Learning to Thrive Beyond Pornography use was the greatest challenge of our life and marriage. It had rocked my self confidence, tainted all of the most important experiences of my life and become the most impossible challenge I had as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

With this podcast or at https://www.zachspafford.com you'll learn about the struggle, how to overcome pornography use, and where to find additional resources to begin to thrive beyond pornography with your spouse.

At some point I took a step away from all the 12 step meetings and councilors and started to figure out my own brain, to look at my issue as something that I had the answer to and I was going to figure it out. Here I share those lessons and give you the power to start your own journey free. Whether you struggle with unwanted pornography use or are the spouse or partner, whether you feel stuck or just don't know where to start, here I will teach you principles, tools and skills that you can use today to change how you think and, in the end, what you do.

You'll hear interviews with my spouse, with experts on human sexuality and with former and current pornography users on how you can overcome your own struggle with addictive behavior.

The Thrive Beyond Pornography podcast will bring new perspective to your struggle and keep you coming back to improve all aspects of your life. (formerly, The Self Mastery Podcast: Overcome Pornography Forever)

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Zach Spafford: I'm Zach. And I'm Darcy. We're an LDS couple who struggled with unwanted pornography in our marriage for many years. What was once our greatest struggle and something we thought would destroy us, has become our greatest blessing in trying. Our hope is that as you listen to our podcast each week, you'll be filled with hope and healing and realize that you too can thrive beyond pornography and create the marriage you have always desired.

Welcome to Thrive Beyond Pornography. We're so glad you're here and we believe in you.

Hey everybody, and welcome to Thrive Beyond Pornography. I'm your host. Zach Spafford and today we are gonna talk about the art of motivation. And I often talk about how when it's time to eliminate pornography from your life, we do it without motivation and willpower. And what I mean by that is you don't have to have.

An immense amount of motivation in a moment where your brain is offering you porn to eliminate a pornography struggle. Because what happens is that over time, motivation often. Fades. Motivation and willpower, they will fade over time every time. And the reason for that is that they are designed as finite resources for finite external problems.

That's what they're designed for. They're there to help you get away from something that's chasing you. They are there to help you deal with something that is. Outside of you, something that might kill you or something that you have to accomplish in a very short period of time by dealing with an externality, like getting food or something like that.

Okay, so that's where motivation and willpower have their. Highest value. Where they lose value is in the long-term internal difficulties that we deal with. And so what I'm talking about here is not motivation on an external scale. What I'm talking about here is the art of motivation on an internal scale, discovering sustainable and enjoyable ways to achieve our goals.

Motivation is a powerful force that often can help us propel ourselves toward our goals and aspirations. It plays a crucial role in our personal and professional lives. It drives us to take action and achieve meaningful outcomes. However, the way we motivate ourselves can greatly impact our experience and results in this conversation.

I just wanna explore. The different strategies that we have for engaging the motivation that we want to engage with in our lives. So the motivation that we're talking about here is who do I want to be essentially, and I wanna highlight some of the different approaches that are more consistent and sustainable and enjoyable over time.

By changing our mindset and adopting powerful narratives, we can transform our motivation and achieve success with ease. And fulfillment. And it doesn't have to be, and when I say ease, what I mean is make it into a habitual way of dealing with ourselves. A lot of times what we think about motivation and willpower is I gotta like dredge up more of this in a moment when things go bad, but.

When I talk about ease, what I talk, what I really mean is how do I habituate this? How do I turn this into a habitual way of thinking about this particular problem or dealing with my brain or offering myself encouragement, that sort of thing. So one of the biggest pitfalls of traditional motivational strategies is that they often rely on a belief that we are deficient in certain areas of our lives.

I'm not enough. When it comes to pornography, I'm not worthy because I continue to view pornography, or I have viewed pornography in the past. This mindset manifests as feelings of being behind not enough unworthiness. We often feel pressured to then prove ourselves or accelerate our progress.

Be there already, or even constantly compare ourselves to others like, so-and-so doesn't have this problem, or I wish I didn't have this problem, or, I should already be there because I'm X years, X number of years old. While these ideas why these ways of talking to ourselves, the they start, so basically they're negative.

They can sometimes provide temporary bursts of motivation. I don't know if you ever got yelled at by your parents when they were ticked off that you hadn't cleaned your room, they often lead to this cycle of hustle. And then burnout and the focus becomes more on catching up or meeting external expectations rather than finding joy and fulfillment in the process.

And for my own life experience. If my parents were like mad, they're like, you need to clean your room. And they yelled at me to get it done, I would get it done, but then it would fall into disrepair. It was only when I was like, what do I want my room to look like? Who do I want to be?

How do I want to live my life personally? That I started to clean up my room and make myself the kind of person who had a clean space all by myself, right? And I didn't need their external motivation. I had an internal motivating factor that allowed me to make those shifts on my own. So instead of.

Perpetuating this narrative of deficiency and negativity. We can cultivate a mindset of empowerment and sufficiency. Like, this is how I like it and this is who I wanna be. So when it comes to pornography, the shift begins with questioning the validity of these self-imposed stories. Like, what if I was never truly behind?

What if my worthiness and success were not tied to somebody else's measures or timelines, somebody else's. Idea of who I was supposed to be. Recognizing that these notions are often self-imposed and subjective, can open you up to this world of possibilities for sustainable motivation, internal motivation, the kind of motivation that allows you to be the person that you want to be without necessarily.

Having to be perfect or having arrived yet, but being on your way. And that's a huge difference in a huge way, a huge shift in the way that we think about it. Motivating ourselves without relying on feelings of deficiency is not only possible, but it's also more effective in achieving long-term success.

By cultivating positive emotions and mindsets, then we can actually tap into an endless source of motivation us. This person that we like being this person that we desire to perpetuate internally. So here's some empowering ideas, emotions, mindsets, that you can consider when you think about, well, how do I quit porn from an internal process and internal compass of motivation, meaning how do I quit porn by.

Moving towards my values rather than being negative or upset or frustrated by who I'm not. So first one is love and enthusiasm. When you find joy and passion in what you're doing, by connecting with the love and enthusiasm that you have for your goal, that j genuine excitement can drive you forward.

Take the work that Darcy and I do. As coaches to help people quit porn. We love talking about this subject. We love solving this problem with people. We love making it a part of our day. We actually, the other night, Amber and Josh, Amber just happened to come to the pool where my wife and I were, and we had a great conversation.

Amber and Josh actually live in Texas, but. Very, very small world. Amber's mom lives across the street from my parents, and we were both at the pool at the same time, and I looked at her and of course, We don't, I don't stand up and go, Hey Amber, it's good to see you Levitt. Let's talk about how you know, cuz you know, confidentiality.

I don't want to, I don't want people to feel like they can't see me in public and say hi. So I basically pretend that I don't know her and I'm like, oh, hi. Nice to meet you. And then of course she's like, it's fine. We're good, and we got into a great conversation. But our love and enthusiasm for this conversation, for this subject helps us, helps propel us to greater and greater connection and greater and greater joy in being porn free in our lives.

Number two is compassion and authenticity. I don't know anybody who would treat their friends the way that they treat themselves when it comes to porn. Too often when it comes to pornography, people beat themselves up. I'm not enough. I can't do this. I've, I've screwed up too much. I'm a bad apple, whatever it is, and we are mean to ourselves.

And if you can just start to treat yourself the way that you might treat your little brother or your little sister or your best friend when they struggle with pornography, that is going to propel a motivation within you that I don't think you can match outside. Like recognizing that imperfections are part of the journey.

And that growth comes from self-acceptance. That is a huge, huge part of all of the work that you need to do to eliminate pornography. Having that self-compassion, understanding that you are on a journey, recognizing that there will be missteps along the way, allowing for that to exist. If I think about the atonement of Jesus Christ, that's exactly why that exists, because he knew there were gonna be perfection, imperfections in the journey.

And that growth comes through self-acceptance, not acceptance, that we are not being the person that we want to be, but accepting where we are as we journey towards the person we want to be. That's the difference. Next idea that I love to explore in terms of cultivating positive emotions and mindsets is curiosity and grit, I don't know any.

So I know for me, when I get into a project and I'm like super curious about how to deal with a particular problem and resolve it with the most effective means, and I get buried deep into it, I'm super curious and I'm just grinding away for the fun of grinding away. Now, that doesn't maybe necessarily sound fun when it comes to pornography, but fostering a sense of curiosity.

That fuels your desire to explore and learn and overcome challenges is a great way to start thinking about your pornography problem. Like, what's going on for me? Why is this happening? What is it about pornography that allows me to turn away from my values in a moment and then come back to them afterward and go, man, I should have, I shouldn't have done that.

Combining this with grit and perseverance and resilience to stay committed to your goals allows you to see, This thing to the end when you're curious and you're. Willing to grind it out, take that grit and just keep pounding, keep working, keep trying, keep thinking about it differently. Learn new ways of dealing with the problem.

Learning new techniques, new processes, new systems. All of a sudden that 1% improvement every single day gets you to a place where. Holy cow. You're so much better than the person that you were before. You may not be to where you want to be automatically. You may not get there in one day, but you certainly will get there eventually if you'll stay curious and you'll stay gritty.

Keep grinding. Okay, next one is gratitude and abundance. Now, this is, this probably sounds dumb, but the truth is, The more grateful we are, the more likely we are to have a sense of ourselves that is happy. Fulfilled and capable. So when you cultivate an attitude of gratitude for what you have and the progress you've made, that helps you shift your focus away from any perceived deficiencies that you have.

And instead, you appreciate the B, the abundance in your life, the good things in your life, and you're able to make those things bigger in your life. And the bigger that the good things are in your life, the more you're able to focus on them and the less your brain is saying, Hey, let's escape. Let's run away.

Let's get rid of, the stress or the frustration or whatever. It's, these are ways that your brain can be motivated without it feeling like a chore. Okay, last one. Purposefulness and trust. This is about aligning your actions with a clear sense of purpose and trust in your abilities to navigate the path forward toward your goals.

When I, so one of the things that I believe about myself is that I can fix anything if I've got enough YouTube, the right tools and the will to fix a particular thing. I trust myself that I can do that, whether that's a house problem, whether that's a car problem, no matter what it is. I feel like I have the ability to fix anything if I have purpose behind fixing that thing, meaning, early on in our marriage.

I had to take care of all our cars myself. I didn't have the luxury of being able to pay a mechanic, so the purpose was getting to work and taking care of my family, and the trust that I had in myself was that I could do it if I tried and I had the right tools. That was huge. And I was able to solve so many problems when it comes to pornography.

There's purpose in that, right? The purpose is I want to be the the person that I tell myself and my wife and the people around me that I am. I want to be the person that I represent to other people. I wanna be that good guy and I trust myself that I can figure this out. That's a huge motivator. I feel motivated to keep going even when it's tough, even when it stinks, even when it's harder than I thought it would be, even when it's not going the way that I thought it should.

Even when I gotta ask somebody for help, it's one of those things that I know if I've got a, an important purpose and I trust in myself that I can achieve that purpose. I. Then I can keep going. I can navigate that path no matter what. And by trusting yourself in the process, you create a foundation of self-belief and confidence.

So many of the people that I work with, they are the struggle is with self-confidence. They struggle being confident. They struggle because they have told themselves so many times, oh, this is the last time. And then what happens? They turn back to pornography and so their confidence is waning because they don't trust themselves to be the person that they say they will because they have proved to themselves over many years that they can't do that well.

Change that. Start by believing that you can resolve this. Maybe it won't be today, but it can happen, and you have the purpose to do it. That's gonna give you that self-confidence. That's gonna help build on the confidence that you have. That's gonna build a greater self-confidence than maybe you would've had otherwise.

And you're gonna start to see change. So those are the five key ways that you can cultivate positive emotions and mindsets so that you're no longer. Falling into the traditional pitfalls of motivational strategies, right? It's love and enthusiasm, self-compassion and authenticity, curiosity and grit, gratitude and abundance, and then purposefulness and trust.

And instead of constantly striving for close calls or temporary victories, consider adopting a decisive victory mentality, meaning, Emphasize the clear and unequivocal nature of the win convey a sense of dominance and achievement. Like be real like. This is better than it was, and that's a clear victory.

And I won. I only watched porn for 10 minutes instead of 30. That's a clear win I won because this signifies that you've not just met your goal, but you've exceeded them with confidence and authority, and becoming the dominant force that consistently overpowers a challenge can be exciting. And fulfilling.

And part of that means redefining what it looks like to be successful. A lot of the guys, so the example I used earlier was, this is the last time, so what if instead of, this is the last time we redefined success as I am going to view pornography at least one minute less than the last time that I viewed it.

That is success. Redefining that success as a sustainable progress that aligns with our values and brings you joy. That's a winning strategy. That's a winning motivator. Focusing on the intrinsic rewards of personal growth and fulfillment and the positive impact that you create rather than solely on.

The achievement of never viewing pornography again, or the external validation of someone saying, oh, you're, on your way, you're getting better. It's getting internal, motivating yourself with intrinsic values, motivating yourself with those key components that you don't have to look outside for and that are achievable sustainably.

So that it's, so you go back to, okay, well what's, what does that mean in terms of automatic, that habit? Go back to that habit idea that I mentioned at the beginning. I have a habit of being gracious to myself and abundant, right? Meaning I think of m the things that I'm doing as I'm getting better. I'm grateful that I'm better than I was and I can keep getting better because I have an abundance of capacity to achieve this, or purposefulness and trust.

Like I look at my purposeful purpose and I trust that I can achieve it, and I get in the habit of having a purpose and trusting myself, or self-compassion and authenticity. I get into a habit of being compassionate to myself, being kind, one of the techniques that I teach people, I. Is nab, a key component of that technique is be kind.

That's be kind to yourself. So self-compassion and being authentic. Naming the problem instead of ma catastrophizing it, right? One of the things that I see too many people do is they say, oh, well, I'm unworthy because I viewed pornography for five minutes. But instead, what we do is we go, I viewed sexual images for five minutes in order to do X, Y, or Z in my life.

That doesn't make me unworthy necessarily, but it doesn't align with who I want to be. Now we've really named the problem instead of catastrophizing it into this lump thing, and when we name the problem, we can actually resolve it. But what I want you to understand from this entire conversation is that motivation is not solely about pushing ourselves to meet those external expectations or catch up with arbitrary measures of success.

It's about finding joy, fulfillment, and a sustainable progress on the path towards your goal. By shifting our mindset from deficiency to empowerment, cultivating positive emotions and mindsets, and then embracing sustainable progress, we then unlock the true power of motivation, which is a consistent.

Level set of who we feel like we are. So embark on that journey of motivation. Start working on any one of these. Start creating a habit of ha around any one of these. In order to create that internal motivation, and you will start to see progress. By the way, that will not be all at once today, but the more you practice each of these ideas, love, enthusiasm, self-compassion and authenticity, curiosity and grit, gratitude and abundance, purposefulness and trust, the more likely it is that you will make them habitual and then they will be automatic in your life.

All right, my friends, I love you guys. I will talk to you next week.