The Instructions Are On The Outside Of The Box – Episode #723

In this solo episode of Live On Purpose Radio, Dr. Paul Jenkins takes on the question he has heard most often in three decades of clinical work: why do I do what I do when I know what I know? His answer starts with an image. Picture yourself stuck inside a box, with the instructions for getting out printed on the outside. You can't read them from where you're standing, and that has nothing to do with intelligence, motivation, or capability. It is a matter of perspective, and it is the first reason he gives for why all of us need coaches.

 

We experience everything from inside our own minds, Dr. Paul explains, and our biggest error is believing what we think. Assumptions don't feel like assumptions. They feel like reality, which is why blind spots stay blind. He shares a moment from a retreat with his coach Jody Moore, where two dozen people each took an hour in the hot seat over three full days. When his turn came, he laid out everything going on in his business and his mind, then paused for the coaching. Jody's whole response was, "Well, that's a thought." He had believed he was describing his circumstances. She showed him he was describing his thoughts about them. A coach, he adds, does not know your life better than you do. What a coach has is the one thing you cannot give yourself: an outside perspective.

 

The second reason is that information is not transformation. Dr. Paul returns to the difference between breakthrough learning, when the lights come on, and transformational learning, when practice slowly changes who you are, and compares it to learning the piano until his hands knew where to go without thinking. Then he adds the third piece: another human. Change happens in relationship. A promise made only to yourself usually leaves a back door cracked open, and telling a coach or accountability partner closes it. He explains the difference between real friends and deal friends, and why he felt free to make his coaching relationships entirely about his own growth. He loves the way his daughter defines commitment: doing what you said you'd do after the feeling you had when you said it has passed.

 

The episode closes with an invitation. Maybe you don't need another book, another podcast, or another breakthrough. Maybe the instructions are already printed on the outside of your box, and you need someone standing outside it to read them to you. Dr. Paul built Positives to support both kinds of learning, with daily, weekly, and monthly practices plus private and group coaching. There's a free sample at liveonpurposeradio.com/positives. Learn more about the show at liveonpurposeradio.com and about Dr. Paul's work at drpauljenkins.com.

What is Live on Purpose Radio?

Live On Purpose Radio features principles of prosperity, abundance, and positive psychology to help you create and live the life you love. As you listen to Live On Purpose Radio, you’ll hear powerful stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Dr. Paul Jenkins interviews inspiring people about principles that empower them to live on purpose. Living on purpose means that you have a purpose, and that you do it intentionally. Live on Purpose Radio, LiveOnPurposeRadio.com, started in 2007 and has been helping listeners worldwide overcome the effects of noxious negativity with a regular dose of Pathological Positivity. Share Live On Purpose Radio with anyone you know who would appreciate a dose of positivity in their life. Visit DrPaulJenkins.com for more resources to Live On Purpose.

This is Live On Purpose Radio episode 723, the instructions on the outside of the box. Now is the only time to create and live the life you love. I'm doctor Paul Jenkins, the positivity psychologist. My job is to connect you to powerful positive psychology principles that immediately upgrade your relationships, business, and mental health. Are you ready? Let's jump in. Welcome back to Live on Purpose Radio. This is doctor Paul the shrink who expands your life with another episode of Live on Purpose Radio. The instructions are on the outside of the box. Think of yourself as being trapped inside of a box. And there are instructions for getting out of your box, but they're on the out side of the box. Have you ever known exactly what you should be doing and still found yourself not doing it? We're surrounded by information. Most of us don't suffer from a lack of information or how to improve our lives, And especially when we have resources available to us like this podcast, you're already learning principles and engaging in practices designed to help you create meaningful change. And yet, we all get stuck sometimes. I've thought about this myself a lot. There's a gap. Right? There's always a gap between what we know and what we do. Can you see the gap? And probably the most common lament that I hear in my office over now three decades of clinical experience, why do I do what I do when I know what I know? Sometimes we're trapped inside of a box, and the instructions for getting out of the box are printed on the outside of the box. You can't read the instructions because of where you're standing. And this is not about intelligence or motivation or capability. It's about perspective. It's about your viewpoint. Sometimes another human being can see something that's almost impossible for us to see for ourselves. And that gives us the first reason why we need coaches. We can't see what we can't see. So we experience everything from inside of the box of our own mind. And the biggest error that we make as humans is that we believe what we think. Our assumptions don't feel like assumptions, they just feel like the way things are. They feel like reality. Our patterns become so familiar to us that we stop noticing them. And that's what I've loved about my career in professional psychology. My job is to illuminate the obvious. There are obvious things that are completely unnoticed until they're called to our attention. Obvious but unnoticed, like the fact that we're speaking English. Did you notice? Oh, yeah. It's obvious, but you didn't necessarily notice that until I called it to your attention. The exception would be if English is not your native language and you're listening to this and kind of translating it as we go, well then maybe you noticed. But our programming is so strong that we develop blind spots, and we call them blind spots for a reason. If you could see them, they wouldn't be blind spots. A coach is outside of the box. So a good coach can ask the questions that you haven't thought to ask or notice patterns that you don't recognize or challenge an assumption that you didn't even realize you were making. This helps you to separate your circumstances from the meaning that you've attached to those circumstances. I still remember such a powerful experience that I had just a few years ago when I invested in one of my coaches. And I say invested in my coach. I was really investing in me, and I was enrolling that coach to help me. Her name is Jody Moore. She's a brilliant coach and a dear friend of mine. And I remember going to a retreat, and this was there were about 24 of us in this little inner circle group that she had put together at a retreat in Southern California. And as we were in this retreat, the whole format was hot seats. 24 of us an hour hot seat. Do the math. That's three full days at eight hours a day just to get through the hot seats. And that's all we were doing at this retreat. So it was my turn. And obviously, now that it's my turn, I really want to lean in and really get all the details out there so that I can get some brilliant coaching from this master coach. And so I'm telling the entire group what my situation was. I'm describing what's going on in my business and in my mind and all the things. Right? And I get to the point where I'm kind of wrapping it up so that I can get the feedback. I can get the coaching. And as I came to a pause in my description, I remember Jody standing over there in the side of the room, and she's kind of got she's kinda got her hand up to her chin a little bit, and I can see that she's thinking a little bit. And she simply responds with this, well, that's a thought. And it tipped me over a little bit at first. I was like, what wait. What do you mean? That's a thought. I've just spilled the beans about everything that's going on in my world. And I thought I was telling her what my circumstances were. She expertly redirected me to see an assumption that I had made that I didn't even realize I had made. I was assuming that what I was saying was what my circumstances were. She called to my attention that I was explaining my thoughts about those circumstances. There's a big difference. Blind spots are called blind spots for a reason. Jody challenged my assumption that I didn't even realize I was making, and it made a huge difference for me because awareness precedes choice. With competent coaching, you can see possibilities that are difficult to see or even impossible to see from your current position. The observer cannot be the observed at the same time because we're locked inside of the mechanism that's doing the observing. So I I want to make a disclaimer here too because I know a lot of coaches. I've trained a lot of coaches. I've had a lot of coaches. The coach does not necessarily know your life better than you do. I I don't think they could. The coach has something you cannot give yourself, and that's an outside perspective. So I would invite you at this point in the conversation, just consider where in your life right now might you be too close to a problem or a dynamic to really see it clearly. Just think about that for a moment. I bet there are times and places where you're you're feeling stuck. And usually feeling stuck is an indicator that we might be too close to see it. You don't hire a coach because they have all of the answers. They don't. Sometimes you simply make that investment because they can see the questions that you can't see. And they don't need to give us the answers. I think we find our answers when we become more aware of the processes that our mind is going through in the first place. And that leads me to the second point that I wanted to make today about coaching. Information is free, and information is not transformation. Knowing better doesn't automatically mean that we do better. So we can read the books or listen to the podcast, watch the videos, attend the master class. We can do our daily meditations and we can have these wonderful breakthroughs that happen and still go right back to our familiar patterns. You've probably heard me talk recently, especially about breakthrough learning versus transformational learning. Breakthrough is all about the lights going on. I see something I didn't see before. It's that moment. Transformational learning would be described more like, okay. I've practiced this enough that it's starting to change who I am and how I show up. I remember when I was learning how to play the piano. And at first, just tracking where are the keys and how do I put my fingers on these piano keys. And after a lot of practice, I simply sit down at the bench and my hands know where to go. And I don't have to think through where is this note. I simply see it on the pages. I'm reading the music and the programming, the neural pathways kick in, and it's almost automatic. Breakthrough is exciting. Transformation, usually kind of repetitive, sometimes boring. It doesn't have to be miserable. I'm not saying that. But it's kind of like practicing the piano. It's not the fun part. Insight has to become practice in order to change our neural pathways. Practice has to become a pattern, and patterns eventually become part of who we are. We've developed a new platform called Positives. And that's where you get the daily, weekly, monthly practices that support a process of transformational learning. We're trying to provide both, actually, breakthrough and transformation. One of the big frustrations I've had as a psychologist is that I I'm pretty good at helping to turn on the lights. You know, I'll speak at a conference. I'll do a training for a company. I see the lights go on in the eyes of the people that I'm speaking to or training. And then they go right back to whatever their patterns were. Whatever their practiced programmed patterns are. That's default. And that's a little frustrating as a psychologist because I feel like I really wanna help people change their lives in positive, powerful, upgrading ways. Lives in relationships. And I've learned that it has to come from continued practice. And that's what we've built over our positives. I'll mention this again in a minute, but I want you to be able to sample that. And if you'll go over to live on purposeradio.com/positives, that's plural, positives, you'll see what we're doing at positives. There's even a free sample there that you can grab hold of if you want to check it out. It's changing the game. There's another piece of this that we often miss. Add another human. Change happens in relationship. And there's something fundamentally different about saying, okay, I'm going to work on this versus I'm going to work on this and another person knows that I'm working on it. Do you feel the difference there? Having an accountability partner, when we introduce relationship and accountability, it creates an entirely different dynamic. I remember working with some clients, especially early in my career, and they would often often make promises to themselves. You've done this. I've done this. Where we make a promise to ourselves and then we kinda we kinda leave the back door just cracked open just a touch, right, in case we decide we're gonna bail on this. Whatever that looks like, we leave a little escape hatch. And I think having an accountability partner, and especially one who is a coach, provides someone who knows what we're trying to create and then gives us regular opportunities to evaluate what's working. They get accountability for our commitments. If I tell my coach I'm going to do something, it's it's kinda like closing that back door that I normally would have escaped through. And it gives me an energetic boost, an encouragement, a course correction if I get off track, celebration and acknowledgement when there's progress made. And it's a relationship that's centered specifically around your growth. When I said earlier that I hired Jody Moore and I said that she's a friend, she is. But she's a very specific kind of friend because the relationship I had in that coaching environment was centered specifically around my growth and development. How selfish. Right? One of my other coaches, this is, I think it was Michelle Villalobos I was talking to about the difference between real friends and deal friends. And they're both friends, but there's a different quality to it. And I felt completely justified in being very selfish in that relationship and focusing specifically on my growth because I was paying her. I I'm not saying that deal friends aren't real friends. I'm saying that there's a different role that they fill. And my coaches have been my deal friends. I still hold them very near and dear to my heart, but there's a difference there because the objective is all about my growth. And I'm not doing it for a selfish purpose because I feel a responsibility to you, to to my dear listener here at Live on Purpose Radio, to the people that I coach, to the subscribers that I have on YouTube, to all of the people who are counting on me to help them with their personal growth. If you've been through any of my coach training, you know I always say coaches need coaches. And it's not just coaches. I I think it's probably more important for coaches. Accountability is so powerful. It's one of the five core principles that we teach children in my nonprofit, NOVA principles. We teach this principle because accountability for our own actions. When we can say I I own my thoughts, my feelings, and my actions. I own those and take responsibility for that. That's what accountability is all about. So the coach or accountability partner is not there to make sure that you behave. The commitment is still yours. The coach helps you stay connected to what you said matters to you. I love the way my daughter described this. She said, commitment true commitment is doing what you said you'd do when the feeling has already passed that you had when you said you'd do it. So think about something meaningful that you've accomplished in your life. Just reflect on that for a minute. Was there another human being somewhere in that process? A a teacher, a mentor, a coach, a partner, a friend, a leader, Someone who helped you become more than you might have become on your own. So a coach gives us perspective because they can see from outside of the box. There's another human who's invested in our growth and adds accountability. Helps us to translate that intention that we had into consistent action. And that increases the likelihood that breakthrough learning can become transformational learning. So as you think this through somewhere in your life right now, you might be sitting inside of a box trying really hard to figure out how to get out. Maybe you don't need to try harder. Maybe you don't need another book, another podcast, another breakthrough moment when the lights go on. Maybe the instructions you need are already there. They're just printed on the outside of your box. And sometimes we need another human standing outside of the box who can read the instructions to us. Come over to see what we're doing at Positives. We have private coaching available, but we also have group coaching and the daily, weekly, monthly positives. This is a culmination of my life's work and I am so excited to share it with you. There are a lot of free things that can help to introduce you to it. Just go over to Live On Purpose Radio, the name of this podcast, liveonpurposeradio.com/positives. That's plural, positives. And you'll see what we've put together there. I am really excited about that because we are addressing both kinds of learning, breakthrough and transformation. And there's coaching available. In fact, we're seeing some really powerful things already just in the first few months of this platform being opened as people are keeping their promises to themselves and their commitments that they've told themselves that they would make. And it's not just about you. It's about all of the people that you can lift and elevate and bless because you showed up in the powerful way that only you can. Did you get what you came for? I hope you did. It's time now to go apply what we've learned and live on purpose. Did you get what you came for? Give yourself the gift of taking real action on what you realized today. Please share this episode with someone you know would value it, and leave us a rating too. It's time now to live on purpose.