100 Ways to Change Your Life (feat. Liz Moody)
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Welcome back to this week's episode of Unlocked.

I have Liz Moody on today. I'm so excited. I try to, okay. I normally am like, I'm so excited for this week's episode. People are like, you're always excited for the episodes. So I try to like, you know, try to get a new introduction, but we'll see how it goes. I feel like you should always be excited. Like why would you have somebody on if you weren't excited about them? Exactly. Yeah. Don't let somebody take your excitement. Exactly. Like I don't need a filler. I'm like, I want something I'm excited about.

- Yeah, so okay, for people that don't know you, Liz Moody is a personal growth expert, best-selling author and the host of her hit wellness podcast, The Liz Moody Podcast. She recently released her new USA Today best-selling book, "100 Ways to Change Your Life," which is packed with science-based like evidence proof of 100 different ways to change your life. So go read it, it's amazing, but I'm excited for the conversation to come.

Yay. I'm excited to be here. Well, first off, the cover of your book is amazing. Thank you. My husband designed it. You are lying. Yeah. We got a bunch from the publisher and they just didn't feel like they represented the feeling I wanted people to have when they read this book, which is that changing your life isn't a slog and it's not a bunch of work. It's not going to make you feel worse before you feel better. It's going to be fun and exciting and interesting. And so my husband, I was like,

having a panic attack at the corner and my husband like sighs and opens his computer and he starts messing around with designs and he came up with that. That's amazing. Okay. So you said something. So a hundred ways to change your life. There is this feeling of like it gets worse before it gets better.

I don't think that necessarily has to be true. Okay. I think that sometimes if you've never done any introspection or perhaps you haven't examined things, you've just kind of skirted along the surface for whatever reason, you can feel like sometimes things feel heavy or hard or difficult, but that's

this book gives you the tools to deal with those times. So I always say wellness should be a tool, not an end unto yourself. And the second that wellness is making your life worse, it's no longer wellness. I think a lot of times we fill our lives with sacrifice and with like, oh, I have

to go through this whole morning routine and all of these habits. And then finally I'll feel good. I'll feel like my best self. And it shouldn't feel like that. The second that wellness is making your life worse, it's no longer wellness. The second that this book is making your life worse, it's no longer a good book for you, I think.

Wow. Okay. I love that. Do you think your viewpoint though comes from like being a child at such a young age and the constant anxiety and trying to fix it and trying to, like you were doing work at such a young age. And I feel like in today's day and age, you just have adults that

kind of skirt through their whole life and they're like, they refuse to do the work. So therefore when it comes time and you're slapped in the face with it, you feel like you're drowning. I think we all need different things at different times. And I had a really traumatic childhood and that resulted in me having an extreme agoraphobic experience, a lot of anxiety as an adult. And so I sought out the tools to help me with that anxiety and with

the situation that I was in. But I think that different people are gonna need different tools at different times. And I don't think it always has to be trauma-based. Sometimes it can just be like, I'm feeling really lonely. I wish I had more people in my life. I wish I had more friends. And there's a section in the book for that because I think that's something that we don't talk about enough. So I don't think it always has to be, I'm dealing with this really heavy stuff. It can just be these like little tweaks. I wish I felt a little bit better. Okay. So as a child,

what would you say was the final tipping point when so agoraphobia you had explain to people what that is agoraphobia for me at least was I would have panic attacks whenever I got out of bed so agoraphobia in general is a fear of going outside and so for me this was in my late 20s I was living in England at the time my husband was doing his graduate school program there and

And I isolated myself from my community. I had all of these, like I had PTSD from a past experience that I hadn't diagnosed yet that was sort of coming up. And so I started having panic attacks occasionally out at a pub or on the tube or things like that. And then I started having panic attacks whenever I went to the grocery store. I remember ones that I left my cart in the line at the grocery store because my anxiety was too great to finish the checkout process.

And then I started having a panic attack whenever I went downstairs and then eventually basically bed felt like the only safe place for me. And agoraphobia is really interesting because you have the panic itself, but often you develop a fear of having a panic attack, which is what is the secondary fear that makes you scared to go into public places. So your mind is always in a constant state of just...

yeah, just waiting for the next shoe to fall really. - Yeah, and so bed became this really safe place for me, my only safe place. And I spent a number of months

essentially just getting out of bed for like to go to the bathroom or my husband would bring me food and things like that. But that's when I started on the journey to develop these tools for myself because I was laying there and I had like my computer propped up next to me and I was just kind of like laying there with my head on the pillow. And I'd been a journalist for a really long time at that point. And so I used the only skill set that I knew how. And I started emailing experts and people that I had no right to email. Like I emailed the head of neuroscience at Stanford and I was like, what's happening?

when you feel anxious, what's going on in your brain? And a lot of these people did not respond and that's very fine, but a few of them did. And that's when I started to put together this toolkit for myself to help me feel better because those were the tools that I needed at that time. - And would you say during that phase of your life, did it have a negative impact on your marriage?

We weren't married then. Okay. But yeah, that's interesting. I've never been asked that. It was one of the hardest periods in our relationship because...

I didn't feel like I could fully articulate to him what I was going through. He didn't know how to show up for me and what I was going through. There was a lot of self blame. There was a lot of other blame. I felt like I was failing at being the sparkly partner that he had fallen in love with. And it came with a lot of lessons about what a long-term relationship is about and that

building that foundation when it's not so good can make things even better when it is good again. - 100%, 'cause I feel like, especially I say, my age range, demographic, whatever it may be, and especially just in today's day and age, it's like, all right, if it's not easy, throw it away. It's easy to replace. You can go on any app and swipe left or right. You can go on Instagram, you can do whatever it is. But when in reality,

Like you got to stick in the hard stuff. You don't just walk away when the going gets tough. Well, and I think that that hard stuff not only is something you have to like get through, but it makes your resulting relationship so much richer and so much fuller. I feel so much closer to my husband because we were together through that time and through

hard times that he's experienced. And I don't think, I think if you're looking for somebody that you're going to just have like a surface level relationship with, if you're looking for somebody that you're just going to kind of like watch TV and be like, oh, how was your day with, then maybe you don't need or want to go through that type of stuff. But I'm looking for a life partner, somebody that I can,

experience this journey of life with. And I think that seeing people in those hard times is so critical for having the information you need to decide who you want your life partner to be. - Oh, without a doubt. And so during that time, 'cause now I just start thinking like for him,

he didn't know how to show up for you and for you did you ever articulate like this is how i need you to show up for me were you at that point in your healing process to be able to do that or did you really not even know how i didn't know i was spiraling like i think it's interesting to be sitting here now and i'm the author of this personal growth book and i'm like here's all these tools to help live your life to actually

to express how bad off I was at that period. But I also like to make it very, very clear how bad off I was because when I was in that period of my life, I was Googling for anybody and everybody who had experienced something like this to see if they were in a better place. Like I remember I'd watch interviews of like, do you know Amanda Seyfried, the actress? So she talks about having panic attacks and I would watch interviews of her obsessively and be like, oh, if she's had panic attacks and

and she can go on late shows, then I must have some hope for me too. - Yeah, 'cause you look for hope. I say all the time, I'll post quotes on Instagram and I'll be like, "I don't believe it."

But like I'm posting it in hopes that maybe I will believe it. I love that. I think that's really powerful. It's a message for your future self, if not your present self. Like you have to manifest it. And to pull your present self into the future, which I think is really beautiful. So I was not in an articulation place. I was in a story.

so uncomfortable in my body on a moment to moment basis that I did not know if I wanted to continue to exist in my body place. And that was not a place where I could express myself in any way to my partner. But what he did over and over and over was affirm that he loved me and that he was there for me no matter what, and that he wasn't going anywhere. And I think that outside of like

helping me learn to meditate or sometimes these like little tools that we look for when a partner is in a place of crisis, like I'm going to get them to therapy. I'm going to fix their lives. Sometimes just asserting that you have value to me. I have love for you. And that's outside of your outside circumstances can be one of the most powerful things you can do. See, I will say that's something I'm terrible at.

I think when we sit and talk and I like reflect, I'm instant fix it mode. Like, let me fix it. It's interesting, too. I think there's obviously different situations. But I was talking about this on a recent podcast that I did on my podcast. And we were talking about how a partner had like lost their job, essentially. And we're like, oh, you want to jump in? You want to be like, apply for this job, apply for this job, apply for this job. But when you're doing that, you're kind of

chipping away at their sense of self-value, their sense of self-worth, their sense of self-capability. And what you want to do is build up all those things. So say, I have complete faith that you're going to find a great job for you. Instead of trying to like fix it, do all these things for them, you want to actually build them up so that they can do all these things for themselves. 100%. I also think, so I have spoken before, like I'm a huge advocate for therapy and

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And one of the things that I learned is a lot of times you get into a relationship, but it's really like a parent child relationship. And a lot of that comes from childhood trauma or maybe a place where you wish someone would have taken care of you. So therefore, like you're just going to try to take care of someone. And I've realized it gets you absolutely nowhere. I'm like, because why do you want to date your child? Like you don't.

It doesn't lay a healthy foundation. Certainly, I think any sort of codependency elements, whether they are in a parent child relationship or they're in a partner relationship, are really insidious and negative and they're not helpful. Yeah. So your book, there was like I there was something because I screenshotted it that you had mentioned.

- A thing that I was like, whoa, which everyone's scared to talk about, but you say, think about your death. - Yes, that's the third tip in the book. - Yes, and I was like, oh gosh, this is really early on. I was like,

This is really on like you're hitting all the hard stuff. So the way the book is structured isn't so that you go through and you do all 100 things and it feels really overwhelming. I'm like, you can pick and choose. There's 18 categories you can pick and choose based on what you need, the tools that you need at that time, as we've talked about. But I do ask that everybody read the first three tips. And one of those three tips is think about your death because

Because I think that zooming out and getting that sense of perspective is so critical for us figuring out what we want our life to look like today. Otherwise, we can just go through the motions. Then you wake up and it's five years later. It's 10 years later. It's 20 years later. So I think it'd be really, it can be really, really helpful in helping us

prioritize our goals, prioritize the changes that we're even interested in making, which is why I put it early in the book. So you can be like, what parts of the rest of the book even apply to me right now? What do I want to focus on? But also it can be so perspective making in terms of what,

what we're focusing on in our day to day in a negative way. If you are thinking about, oh, I'm at the beach and I have all this cellulite and I hate the way that my body looks. Is your deathbed self going to be happy with that? Are they going to be like, wow, I wish that she had critiqued her looks more. I wish she had felt more

more like she didn't look good enough, like she didn't like herself more? Or is your 80 year old, 85 year old self, your deathbed self going to be like, I wish she had enjoyed every single second that she was at the beach, that she was at the fun party, that she had the opportunity to spend time with her friends, her loved ones, all these things. I think that having that little voice in the back of your head is really clarifying for what really matters. Yeah, I because I

especially when you're young and you're just like, oh, I have forever. Like, I'm gonna live forever. I'm fine. It doesn't matter. And when you take a step back, even for me, I'm like, all right, I'm 26, but I'm like, whoa.

Like, what am I doing in certain areas? I'm like, cause I'm not happy in this area or that area, or I don't feel fulfilled or, and I think a lot of that though, which like reading parts of this, I was like, whoa, I feel like I'm in certain times like talking to myself because one of the things that you said, the next one was the, uh, not, it was six, the start, the milestones, right?

Like set by size milestones, bite size milestones. And for me, I've always been like, well, if it's not big, it's not good. Like if I don't accomplish it to the very best, I might as well have just not even done it. Well, and going back to what are the messages that we internalize from our childhood that make us feel like we have worth? I wonder if there were some messages from your childhood that you got about where your worth and value in the world comes from. So I look at it and I'm

I think first off, growing up in a big family, like there's five kids, so everything's always a competition and there's only so much attention to go around. Like you have a mom and a dad and that's it. And so I feel like for me, I was always, and there were so many other things, but like it was, I was, had to be the best in school.

I rode horses and so I competed in that for 10 years. I had to be the absolute best. I had to, everything I did, and even I feel like a little bit of OCD, like I would, my grandpa would help me like work on school projects

And if I messed up, it didn't matter how far along I was. It's rip it up, throw it away, start over. And he was like, you can't do this. Like, it's fine. And so I think maybe it was a fight for attention. Also growing up on TV, it's just you want to be the best. And I saw people around me like Kylie Jenner is a

day older than me, a day older than me. And I saw how far she was. And I was like, well, shoot, I'm not that far. So like now what I've accomplished isn't good enough. But the thing is that Kylie Jenner is comparing herself to people too.

Every single person is comparing themselves to somebody else, which is why you don't see anybody reach a point and say, oh, I'm satisfied now. Like I'm all good. I got it all sorted. That never happens. And so I think that for me, it's been a big part of my journey is to figure out what are the things that create a sense of worth and value internally so that I'm not relying on these external factors to feel like I matter in the world, to feel like I belong, like I can take up space.

Going back to the bite-sized milestones, that's from work from Dr. Katie Melkman. She's at Wharton and she does amazing work on behavioral change. And what I love about bite-sized milestones is one, and I think this is a really interesting thing that nobody's pointed out before, which you pointed out, that it lets you focus on the little. It lets you take little wins and have those little wins matter. But two, it actually does help you achieve your greater goals significantly more than just setting a greater goal. So if you set a goal to write a book,

you would sit down every day and go like, oh my gosh, that's so intimidating. How am I gonna write this book? I don't know. Like, it feels like a lot. And then you might just never do it. And I think so many of us have dreams that we never even go after because they feel too intimidating. They feel too large. So breaking it down into these bite-sized milestones. Okay, I wanna write a book in six months.

how many words do I have to write every single day to get that book done in six months? And then every day you're just waking up and you're writing your 500 words. You're also taking some of the pressure off. Do they have to be good? Do they have to be bad? It doesn't matter. You have 500 words. You have to do that every single day. And that's how big goals get accomplished. - Well, see, and when I read that, I was like, whoa, it makes you like go back and replay things.

Because if your goal is to just write a book, then okay, you can write a book, but it doesn't mean it's gonna be great because your only goal is to write a book. If you have the milestones of, well, I wanna talk about this, this, this, this, or how I feel this day or that day, those are those little milestones that you write about. And then you're like, all right, it's gonna sit there until I have that next milestone. And so I looked at it and I was like, and especially too with Chloe and Grace and my siblings, after having them,

And it's funny because I was talking to my boyfriend last night and somehow pregnant women got brought up. And he was like, isn't it funny how you see a pregnant woman and when she finds out she's pregnant, she's like, all right, well, now I have to change how I eat. I have to work out. I have to take all these vitamins now. And she completely changes her life. And then the moment she has her child, she goes back to all the things she did before she was pregnant. He was like, don't you wonder why...

women think, okay, this child is good enough to treat your body this way, but without the child, I'm not good enough to treat my body that way. - There's incredible research about how much more likely women are to do good things for themselves if they feel that it benefits somebody else. So even when we talk about parenthood, often you'll hear the old adage, oh, fill your cup so that you can fill other people's cup. Fill your cup so you can take care of other people. There's literally research that says women will not fill their cup

otherwise and it devastates me. I think that realizing that we again have worth, we have value unto ourselves for being exactly the people that we are is so critical to any journey. It is not for your kids. It is not for your partner. It is for you and that's okay. That's not selfish. That's okay. And that's why like Chloe and Grayson, I have learned, like I see their struggles day to day, whatever it may be. And I,

the amount of grace I give them of like, hey, it's okay. Like if you're having a bad day, it's okay. Or sometimes just showing up is enough. And I found myself saying these things to them and I was like, all right, well, if I'm saying, if I want this for them, why would I not want it for myself? Exactly. If you are a parent and you think to yourself, oh, my kid, when they grow up, I just want them to fill their cup so that they can fill somebody else's cup. That wouldn't make sense to you. You

talking to yourself like you would talk to your own best friend or like you would talk to somebody that you really, really love and doing that on a very nuanced level. Like, would you say that about that person's body? Would you say that about that person's thoughts? Would you say that about that person's ability to complete or not complete their to-do list that day is a really, really helpful daily practice. And there's a lot of research around how it can serve

as a little bit of bumpers to help us speak to ourselves better. This episode of Unlocked is brought to you by BetterHelp. I absolutely love partnering with BetterHelp. We all know I am huge on therapy. Therapy is my go-to. It's the only thing I do.

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When you say that, like the devil's advocate side of me goes to, if you're asking yourself, well, would you say this to this person or that person or whatever? Do you feel like sometimes...

treat others negatively and say, oh, this person looks this way or that way or whatever because they say that to themselves. Oh, for sure. I definitely think that we get into thought patterns. One of my favorite tips in the book, it's about how we can literally rewire our brains to feel happier. Yes, that's what I was going to say.

I love this tip. It's Rick Hansen. He's amazing. So he's from UC Berkeley and he does this research about neuroplasticity, which is our brain's ability to actually change on a physical level. And so if you want to change your brain on a physical level to think different thoughts, you can do this three-step process. It's really easy. You can notice the next time that you're feeling something good. You can amplify that feeling of good. And then you can sit in that feeling of good for about five seconds.

And what that's going to do is it's literally going to change the pathways in your brain. It's going to make it so the next time that you feel any thought, it's going to be more likely to take the well-trod pathway, the pathway of good. So you're going to be feeling more good things on a regular basis. To your point earlier, when we're thinking negative things all the time about ourselves, about other people, about the world, your brain is...

they're treading through that pathway. It's making that pathway stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger. So the next time you're just gonna think any old thought, it's gonna be more likely to take the negative pathway, whether it's about yourself, whether it's about somebody else. It's why we need to be so careful about the people that we hang out with too, because if you're surrounding yourselves with people who are just,

hating every single second, taking everything in the most negative way possible, you're wiring literally on a physical level, those pathways in your brain, and you're gonna be more likely to see the world in a more negative way. - I've always said that, like, what's the quote? You were like, you're as successful as,

the people around you. - Oh, for sure. - Like it's exactly, and that's not to say that, all right, you can't have friends that are having a bad day, but it's just if everything-- - I think it's about if it happens every single time. I think paying attention to how you feel after you leave hanging out with people and being really, really honest with yourself. And again, it does not mean that people can't have bad days. We want to be there for our friends, for ourselves when we're having bad days and those are gonna happen. And I'm not saying we should get rid of those entirely because that's part of the experience of being a human.

But if it's happening over and over and over and over and every single time you hang out with this person, even when it's a good day, they're finding the bad things in it. Yes. That's when I think it becomes problematic. Yeah, that's see, I like. And so another one was which we've talked. We talk a lot on my podcast about our boundaries. And that's definitely a therapy. It's so funny. I look at it because.

Unfortunately, it's a therapy phrase because I feel like we live in a society where it's just there are no boundaries.

And if you do, people are afraid of setting boundaries because you lose a lot of people along the way. A quote that I learned when I went to this therapy program where the people that complain about you setting boundaries are the ones who benefited from you not having any. - Which therapy program? - Onsite. - I did that too. - You did? - Yeah, I loved it. - Okay, yeah, I loved it. So I've gone twice. - Yeah, it's amazing. - I say it's just like, I've even said, I wanna go again.

I want my boyfriend to go. I, anyone, I'm just like, you know. It's like a, I just think that it's this really beautiful opportunity to take care of your mind in a wonderful way. I also just did a podcast with the world's leading expert on stress on my podcast. And there's incredible research how if you do an immersive experience for like a week or so, that pays off for a year to come. So essentially they had two groups of women. One took a normal vacation. So they're just relapsing.

resting, relaxing, whatever. One did a mindfulness meditation practice during that vacation. Both were like restored for a little bit afterwards, but the group that did the mindfulness practice felt the benefits of that practice. They interacted with their daily lives in a much more calm and happy way for a year to come. And so I think that these really immersive programs can sometimes be helpful, especially if you're like, I don't have time to meditate every day. And maybe you do a full day or a

multi-day retreat or something like that and it can pay off in dividends and i think it's like the greatest gift i've ever given myself the greatest gift yeah and but it can be intimidating it can be scary to go and do that and when talk like listening to you speak one thing that i've thought of since the beginning is you obviously were in a place to where

you had done no work and you were dealing with not you hadn't done any work but obviously before you wrote like you did all your work with this and along the way after you did a lot of your work was it hard for you to deal with people who have done zero work?

Because I that's what I felt when I did my therapy program. And one of the things they remind you of, as you know, is, hey, not everyone just did what you did. Like not everyone was here for a week and was forced to come to terms with their trauma and setting boundaries and doing what you do. So you have to have grace for people that haven't done it.

So a few things. One, I don't think that my work is done. One of the reasons. Oh, it's always going. It's always going. And one of the reasons I structured the book, even in the way that I did, is I wanted it to be a tool for years and years to come. Like maybe this thing is not cropping up in your life right now, but maybe it'll pop up a few years later. So I definitely have found myself confronted by different challenges, even in the process of

doing this whole book tour, I've been confronting different things or I was just at Thanksgiving with my family for a week and that brought up some fun stuff too. So I think that always feeling like I'm open to learning and excited about learning new things about myself and my relationships and all of that. And then that also gives me a lot of empathy

for everybody in my life because I think we're all at different stages of our journeys. I think my biggest qualification in people I'm gonna surround myself with is a willingness and excitement to learn. As long as they have that, then we're good to go. I also think to the boundary conversation, one of the most important things that I think people get

wrong about boundaries that I really like to remind people is that it's not about what you are saying at any given time. It's about what you were doing after what you say. So this is so much about what is in my control and what is out of my control. If you just go through your life all day saying what is in my control and what is out of my control, you will feel so much better. But with the boundary conversation, if you say to your parent, I don't like when you bring up my marital status,

And then they say, okay, that's not a boundary. A boundary is saying, when you bring up my marital status, I cannot be in the room with you and I will leave and then actually leaving. And I think that if more of us were taking that second step, we would be able to preserve a lot of our self-esteem, our self-worth and our sanity. Yeah. Well, I say that in relationships, like what you accept in the beginning is

unfortunately you're setting the tone for the whole relationship. And so it's hard to go back. I disagree with that. Really? I do. Yeah. Oh,

we can always grow and evolve and change and i think sometimes our partners will really surprise us i had a sex expert on my podcast and we had this whole long conversation about what to do if you've been faking an orgasm because a lot of people end up in these long-term relationships where they have been faking an orgasm for years and years and years and they're like well we're married now i guess this is the rest of my life but you can

You can go back, I think. You can say, the very base level is to say I've changed and I want to experiment with different things. And I think that can happen whether it's an emotional thing, a type of conversation you like to have or something that you like in the bedroom. You can say, this is no longer working for me. I've grown and evolved as a person. I would like to try something new.

But I also think that you can say this wasn't the real me and I'm getting to know the real me and this is what the real me needs. And that's a really, really powerful thing. My husband and I have been together for 15 years. Holy cow. And we haven't been married that long, but we've been together for 15 years. And one of the most beautiful parts of our relationship is how much we've grown and changed and evolved and created that space for each other to grow and change and evolve.

I see that. I think for me personally, with, I think I've seen, cause like I was engaged, caught off my engagement. I've had, I've dated a few people, but I think I saw myself trying to be what

I saw they wanted or needed or whatever it may be, instead of setting the boundary of just like, this is who I am. But isn't that going back to some of the stuff we talked earlier about where you've been taught that your worth and value comes from pleasing other people, performing for other people. And that's why now I feel like after I've done a lot of work and a lot of therapy and a lot of

I'm like, I don't, I don't have the energy to be anything other than what I am. So like. It's a good tactic. Just exhaust yourself. Exactly. I don't have the energy to be anything other than I am right now. Yeah. And so at the very beginning, like even the guy I'm dating now, I'm like, these are things I say non-negotiables. Like these are things that I stand firm on and like that I will not waver from. Yeah.

I think knowing if you know there are things about yourself that you're not going to be willing to compromise on. I think that being upfront about that is incredibly important. I have this thing called match theory that I absolutely love, which is just the idea that we are all out there looking for our matches. So every single second that you're spending on a date, trying to present is something that you're not, whether that's sending a text message at a certain time or

giggling in a certain way or dressing in a certain way, all you're doing is preventing yourself from finding your match, which is our ultimate goal. So I think the more that you know about yourself and the more that you present as your most authentic self early on versus trying to be a person that's going to impress the other person that's gonna make them like you, that's gonna help you find your match, whether it's in a friendship, whether it's in a relationship, whether it's in a job, you're looking for matches, you're not looking to impress people. So I think internalizing that

And leading with that is really valuable too. But also if you've been in a relationship for a long time, I just want to give people hope that they can change and you can evolve and you can grow together and you can have a different future than you had a past. - Yeah, that's so true. Because it's like what you said, we don't just throw it away. We don't, but having boundaries, you also like, I look at it and just people in my life and I'm like,

you just let people run all over you or you just change and you're unhappy because you're not sticking to your boundaries. But that to the point of what can we control and what can we not control and to some of the conversations we had earlier, I think for our friends who are doing that, the most valuable thing, what we want to do is say, why?

I'll share you with this person. You're so much better than this person. But the most valuable thing you can do in that situation is build up your friends so that they feel like they're so much better than that person rather than essentially questioning their judgment, which is going to make them feel worse, which is going to make them make worse choices. Mm.

So instead of being like, why? Like this person's awful. You say, you're so great. I'm so impressed by these things you're doing. What are you thinking about what you want your future to like look like? Really building up their sense of worth and value and their ability to make good decisions is gonna get you better results.

I agree with that 100%. I feel like we live in such a fast paced world. And especially like my life, I'm always like, all right, what's the next thing I have to do? And so there's sometimes to when I speak that it can sound not the most empathetic or not. Cause it's just like, Hey, what are you doing? And it's what I feel like when you care about someone so much, it's hard for you to think through it because you're just like, I don't want this for you. I, you know, it's so,

It's so hard. I completely agree. I just did a episode about relationships with Dr. Alexander Solomon, who's an incredible relationship therapist. And she had this little trick in it. And it's for when you're fighting with your partner. But I actually think it'd be really useful in the situation you just described to which is asking for a redo. So it's literally if you have a fight with your partner, and you're like, say something. And then if you just have a little moment, you're like, Wait, I don't like how I said that. And you could just say, I'd like a

I'd like a redo. I wasn't my best self in that moment. You can even like leave the room and like judge your face a little bit and come back and be like, okay, what I meant to say is this. And there's really interesting research from Dr. John Gottman and Dr. Julie Gottman and their incredible relationship experts. Um, and they say that in negative interactions, you want a five in, in arguments, in times of conflict, you want a five to one ratio of positive to negative interactions.

So you want like a positive interactions, like a little bit of humor, a little bit of handholding. I hear you, I see you. And a negative interaction is like criticism or going silent and not listening to whatever they're saying or whatever. - Because I think it's possible to validate how someone feels while also maybe not being

understanding or not. It's like, I understand how you feel that way. - Oh, 100%. That stuff is completely positive. You're not acquiescing to their point of view. You're just saying, I understand the way that you feel. But that redo moment is a little moment of humor. It's a little bit moment of like, oh, like that was a little bit silly, which is a huge positive interaction that you can bring to any moment. So I think if you come out with your friends, you're just like,

"I want you to live your best life. "What are you making these choices?" You could be like, "Wait a second, pause." I wanna do a little bit of redo 'cause this came from a place of caring so deeply about you and wanting you to live your best life. I think I could do that better. - That's awesome. I love that. See, that's my tip for the day because I need to be better at that. So what would you say your favorite tip is in your book? Like your favorite one.

- It changes all of the time based on what I need at that time. So I would say right now, I love the rewiring your neural pathways for happiness tip. I do think that one is such a great one because you can be doing it literally right now. I can be saying, this is such a good conversation. I'm gonna notice that, I'm gonna amplify that, I'm gonna sit in it. You can do it all the time. Nobody has to know and you're changing the pathways in your brain. I also love, there's a tip about building self-love.

And I've been using that a lot lately because I think that we talk about self-love a lot, but it feels really abstract. It's just like, love yourself, girl. And you're like, okay, like, but how, how do I do that? And,

And this is a really pragmatic, actionable way to do that, which is recognizing that self-love is built on self-trust. Because if you don't trust yourself when you're saying, I love you, I believe in you, you can do this, you deserve a good life. You're not going to believe those words. So then you go back to how do I build self-trust? And you build self-trust by keeping promises to yourself.

A promise to yourself looks like I'm not going to go on my phone first thing in the morning. And then you roll over, you reach for your phone, you're scrolling on Instagram before you've even woken up. That is a broken promise to yourself. A promise to yourself looks like I'm going to do my workout today. But then you run out of time. You prioritize a bunch of other people's needs first. You maybe get tired by the end of the day. You're scrolling on TikTok. That's a broken promise to yourself.

All of those broken promises add up to you not believing that your word has worth. And then when you say these kind things to yourself, you're not going to believe those words either. So I've loved the tip recently of making little promises to myself that I can keep so that I can build that relationship of trust with myself that will turn into love with myself.

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I love that because and I'm kind of my personality. It's it's like all or nothing, like I said. So I'll be like, all right, instead of working out twice this week, I'm going to work out five days this week.

And so I set unrealistic expectations and then I fall through. So one of the keys to all of this working is to set the bar significantly lower. So we set the bar so high and then we aren't able to keep the promises and then we aren't able to have the levels of self-love that we want to have. So set the bar lower and lower and lower until you can stick to the things. And then that's going to build the foundation for that self-trust. Yeah. I need to be better at that. That's going

I'm setting the bar a little lower so I can feel that I've accomplished something. And so much more counts than we know counts. When I do these interviews with experts on my podcast, I'm always like, what's the minimum? Like, I'm like, how much meditation do we really have to do? How much of a workout do we really have to do? And those numbers are significantly lower than we think. There's research that five minutes of meditation has a profound impact on our brain. There's research that a few rounds of a breath work practice.

which is gonna take you less than a minute total, has a profound impact on our brain. There's research that if you think about working out outside of like,

and punishing your body and wanting your body to look a certain way. And you actually think about working out in terms of how you body feels, how you want to feel in your body. Very, very small amounts of movement are going to change that base state. I actually think that we've been brainwashed so much into thinking that working out is to make our bodies look a certain way versus make our bodies feel a certain way that that's why we're like, oh, a 10 minute walk doesn't count. But

A quick walk around the block is going to have massive impacts on your hormone levels, your metabolic health, your stress levels, your creativity. So one of the things you speak about is like hidden information and your emotions. And so Erin, who produced the podcast, everyone knows who she's come on a few times, but she's known me forever. And I feel like I when she and I communicate at times, I'm

Like a lot of people I can do maybe don't see through my communication, but whether like I respond in anger or I respond, she immediately knows like, okay, something else is going on. And I feel like as a society, we just take people's actions or words as they say it. And we don't take a second to think, whoa.

Like, is there something else going on? Do you personally feel that maybe when someone's responding in anger or harsh words that it's deeper than just that?

I had an anger therapist on my podcast and he said something really interesting about anger. The whole episode was sort of about how anger is misunderstood as a society. But the reason we evolved to have anger on an evolutionary level is to alert us to injustice and then to fire us up to do something about that injustice, to give us the energy that we need to tackle that injustice.

So first of all, I think anger is a wildly misunderstood emotion and being able to embrace anger both in ourselves and on a societal level can be helpful to an extent. Obviously, there's anger gone wrong and we talk about that in the episode. But I think that it's a wildly misunderstood and mis-empathized with emotion. And I think we need to be gentler with ourselves when we're experiencing anger and say what...

is this anger signifying? And to that point, I have a tip in my book about whenever you feel any sort of emotion, instead of just saying, I'm so angry, I'm so stressed, I'm so sad, you can ask yourself, what would be two alternative words for this thing? And that can help you bring a level of specificity to what you're feeling that can be incredibly clarifying. And you can use that clarity to take actions and have conversations that would be different than what you would otherwise have. So instead of I'm so stressed, maybe it's

I'm actually feeling really scared right now, or I'm actually feeling really betrayed by this relationship that I'm having in my life. I'm feeling insecure. You can start to tap into all of these other options for what you're feeling. So I would encourage people the next time, and I would encourage you the next time that you feel like you're feeling a certain way to ask yourself, what are two alternative words for the way that I'm feeling?

And to the point of if you're on the receiving end of that, I do think there could be some value to figuring out, to asking yourself, okay, they're presenting as this, but what are two other things? Or even asking the person, hey, you're sending me these text messages. I'm feeling like they are coming across as a little bit angry. Is there something else that you might be feeling that you maybe wanna talk about? - That's great because I think we look at it and we just see anger and it's automatically just,

All right, you shut off. When in reality, if you take a sec, I think it goes back to being empathetic. Like you said, being empathetic with people's emotions of like, whoa, I wonder why

they feel this way or I wonder what's going on and taking time to ask the hard questions yeah and I think being a human is so hard it is and if we just go through the world with a base level of being a human is hard it's hard for me it's hard for you it's hard for every single person that I'm interacting with you don't have to excuse people's poor behavior and I'm a huge fan of always directly standing up for yourself or standing up for what you're worth what you believe in but if you're

in traffic and you assume the guy cut you off in front of you because he hates you and he wants you to have a terrible day or you see me cut you off because he's late for work he's stressed out he's you know what i mean going through the world assuming that people tend to have good intentions but it's also hard to be human is better for our cortisol levels that's just like a better self-coping technique i need to get better at that

We talk about road rage in the anger episode. We have a specific action plan for that too. Okay. So before we wrap up, I have one last question that I've thought of. Obviously, when you look at your book and you're like, oh, the pink and this, that you're going to think, okay, it's geared more towards women.

And so how do, like, what do you say to the men that may be listening that are just, cause that's something we've, so this last podcast guest I had on, he was talking about, his name's Dax and he did a song with Darius Shrucker and it went viral and it's called to be a man. And it talks about how like you're a man, you provide, you go to work, you come home and rarely is it ever asked, like, how are you doing? You know? And I,

I've really wanted to focus on that of I feel like that is a thing is so rarely do we ask men like, hey, but how are you? I think that that question is so powerful. First of all, we have a lot of men who have loved the book and my husband did design it. So he tried to make it good for men and women. I think because the pink is so bright almost. And then we have the orange and the yellow. I wouldn't be embarrassed if I were a man to be seen holding this book. And it doesn't feel like

Self-help. I always call myself and my work self-help for people who don't like self-help content because it's going to change your life. It's going to make you feel better. But it's really grounded in science, which I find that men particularly women love it, too. But like men really enjoy. You have to like show them facts. Yeah, there's a lot. There's a lot of science. Every single tip in the book and there's 100 of them has hard concrete science behind it.

But I also think to your point of asking like, how are you? How are you doing? My husband loves getting flowers. And if I had never asked him, hey, like what do you think about getting flowers? I wouldn't know that. We make so many assumptions about people in general.

There's a tip in the book about letting people reveal who they are in front of you instead of going in and saying, oh, you're wearing this outfit. You must be like this. Oh, you're this gender. You must be like this. Oh, you said this thing. You have this tone of your voice. You must be like this. But really, instead, asking the questions and letting people reveal who they are in front of you. I think that can be incredibly powerful and let people show you what their needs, their wants, their goals, their desires are. I love.

Love that. That is awesome. Let people show, reveal who they are. I,

I so many times and do it over and over and over in a relationship. My husband, I have been together for 15 years, but he's changing and growing and evolving all the time. So instead of just assuming, oh, he doesn't like watching rom-com, so I'm not going to invite him to watch this rom-com with me. Maybe he does now. So I always ask him, do you want to watch this movie with me? I'm going to go do this thing. Do you want to do this with me? Are you not interested in this? Are you interested in this? Always checking in because it's

allowing people to be who they want to be is going to make them want to be around you more.

I love that. That's a great thing to end on. Now, where can people listen to your podcast? It's called the Liz Moody Podcast and it's available wherever you listen to podcasts. We have tons of different experts on. We have tons of different types of shows. We have one about like the pros and cons of having kids. We have financial health. We have gut health. We have every single thing, how to make more friends, every single thing that you can think of that would make your life feel better on a day-to-day basis. We're talking about on the Liz Moody Podcasts.

And then my book is 100 Ways to Change Your Life. That's available wherever books are sold. We have 18 categories, how to be more confident, how to stick to habits, how to achieve your goals, how to live longer, all of these different things. That's amazing. And then I'm Liz Moody on TikTok and on Instagram. And I share lots of little bite-sized tips to help you change your life. I love it. Well, thank you for coming on. Thank you so much for having me. Sitting here with you now today, I'm like, all right, these are the things I know I have to work on. Like...

You ask such good questions, truly. So thank you for having me. No, thank you. Social media is exhausting. I mean, I love it. The memes, the drama, the tea.

So I started a podcast to digest all that is going on and give you an opportunity to just sit back and soak it all in. The Perez Hilton Podcast. We talk trending topics, cultural resets, and in case you missed it. So if this sounds like your world, your cup of tea, give my podcast a listen. The Perez Hilton Podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts.

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