If you listened to part 1 of our Life After LifePlan podcast episode, then you are in for a treat on today’s podcast! Don’t worry if you haven’t had a chance to listen to it. You can always go back and listen to it here.
Also, be sure to grab today’s download and find out if your relationships are toxic or healthy. If you have listened to me long enough, then you have probably heard me talk about Marybeth a gajillion times. For those of you who don’t know, Marybeth was my personal assistant for six years. And when I say personal assistant, I mean she pretty much ran my life!
Marybeth recently went through her LifePlan, and had some amazing revelations that we wanted to share with you guys.
It’s taken a while to get in here for the LifePlan. Why did it take so long to come in?
Well, there were a couple reasons. First was just baby land, which is where I lived.I have been busy. Our youngest is now almost 18 months.
The other reason really kind of went away, because I was getting to the point where I’m like I just really want to come in and do this. After Joel did his LifePlan, and we talked so much about some of the stuff.
I was just, I don’t know if intimidated is the right word, but it’s you, we have this relationship. We’ve had this great relationship, great friendship for 11 years now. You are an incredibly safe person for me to be around, and I can share anything with you, but there are still these things about me and those deep dark places…
To have a really good LifePlan, you have to be willing to be vulnerable and open up and share things. That’s still hard to do, or at least I imagined it was going to be hard to do.
Amazingly when life plan came around, it was not nearly so, but I was ready for the tears, ready for the, “this is going to be so dramatic”. It wasn’t. I was hesitant because I had these things inside that I just didn’t want to talk about and I didn’t want to be vulnerable about.
This is the toughest thing for me because I’ve had close friends that have come through. It’s tough because of two things: one, I know you so well. There’s very little hiding, because I know a person so well, but the great thing about that is there is no judgment, it’s a free place to be.
It’s all about how great do I want my life to be on the other side of this as opposed to what can I hold back on. I’ve had a lot of close friends that have come through that it’s been tough, because I know more about them.
I’m able to get to those places that are a little bit more painful that also turn out to be insanely freeing. I also have to shift into I can’t be friend mode. I have to be here to walk you through this process and guide you through it. It’s difficult.
Going into it, like you just shared, probably the thing that held you back, other than the schedule was having to be vulnerable. Once you got in here, what was that like? What did that turn into?
It was easy. It really was. You ease into it, and so even though I think I was coming in with my guard up a little bit, I was like, “I really do want to do this, and I just need to just put my guard down”.
At the same time there’s this discomfort. Then we’re just talking and we ease into LifePlan. It’s not a big deal, and as long as I’m willing to be honest with you, we are able to talk about some things that were challenging.
Let’s dig into a little bit of that if you’re ready to get vulnerable again, for all the people that are listening. There are so many people going through what you’ve gone through and experiencing this and thinking, “Gosh, I want to change my life, I need change in my life but I’m afraid to go get change.”
As you’ve gone through the process, obviously we always say the first day is the emotional day. We’re not going to lay you down on the couch and talk to you like a psychiatrist. We do go through very intense, emotional stuff, but our goal is not to sit there and live in it.
Our goal is to get to the information, pull it forward and not show the “what”. That’s where so many people focus is they focus on is the “what”. We blow past the what to the why.
We go heavy into the root system and find out the “why”. Why did that happen. Why did these people do this. Why did I experience this in life. Why have I felt this way forever?
Let me ask you, what was the greatest revelation that you’ve received going through LifePlan?
Without a doubt, it was the truths and the lies, and really I would say the lies. I had a belief system filled with a lot of lies. I would say probably my biggest one that overarched everything was that perfection, or at least very near perfection, was where I needed to be.
If I didn’t make it then I was a complete failure. There was no middle ground. There was no grace. It was just I’m either perfect or I’m a failure, and if I’m a failure, I’m therefore not lovable, I’m not valuable, I’m not worthy.
I filtered so much information through those lies and it ended up taking over my life in a sense.
Did that lead to freedom by knowing that?
Yeah, it’s crazy! I’m not a failure.
There were certain aspects that you looked at and said, “This is happening, I’m a failure,” or, “Because I’m feeling this, I’m a failure.”
I would say overall that was just how I viewed anything. In things with my relationship with Joel, it would be like if I did something or said something, or I didn’t meet these expectations I had in my head of like, “Well, Joel’s coming home and dinner should be ready and the house should be clean,” like I’m a ’50s housewife or something.
Seriously, I had these expectations in my head, and I would feel frustrated and then it would turn from frustration into failure pretty quickly.
Especially if it was like okay, that was the day that some business stuff didn’t go well with piano, and that was the day that the kids were just crazy, but they were probably kind of crazy because I was trying to focus on some piano stuff.
Then the house didn’t get done, and it’s like everything would compound, and then at the end of the day I would be like, “Oh for the love of all that is good and right.” I would just become such a frustrated person, and it was all because my perspective was just jacked up.
I think the craziest thing, now, is I think I judged myself more than anybody else judged me, but I would just assume other people were judging me.
It’s funny, we were actually talking earlier, Joel would make these comments from time to time. For example, and I can share this, I know, but we were having breakfast the other morning and he chose not to have a waffle because he just didn’t want the calories, so he says.
Meanwhile, I had just eaten a waffle, and so pre‐LifePlan, when he would make a comment like that, I would be like, “My husband thinks I’m fat. He thinks I make bad choices about food, he thinks he’s so much better.” All Joel was thinking is, “I think I’d rather have eggs this morning.”
It has nothing to do with me, but because I have all these lies that I’m filtering what is said through these lies. I would take it completely different than how it was meant.
Is it also possible because somewhere back in your past is somebody who would judge you or somebody who would tell you things about yourself? You line that up, you get this training in your brain and these things that are lies from somebody else, it becomes a broken belief system, and you’re stuck with it.
How freeing is that on the other side to realize, and what’s the process? When you hear that now, what’s the process that you go through in your brain?
It’s funny, because it came up because he made a comment like that after LifePlan, and I just started laughing. I think he was confused for a minute maybe, but I was like, “Okay, so pre-‐LifePlan,” and I love that he’s gone through this and that the facilitates this, because he totally understands.
I’m like, “Pre-‐LifePlan, when you would say things like this, and this is what I would hear. You, I did not like in those moments.” It was so funny, because he’s like, “Wow, I was just talking about this about me,” he’s like, “I had no idea.”
It’s so difficult until you know, and Joel is phenomenal at doing this, and he does an incredible job of walking people through this, but until you pull that out, even a guy who lives and breathes this stuff, until you know it doesn’t matter.
I tell spouses all the time when they come through, like if a spouse sits in on somebody else’s LifePlan. I say, “I don’t care how many times you tell them,” because they’ll say to me, “I told them that a thousand times,” I’m like, “Did it work?” No, of course not, because you’re telling them the what.
It doesn’t matter how many times you tell them the what, if they still don’t understand the why, it doesn’t matter. It’s so difficult to go, “How come I can’t guide this person to freedom”? It’s because we’re only focusing on the what.
Now that you’ve dug down and you discovered the why, it changes everything. With that, let me ask you this, what is the most empowering thing that you learned through LifePlan?
Gaining perspective on what has caused me to become this way and what influences have been in my life and how I’ve gotten to this point of believing the things that I do.
With that perspective, I can say, “okay, well I’m not this horrible person for believing these things; this is just how I was trained to be.” Now going forward, I know this and I can choose to view things differently. You can’t just choose to see things differently when you don’t know.
I needed LifePlan; I needed to really dig down to the why, to my root system to get that perspective.
The important thing to understand is, people say, “Well why can’t you just change?” I hear that all the time. “Why do you need to understand your root system, why can’t you just change your decision? You can make any decision you want.” You literally make your decisions based on what you know.
Based on training, based on information, based on influence. Here’s what I see almost every single time. I see people, and since you’re a music teacher, I see people grow up one way, have influence one way, and do a pendulum swing to the other side and say I am not going to be that way, and go all the way to the other side and do the same exact thing from a different direction.
If they have a controlling parent they become incredibly lenient, if they have a submissive parent, they become incredibly controlling. Those are just examples, there’s a ton of stuff, a ton of decision-‐making processes, but it basically still comes down to the same thing.
As long as you don’t understand why those things happen in your life, why those influencers did what they did, why they taught you, why they said, why they lied to you, whatever, it still is virtually impossible to make great decisions on things in your life.
Now that you’ve been through this process, you’ve discovered a lot, you discovered perspective, you discovered the influences in your life, you discovered how to make greater decisions with greater perspective, and you’ve unlocked all of these pieces.
How does it change the way, you’re a mom of two tiny kids, how does it change your perspective, how does it change the way you view your kids, motherhood, all of that?
Freeing, oh my word. I love my kids, I wanted them to feel loved, and it stressed me out to ever feel like what if I’m doing something and they don’t feel loved? That controlled my parenting. Now, I’m just like okay, I do love my kids and I show them that I love them, but it helps me to not be controlled by them.
My darling Josiah, he was already learning how to manipulate mom, but, and it was frustrating because I wanted to make sure that he felt loved but when he would get fussy then it was challenging for me.
I was like, he’s whining, he’s fussy, this isn’t acceptable, but at the same time, I don’t know how to respond to him in a loving, kind way and resolve the situation. Whereas now, I’m just like, bust it out baby.
If that’s the choice you want to make, that’s the choice you can make, but you’re not getting away with what you’re fussing about. Now I’m like okay, you can make your choices and those are your choices and here are those consequences. You can’t control mom any more.
Instead now, you give him options. There are consequences for good, and there are consequences for bad. You can choose, but instead of getting your self worth from parenting, your confidence from parenting, instead you’re looking at more of I need to raise adults instead of kids.
We’ve had a lot of women that have come through the process. Some still had reservations about sharing this information with a guy? What is it going to be like to talk in front of a guy about some of these things?
First of all, there’s no judgment, so I think that’s a huge thing. I think that also I think when you’re willing to be vulnerable and open up and know that you’re not going to be judged, it really, I don’t want to say it doesn’t matter.
I know that hearing that, somebody’s going to be like, yes it does, but in seriousness, it’s going to be so freeing. It’s going to be so worth it to just talk about that, open up, be vulnerable and get through that. There is freedom on the other side.
That, for me, I have been through so much crap in my life, and I’ve experienced so much in life, which is obviously why I do what I do, that judgment is pointless for me in these situations. I always tell people coming in, if I’m getting my needs met by you, I shouldn’t be doing this.
My goal is to help you get all of your needs met and discovery and perspective and all that. I think that’s the thing that I do want everybody to know is that there is no judgment in this process.
There isn’t anything that I’ve heard, and the funny thing is I’ve had people that have tried to, it’s not that they tried to shock me, it’s that they thought, “Okay, I’m going to share this right now, and you’re going to be shocked.” I’ve even had people say that, and it’s like nope, no shock here.
The reason why is every single person has gone through something, some level of something. Some have just gone through so much more, so that there’s no point in judging. The judging is what people do, I say focusing on that surface level, the what. You focus on the what, you judge on the what.
The what is not the problem, the what is the outward expression or inward expression of the struggles from not knowing the why.
What would you say to anyone out there who is sitting there, thinking, “Is this something I should do? Is this something I should experience? Can I feel safe going and doing this and can I trust in the outcome?”
Yes, you can do it. Yes, you should do it! The freedom on the other side of it is so worth it. Not everybody’s going to have the same experiences that I’ve had, and so for me, my freedom was huge and freedom from judgment and a lot of that was even just self-‐judgment.
That was probably one of the biggest things in my life plan that I gained freedom, and I’m able to go forward and have a better life and make better decisions. I think other people are going to have other things that they’re going to have freedom from, but it is worth it.
Do it!
Folks, hopefully that helps. That is something that we want you to hear, we want you to understand that our goal is to change your life, our goal is to help you find freedom, our goal is to help you live without the lies, live without the judgment.
Stop telling yourself so many lies, and that I think is something that we discover in so many people’s LifePlans, and Marybeth’s as well, is that so many of the lies are ones that come from you. Living without that, living, not telling yourself that junk, is complete freedom.
If you would like more information on LifePlan, click here and signup today to get more information. All you have to do is fill out the information and Joel Fortner will be the one contacting you.
He will contact you, he will tell you anything you need to hear, give you all the information you need to make a decision to come and do this right now, but make the choice to do it now.
