How to Change | Ep #113

I’m Andrea Giles, and you’re listening to the Heal from Infidelity podcast,
episode number 113, How to Change.

Hello and welcome to the Heal from Infidelity podcast where courageous
women learn not only to heal from their spouse’s betrayal, but to become
the boldest, truest, most decisive, and confident versions of themselves
ever. If you know there’s more for you than the life you’re currently
living but don’t quite know how to get there, you are in the right place.
Stick around to learn how to create a life that will knock your own socks
off. Is it possible? It is, and I’m here to show you how. I’m your host,
Andrea Giles. Are you ready? Let’s dive in.

Hello everybody. Welcome to episode 113. Happy to have you here. Today’s
topic is all about how to change. Why this topic? Why today? I think it’s
safe to say that we all have aspects of ourselves and our lives that we
would like to change. We often are going about it in a way that we think
might work, but is often the wrong way. It’s a way that’s unproductive, a
way that often sets us back and maybe can even be sabotaging. So we don’t
get the results that we want, and oftentimes we think that we just can’t
change certain aspects of our life. That it’s just beyond us, that we can’t
ever do it. Another reason for this topic is that many of us are hoping and
praying that our spouses will change so that we can stay married to them.
We may try various means to get them to change, to kind of try to control
it so that we get the outcome that we want, right? We want them to change
in these ways that we really need to see, so that we feel safe being
married to them, and we might feel really, really frustrated when it’s not
happening.

We may wonder also if the things that they’re doing are actually truly
changing, or if they’re just kind of going through the motions to appease
us. How do I know if they get it? How do I know if they really are
understanding the change that needs to be made? We may see some signs of
change and not really know if they are sincere or not. Okay? Hopefully this
episode will give you a lot more insight into the topic of change and not
only if your partner or spouse is changing, but how you can make deep
lasting change. The good news is it’s always possible to change if you know
the science behind it, if you know how. Okay?

Okay, so there’s this man named Robert Dilts, and Robert Dilts is an
internationally recognized developer, author, trainer, and consultant in
the field of leadership and change. The fancy name for his title is
Neurolinguistic Programmer. That’s his title. He has created this framework
called The Logical Levels of Change that has just made me think deeply
about change and is very hopeful to me. There are six levels that Dilts
created of stages that we go through, levels that we go through to bring
change into our life. And I want to show you what all of these levels are,
teach you what they are, in this podcast, so that you can understand
yourself and where you are, and really understand why it’s working or why
it’s not working to bring the change that you want. Okay?

So let’s look at the levels. First, I want you to imagine a pyramid. So at
the base of the pyramid, it’s wider, and then as you go up the pyramid,
it’s more narrow, right? The widest space, there’s going to be six, imagine
six different stages moving up the pyramid. There’s the widest one at the
bottom to the next widest all the way up to the top that’s more small,
right? At the widest space at the bottom is the environment. This is level
one. This means changing things in your external environment. For example,
if your desired change is to stop panic checking his phone or panic
reacting, checking his location, checking his social media. What we might
do to change our external environment is put up a barrier to those things
to make it easier not to do. So, for example, if we don’t want to check his
social media constantly, we might log out of the accounts so that it’s not
so easy for us just to go look, whether on a shared computer or even if we
have their password logged into our phone, we might intentionally log out
so that there’s one external barrier to doing that thing.

We may delete the location app on our phone and would have to go through
the conscious effort of reloading it to check. We might ask him to move his
phone out of the room at night so that you don’t feel tempted to check it
in the middle of the night while he is sleeping or feel panicked by the
phone every time the screen lights up. Like that, there’s something new, a
text or something. You might just ask that the phone be out of the room to
help change the external circumstance of the easiness, the ease in which
you can go panic check, panic go snoop, things like that. Okay?

Another example is if you’re trying to change your diet, changing your
environment would look like removing all junk food from your home. I’m just
going to take all the sugar out, take all the chips out, all the soda. I’m
just removing them, okay? That’s changing your environment, external. It’s
external.

Level number two, behavior. You’re doing things to change your behavior.
This is the second level up on the triangle. This means that in the case of
with the husband and trying to change your behaviors there, the behaviors
that you’re changing in this level are you. Instead of constantly checking
Life360 to see where he is, you may decide to distract yourself. You might
get busy doing something else. You might have a conscious thing that you go
do when you feel tempted to look. You might do the same thing when you’re
tempted to look at social media, you might try to change your behavior by
trying to convince yourself that it won’t do any good to look. You might
want to read something specific or listen to a certain podcast such as this
one whenever you’re tempted to look.

Now in the diet example, this might look like not walking to the pantry at
9:00 PM to grab chocolate chips. You’re changing your behavior. It might
look like starting to weigh yourselves daily to see what your progress is,
with the intent of keeping yourself accountable. It may look like laying
out your clothes the night before, your workout clothes, to make it easier
for yourself to work out in the next morning. Okay, so that’s the behavior
level.

Level three, skill. At this level, you are learning new things to stop the
panic checking, fighting matches with your brain, and maybe even with your
spouse. You might get into a conflict with yourself first, and then it
could turn into a fight with your spouse. The skill needed here is it could
be emotional resilience. It might be learning to sit with really incredibly
difficult emotions without reacting to them, without obeying them, without
doing what they’re pushing you to do from that panic place.

Once you have developed that skill, you now know how to pause before
reacting. You learn to master your own emotions, and you learn the
difference between reacting and acting within your own body. Acting would
look like having a clear, strong reason to go do some investigating based
on things that are coming from a wise, calm place of knowing within you.
Knowing that it might be hard to see what you need to go see, but it’s
coming from this understanding that you need to look. It’s not fear driven.
It’d be a very different experience for you.

In the diet example, it would be the same skill. And there’s other skills
too, but this is one of them, emotional resilience. Not grabbing food to
solve for an emotion, sitting with a discomfort and knowing that you’re
going to write it out, that you’re going to let that wave crash over you,
that discomfort of really wanting to go eat to avoid the feeling of
loneliness that you feel, the feeling of fear, whatever it may be, that
you’re sitting in it and that the food is not going to solve it. It’s just
a temporary fix. Okay?

Level four, values and beliefs. Deeply held values and beliefs give you
something to lean on when you feel weak. If you know what your core values
are, they will hold you up and protect you, and if you don’t, I want you to
go back and listen to my episode about values and go do the work that I
give you there. It’s really important. If one of your core values is
self-trust, when you feel panicked, you can remind yourself of that value
and honor it. The more you honor it, the more you will feed your
self-trust. Isn’t that amazing? You’ll give proof to yourself that you can
be trusted, that the world didn’t end by you not checking, and that if you
really need to know something, it will reveal itself to you. That you’ll
know.

In the diet example, if you value physical fitness, it’s going to drive
your actions. It will override the momentary temptation to binge on
chocolate chips because there’s something deeper. There’s something bigger
that you are pursuing based on your values.

Stage five, identity. This level is when we start shifting our whole
thought of who we are. For example, if we have an identity that is highly
enmeshed with another, it will be harder to act in our own best interest.
If we just identify and see our own value and worth as a wife and a mother,
it can be very scary to go, who would I be if I was divorced? Who would I
be if I’m sharing custody and don’t have time with my kids all the time?
Who would I be if somebody else was taking care of them besides me? What
would that mean about me as a mother? These things can feel very scary. If
we do not have a strong identity separate from our kids and our spouse,
this has the potential of pulling us right back into that fear and
reactivity.

On the other hand, the deeper we identify as an independent, capable
person, the more freedom we will give ourselves in exploring what is
available to us. We will not need to control others because we know that
ultimately we will be just fine no matter what they do. If we shift our
identity from someone who has no self-respect, no self-control, just kind
of eats whatever, does whatever, to somebody who at their identity deeply
honors and respects their body, we can use that identity to help us make
decisions that support it. Like eating healthy food, using moderation,
moving our bodies, things like that.

Okay, the last level, level six, mission and purpose. The last level is at
the top of the pyramid, again, mission and purpose, and it means that we
see ourselves as a part of a bigger picture. We are aware of our place in
this world. We are aware of the impact we have and the potential for who we
can reach. It drives us. It keeps us accountable to our goals.

I’m going to give you a little personal example that just happened
recently. Okay? So last week I have an older brother who is a host of a
podcast, and I was interviewed on his podcast. I’m going to be sharing it
to this audience as a bonus episode here, but he was interviewing me and
afterwards we were talking about business and talking about being an
entrepreneur and the work of it, and just the grind sometimes how much work
it is, and the guessing game of is this approach going to work? Not so much
in coaching, but the business side of it, being an entrepreneur, and he
said, “Andrea, why do you do it?” He asked, “How do you keep going?” That’s
what he said, “How do you keep going? When it gets really hard and
discouraging, how do you keep going?”

And in that moment, I thought about it and I thought about my years of
being a coach and starting literally from nothing with just, hey, I’m a
coach now. Come hire me. I can help you. And people thinking, oh, that’s
kind of cute, Andrea’s coaching, right? To people going, do you think she’s
going to make it? To even family members wondering about that? What’s
Andrea up to? And guess what kept me going? My clients. Truly, sincerely
matter more to me than my own drama, my own fear, my own lack of skill. I
am on a mission. I have a mission. I have a purpose. I’m on a mission to
help people stop suffering from infidelity. I’m on a mission to help people
remember who the heck they are, and that this event in their life is an
event in their life. And that it does not define them. And that not only
does it not define them, it can bust their life open in a way that helps
them to actually find themselves, to really identify and find themselves
who they are, who they want to be. It can be a major catalyst for growth.

And so I told my brother that I can’t not. I can’t not do this. My purpose
is in changing the world in my own little corner, in the infidelity corner,
changing the narrative around it and really helping people use this as a
launching point, a springboard, to their best life.

So guess what this means for me? Because this is at the top of my pyramid,
because this is the thing that keeps me getting up every day and showing
up, even though if I disappeared, I wouldn’t get fired, right? I mean by my
clients, I would. But nobody would care. I wouldn’t have a boss. It’s me.
The buck stops with me. So why do I keep going? Because I have to, because
I can’t not, because this is part of my mission. So what this means for me
though is that I have to look down the pyramid at the different things
needed to support my mission, and there are skills that I’ve had to learn,
not just coaching. Oh my gosh, there’s so many things that I’m still
learning. There’s always things.

It means learning how to write, learning how to sell, learning how to
market, learning how to lead a team, learning how to delegate. Learning how
to coach, that’s like crucial and very, very important. But that’s like one
thing in many when it comes to being an entrepreneur and owning my own
business. So I’ve had to learn the skills. I’ve had to change my identity.
I’ve had to change my beliefs about myself. I’ve had to change some of my
behaviors, but all of those things are working from the top down instead of
the bottom up. They are rooted in my mission and purpose and remembering
that it’s not just about me, it’s about a lot of people. It’s about you.
And the beautiful thing is that me being rooted in my mission and purpose
and remembering that, makes it so that the rest of the things needed to
make change, take care of themselves.

So here’s the cool thing, okay? If you’re looking at that pyramid, if
you’re imagining all the different levels, the higher up you go on the
pyramid, the higher it will impact your ability and speed of change. Why?
Because if you have a deep internal mission, the other parts will follow
up. They’ll catch up. You will learn the skills, you will change the
behaviors. Your identity will start to shift as you sink into your own
mission, your own purpose.

So we can start at the bottom of this. We can start at the bottom of this
pyramid and start with just changing our everyday environment. We can do
that. Right? We can start there, but what happens is people get burned out.
They don’t see the results they want right away, so they quit. Go, this
isn’t working. I quit. Or they try things for a little while and think it’s
just too hard. Right? And we can climb up that pyramid and the higher up we
climb where we do the internal work, internal work, of really shifting how
we think about ourselves, really shifting our place in this world,
remembering our significance, the worth of who we are. Then those things
lower down on the pyramid, sort themselves out. Okay? They sort themselves
out.

Let’s go back to infidelity. If you’re just going through the motions of
trying to put your marriage back together, even if you’re saying, oh, no,
this is changing. This is better. We’re changing these old patterns. If you
go back into the old, going through the motions, it will be very hard to
break patterns. It will be a constant yo-yo of two steps forward, one step
back. If you’re leaving your marriage and you’re really wanting to change
your view of yourself, you took a beating. It was really hard on your
self-esteem, and you’re wanting to change how you view yourself so that you
can go and do the things you want to do, have the life that you want, go
get it. Right? Working higher up on that pyramid is going to get your
results much faster. Okay?

So what changes this? Grounding into a deeper meaning, a purpose, a
mission. Maybe our new mission after infidelity is to show your kids what a
happy, healthy marriage looks like. Either with their parents or someone
else. This kind of devotion to a purpose wouldn’t change behaviors. It
would change the environment and would reveal what skills need to be
learned to have it, to commit to it, to have that thing.

Let’s circle back to the diet example. Initially, we may want to lose 20
pounds, so we remove the junk from our home, we arrange our workout
clothes, so they’re easy to find. What changes the game and makes all of it
so much easier is getting clear on why you want this. When it’s attached to
something bigger than you, like wanting to have the energy to play with
your kids or grandkids, or showing yourself what you’re capable of so you
can be an example, maybe to your family, to others, the rest takes care of
itself. You look for who can teach you what you need to know. You’ll see
the gaps in your education. You’ll see like the holes, like I have no idea
how to actually do that. And you go, who’s the best person that could teach
this to me? And then you go work with that person, okay?

This helps you shift your identity from somebody who maybe was an overeater
before to an intentional eater. Everything changes at the core level here,
okay? And everything moves so much faster. If you are starting from the top
levels where you’re working from the inside out, you’re not white knuckling
it. You’re like, today, I’m not eating chocolate chips. Just not doing it.
Right? You are grounded in a deeper purpose. It becomes so much easier.
When you learn how to change the whole narrative. When you learn to change
the story about yourself, about your situation, new things will appear, new
ways, new ideas, new ways of viewing the world, new ways of viewing
yourself. Okay?

To wrap this up, I invite you to look at something you are trying to
change. Identify how you are trying to change it. What are you doing? If
it’s not working, why? If it is, how are you doing it? What are you doing
that’s making that work? And if you want help with this, my group, my Know
in 90 group, is all about making deep internal changes so we can make the
best external choices. It’s deep work. It’s not just about changing up our
behaviors. It’s not just about changing up our environment. Either he’s in
my house or he is out of my house. It’s about getting in touch with your
own mission, your own values, your own standards for your life, and
becoming the person that makes the decisions from that place. The rest
follow suit.

You learn the things you need to learn to be the person that shows up as
the CEO of their life. You learn the skills required to be a great decision
maker. You learn the skills required to settle down your body and your mind
so that you can see the deeper meaning in things, so that you can see the
facts without being so emotionally charged. It will fast track your
success. I see it in the group every single day. It will fast track. You
will be able to make the changes needed, have the in the internal shifts
needed, and the external support by myself, by all the other amazing women
in the group, to be able to internally shift so that you can show up really
powerfully in your life.

All right. Thank you so much, my friends, and I will see you next time. All
right, bye-bye.

Thank you for listening to the Heal from Infidelity podcast. If you would
like to be kept in the know about upcoming free classes, new podcast
episodes, and other ways of working with me, go subscribe to my weekly
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it’s andreagiles.com/lies-about-dash-infidelity/. I will see you next time.