Choice Point To Overcome Pornography

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Hey, everybody, and welcome to another beautiful mastery Monday here on the Self

Mastery podcast. I'm your host, Zach Spafford.

Listen, I got something for you guys. I'm here to help you overcome

pornography. You guys know that right? I just want to let you know that there's

some stuff that's gonna change.

That's all. I'm not going to tell you what it is right now. But I'm going to

tell you something a little bit later in this podcast.

But these last few weeks have been a great deep dive into how you can really begin to

move past pornography by not just focusing on pornography, but focusing on how

you can become the person you want to be.

By the way, I just want to thank all of you who have written in and said how

much this has helped you. That's kind of awesome, actually, that you guys are

like, hey, you know what, this changed my life. So thank you for sending that

in to me. If you have a second, just take a moment and write a review that

helps people find us and all of this great content, more than anything else you

could do. You know, share it, obviously, with as many people as you can, but

writing reviews helps people find this. So please do that.

Many of you know that I am all about an evidence based approach to Overcoming Pornography.

You've probably listened to my episode about how pornography is not an addiction and the book by Dr. Lance Dodes, you may know Cam Staley, who is a PhD researcher out of the University of Idaho, a really great guy, quite like him.

You are probably thinking, okay, yes, we know that you like evidence. So not

only do I have the evidence from my own journey that I've shared with you, one

of the components of my coaching to Overcoming Pornography is based in

Acceptance and Commitment coaching, I call it ACC, which comes from Acceptance

and Commitment Therapy. Now, I'm not a therapist, but I have studied the

techniques and processes and systems that have helped 1000s of men and women

and their pornography struggle.

And I've done it myself, like, this is not pie in the sky. This is not, hey, you know what, let me tell you a theory, and I will help you figure it out. That's not it. This is real life. This is my journey. You are like, Yeah, I need somebody who's been there.

You know, I always talk about I have an MBA, and I've been in business for a long time,

before I became a coach, I, I was an insurance and I loved it. And I did some

other things that add some great, cool stuff. And I always think about, who's

the guy that I would come to, who's the person that I would go to, if I needed

help running my business. I would not even go to a Yale or a Harvard School

Business School professor, I would go to a guy who's actually lived the

process.

Some of you guys know Gary Vee, cool guy, I listen to his stuff, I don't listen

to a guy who works for Harvard. I don't, because I want to know what it looks

like to actually be in the trenches. And that's why I use ACC. And the coaching

that I do is based in both my real life experience and acceptance and

commitment, coaching. And then Acceptance and Commitment coaching, there's a

principle called the choice point. It is one of the key principles of ACC that

I use in the membership, which has been closed now to members to new members

for a little bit, a little while.

But I will tell you this, this month, I'm launching a new platform that will make it so

you can download a single app and get all the great content on your phone. So

I'm looking forward to it. And when it's ready, I will open up the membership

to anybody who wants to join. So keep an eye out for that.

When I talk about choice point, though, I want to go back to choice point because that's

really the point of what we're talking about. I want you to imagine a narrow,

long road that you're traveling, you're just out there in the woods. And I

always picture a Midwest road in the fall. So it's beautiful. It's cool, it's

damp, the leaves are falling. There's all these colors. That's the road that I

imagined your road might be totally different use yours might be in the desert.

And you probably know the the poem by Robert Frost, two roads diverged in a wood and I,

I took the one less traveled by and that has made all the difference. So I want

you to imagine you're standing there at that same crossroad that that Robert

Frost talks about. And only instead of figuring out which one is the less

traveled road, you're going to apply a different calculus you're going to apply

a different set of rules.

If you recall back to October of last year, I did two episodes, one called

Overcoming pornography by choosing values instead of goals and the following one,

the one right after that so is episode like 108 and 109, Overcoming Pornography

by practicing the values we have. If you go back to those after you listen to

this, to help determine you what your values are, they will be excellent resources

for the choice point exercise that we're about to discuss.

Most of us are living a life in a way that we simply react to a lot of what's going on

around us. It's just reactions, we don't often think about why we do the things

we do. And we often simply make decisions, without giving them much thought,

this is a really, it's some is pretty normal. It's a habitual way of making

choices. It's super normal, it's super helpful, actually. Because if we don't

do this, we would actually have enormous mental and decision fatigue by about 9

am every single day. So every day would just be like, too tired to make any other

decisions.

But when it comes to pornography, one of the key elements of most people's habitual use is

found in this same idea. We've made the decision so many times before that

we've lowered what I like to call the consent threshold or the threshold that

we have to consent to making the decision. And our decision is really made in a

pretty automatic way.

So the choice point is a visualization of the crossroads that we come to every

time we encounter the discomfort that we want to avoid, that often leads to

pornography viewing. Using the choice point, and a little bit of a pause, each

of us can make decisions that more fully aligned with our values.

Now, you're like, What? Is this the only thing I need to know? No, this is not a silver

bullet, you're not likely to automatically stop viewing pornography because you

visualize this imaginary fork in the road. But when this is coupled together

with a number of the other skills, I teach in the membership, and with my

individual coaching clients, it can be a useful tool in your skill set.

So here we are at this crossroads. And the two roads are ahead of you. And to your left,

we have what we call away moves, or the away road. And to your right, we have

toward move or the toward road. Away moves are traveling down a path that takes

you away from your values. And the toward Road, as you may have guessed takes

you towards your values. You can see now I'm sure as you listen to this, you're

like, oh, yeah, of course, I need to know what my values are. Because if you

don't, then how do you know which direction to move.

So still just imagining, right, we're standing there, we take a pause, maybe 10 deep

breaths, maybe we just step back mentally, from our brain from what our brain

is telling us. And we just start observing where we are, and what choices we're

gonna make. And then I want you to imagine taking the away road, I want you to

see what's down there and how it ends. And how you feel when you've completed

that journey and what that actually looks like at the end. Now, I want you to

imagine taking the toward Road, what's down there? How does this end? How do

you feel when you've completed that journey?

And that's, it's as simple as that. It's a simple, simple process, if you are willing to

try it, take some time right now and see how it works. So you know, if you've

got a small decision in your life you want to make right now, it's a perfect

little, little experiment, we'll run together. And by the way, you might need

to do this, like 92 and a half times before you get any good at it. So just

don't, don't be discouraged.

But the key here is to try it, get used to it in your daily life and use it to be the gatekeeper for some of those automatic decisions that are not currently in line with your values. Again, it's not gonna be a silver bullet. But the more you try it, the more likely it is to work. And the more likely you are to align your actions with the values that you really love.

I love you guys, you know, keep going. If you're out there, and you're listening to this,

you know, whatever, choice point… that's fine. Just keep going, keep listening,

keep doing the things that I teach you just try them out. And one day they will

work and the better you get at all of them. So like get good at one at a time,

tiny little bits. And in the long run, you're going to aggregate do what I call

aggregation of marginal gains, right? You've probably heard that term. And

you're going to get so good that you're going to be way better than you are

now.

I've been where you are. And I know how to get you from where you are now to the place

where you want to be. So let my experience guide you. Alright, my friends, I'll

talk to you next week. Bye.