get worn down. You're going to get tired. But man, discipline comes into play and there is such power and majesty in self -discipline and self mastery. And discipline essentially is doing the things you say you're going to do. That's that commitment, that discipline. It's making and keeping commitments. Right?

gotta have that kind of discipline and that comes, it's a muscle my friends. So if you feel like right now you're like, I don't have very much discipline. It's, it's one of those things where you just, you realize I'm going to build this muscle. I'm going to build my discipline muscle. And so start with small things and just make a commitment to yourself. Do something today. Say today I'm going to turn off my phone two hours before I go to bed and I'm gonna set my phone down and be done with it. Right. Keep that commitment to yourself.

that starts to build that kind of discipline and you can start building that discipline muscle until it becomes super crazy strong where like you have just unbelievable amounts of discipline, right? But you can work into it. So it will always be working on your discipline muscles. Think about that discipline. Discipline will push through again, the disobedience and the distraction and even the discouragement, the doubt. So exercise that discipline. The next D,

I came up with this morning is dedication. You know, I'm going to combine two of them. I have, I have dedication and devotion. They're kind of different, but they kind of go together. Let's, let's roll both of those dedication and devotion. I want to tell you a story. Years ago, I had the privilege to help lead a humanitarian trip to Peru and I had spent a couple of years down in Peru and love that country, love those people. And.

man, there's a lot of poverty in Peru. A lot of tough, tough poverty. It's getting so much better now. It's really improving. They're changing that country. There's a lot of poverty. And I helped lead a group down there and we went to, well, the trip went all the way from Cusco, all the way up to the North, past Piura, up into Suyana, like way up North, almost to the border of Ecuador.

Rachel Denning (20:25.646)
And we took this group of youth and it was a group of affluent youth from the United States. And they got down there and they wanted to work and they wanted to help. And it was it was one of the most beautiful things to watch them be so dedicated to this cause. And one night we were up in Chiclayo.

and in this we're in this village and they didn't have any clean water and some engineers had come in and be like man there's water right under your feet which was so it was so crazy to think about these people have been going out without clean water for so long and he said there's clean water just you know 10 12 to 15 feet below you you just got to get a well and they didn't know that they didn't know about wells they didn't know about engineering they didn't have the resource they didn't have the knowledge so one of the projects we were working on was getting a well put in.

And so we were digging it down and doing a big well for the for the village. And we had engineers were going to come into all that. But we were digging with with the the locals digging this well. And these youth we brought, we were digging, digging a hot, humid sun. We were exhausted. And it was getting towards the end of the day. The sun was starting to set and we sat and they all had blisters, man. They all had blisters. They were sore and just spent tired and hungry.

And I asked them, I said, you guys, I'm not going to, I'm not going to make you push here. Do you want to, should we call it a day and let's head back to the hotel and get dinner and we'll, we'll have them finished up. And they were just in unison. No, we will keep digging until we hit water. We're going to do this thing. And it was, it was so humbling and so inspiring.

with blistered hands and sore muscles, we kept digging into the night and we got down to the water and then we ended up having this epic mud fight. It was so awesome. But we got down there, we got the water, we hit water and they were able to go in and later on put the well in. And it was so beautiful to see that kind of dedication. What are you dedicated to?

Rachel Denning (22:47.534)
Where do you need more dedication where you're gonna stand and defend? There's another D word, right? What are you gonna stand and defend? What are you gonna keep working? You know, blisters and sore muscles. Where are you dedicated enough to keep pushing?

Where have you not been dedicated enough that your lack of dedication has actually kept you from getting the results you want. That's one of the things I love to talk about with my coaching clients is saying, you know, at some point there's a level of dedication that where you take action. And then there's another level of dedication where you take action until you get the results you want.

And that's the kind of dedication I want to encourage all of you to have. There's some area in your life where you haven't been dedicated enough to get the results. And that's the kind of dedication we need where we keep going until we get the results. That kind of dedication. So the devotion piece of this is when we devote ourselves to something special and we can devote ourselves to service. We can devote ourselves to love.

It's literally you guys where we hand over, like hand over mind, heart and soul in total devotion. We absolutely must do this in our marriages. To be completely devoted to your spouse and to marriage, to the institution of marriage and the sanctity, the sacredness, the wonder, the awe, the greatness of marriage.

Be wholeheartedly every bit of it.

Rachel Denning (24:31.886)
Like we're not like a little piece of my heart's over here, my little piece of my heart's over here, and kind of part way in, right? We see that all the time when people are just kind of halfway in to be all in, to be fully devoted to marriage.

And well, this is interesting, right? Fully devoted to parenting as well, it's a family. Can you be fully devoted to two things? I think so, I think there's a way to do that. Where I can be fully devoted to my wife and I can be fully devoted to being a great father. Right? And I have these roles that I'm gonna take on and I'm just giving it total devotion. And what that does is it means I cut off.

I cut off other outlets.

Like I literally in my mind, I cut those out. They are gone. Those are no longer options. Like there's, there's no option in my head for not being a great father. Like, yeah, you know, yeah, if things don't go so well, you know, whatever, or, or for me, for like divorce, right? There's no option in my head for divorce. And Rachel, I talked about that before we got engaged.

Like we go into this thing, divorce is not an option. Like we're going to work on this and prevent it. And we're going to work it out. Right? So that was for us. That was our commitment for us. Does that make sense? Like I'm removing the option. So for me, I've removed the option of living a mediocre life. Unacceptable. Absolutely unacceptable. It's not there. So I'm fully devoted to living an extraordinary life, which means I cut off the, those little exit.

Rachel Denning (26:21.134)
paths, those little distractions, I literally shave those off, cut those off, remove those from my life. That's not an option because it's unacceptable. I'm fully devoted to living an extraordinary life and devotion. Devotion will push me through discouragement and distraction and disobedience and doubt. And then the last D, man, we can probably come up with more D's. You've probably while you've been listening, had some more D's come into your mind, but diligence.

Let's just be totally diligent, like 100 % committed.

Diligent in in even the details. There's another D diligent in the details It's in the small things. That's that'll make a big difference It's being diligent in following through and finishing something to the end It's diligence. I'm listening to I'm listening to so many great books right now reading great books you guys and you should Like keep reading just read voraciously

And all these will come up. You'll see all these D's come up in these great stories of triumph and success and struggle. Right now I'm about halfway through a book called Shoe Dog about the founding of Nike. And what a story. What a story of determination and discipline and dedication and devotion and diligence. man, what a story. And facing.

the doubt and the discouragement and the distraction and the disobedience. It's all there. All this is in that book. This is fantastic and those great stories. So let's be diligent. My friends, I'd love this. Thanks for staying with me. Thanks for being here. Thanks for being awesome people. Let's do this. Instead of letting our lives be plagued by the dreadful D's, instead of being a slave to them, right? Because when we let them have hold on our lives, like they become our masters.

Rachel Denning (28:25.038)
and we become slaves or prisoners to them. But let's take back charge. Let's choose because you have that power. No matter where your life is at right now, no matter what's been happening, you can turn it around. Today can be that change. Today, I wish I had something to pound on. Today, today can be that day. It's a new you and a new life. And you switch, you can cross this line. You can just jump across this gulf that's in between the dreadful D's.

And then I don't know what the other D's are going to be called, but they're the better D's. Right. They're the great ones. And you can choose to step away from, just crush the dreadful D's with the other ones. Choose it today. Do it. Write it down. Make a commitment. Set those alarms. You write them down each morning. Put them around your house. Whatever.

Determination, discipline, dedication, devotion, diligence. Choose to turn it on and go after it and be all in and live the life you want. I want it so much for you, but I can't do it for you. I can only do it for me. You have to do it for you. And I hope you want it enough to do these things and you go after it. Those are the things that'll.

It'll, it'll bring us the results we want my friends. So let's, let's get after it. Take those, the D's, those power words, put them in our lives and make great things happen because awesome is always an option. My friends reach upward.