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Episode 11

You are listening to the Self-Mastery Podcast, where we break through barriers holding you back from becoming who you wanna be, whether you're struggling with pornography, overeating, social media addiction, or just wanna get better at succeeding at life. This podcast is for you. Now, your host, Zach Spafford.

Hi everybody. Welcome to Mastery Monday on the Self-Mastery Podcast. I'm your host, Zach Spafford. Today we are going to talk about how my wife caught me looking at pornography. Darcy caught me. I think a lot of people have been there. I think a lot of pornography users have been there. I had been looking at inappropriate pictures on my company laptop when she was under the impression that everything with my pornography problem was behind us.

We were right in the middle of suffering through a really difficult miscarriage, and I was turning back to the old things that made me feel better when I was feeling less than good. She was furious. She threw that laptop down the stairs along with some laundry detergent and my dignity, and I was caught.

Being caught is a terrible place to be. There is not a thing that you can say that really makes it better. There is not a thing that you can do to make the other person trust you again in that moment. It is the point where you feel your absolute worst while someone stares at you feeling your absolute worst.

It's the dream where you find yourself standing in front of the entire class in your underwear, except you are in real life and feeling just as exposed and the other person hates you for it. This was the moment. That I broke my wife, the woman who had up to this point, seen me as an amazing husband. In fact, when she tells this story, she talks about me being the guy that our friends would tease because I was always up changing diapers and putting kids to bed and helping with the babies.

I think I am that guy in part because of my pornography problem. . I do those things. I help my wife as much as I possibly can because of my pornography problem. I think I am that guy because at least in some way, I'm trying to make up for being rotten and broken on the inside. So I make myself look awesome and helpful on the outside, at least to my wife, at least until I got caught.

What's terrible is that getting caught in this moment was not the moment that I can tell you. That I changed and I started getting better. This was not that moment. This was a moment that made me get worse. This was a moment that made me turn inward and become more sneaky. Made me stop allowing my wife to see the real me.

I stopped sharing Zach Stafford, vulnerable loving husband, and I started being a character in my own marriage. I became a guy that never failed at anything. I would mess up at work. I would not tell my wife. I would mess up with pornography. I would not tell my wife. I would get stressed. I would not tell my wife.

I would become depressed. I would not tell my wife. That moment was the moment I turned inward. I became a perfect guy outside as best I could so that she wouldn't have to deal with my weaknesses, because in my mind at least she couldn't handle it. . I don't have to tell you guys how that ended because you know how that ended.

She caught me again some other time and many times thereafter because I was not getting better and I'm not proud of it, but it happened. This is true for so many people that I work with, and the question that I often get from my clients and the question that I was asking myself was, what if my spouse is never gonna be ready to forgive me and be my partner again in every way?

And I'm gonna tell you that that doesn't matter. The truth is that you need to be honest with your spouse, not because your spouse deserves your honesty, although there is an argument to be made there. Telling the truth is about being the person you want to be building. The person you want to be is about being conscientious about behavior that brings us down and tears us down and tears down our sense of greatness that we have within us.

So I wanna talk about building you. That's the topic of today. I told this story because I didn't get that I was becoming someone at the time that I was living that story. . I wasn't just becoming a person, I was building someone, and in the end, the person that I eventually began to build was not the person that I wanted to be.

Right? There's a difference between building someone and becoming someone. Tony Robbins has a documentary on Netflix called, I'm Not Your Guru, and he really, he encapsulates this argument. Pretty well, and there's a lot of swearing. So if you're, sensitive to swearing, don't go watch this. But part of that, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna replace one word in this quote from Tony Robbins with the word dude, and then you guys can, piece that together if you want to.

But near the end, he says something that really struck me deeply. He says, I constructed Tony Robbins. , I created this dude standing here. When we create or construct or become the person we want to be, it isn't an accident because we have to do it deliberately. It is being done deliberately. Whether you're choosing, the bad stuff or you're choosing the good stuff, you're deliberately building someone.

So there's three things that you need to do to deliberately build the person that you want to be. These are very simple. They're very easy, and they're things that you'll be like, oh yeah, absolutely, I can do that. But unless you deliberately put these into play in your life, you're gonna drift along like water and just go to the long, lowest common denominator.

You're not going to build the person that you really want to be. You're just gonna become whatever it is that you become. The three things are determine the virtues that you want to have. Then the second thing you need to do is determine a strategy and tactics to gain that virtue. And then the third thing is execute on that strategy and those tactics every single day.

So Benjamin Franklin, early on in his life, determined 13 values, virtues that he wanted to have or emulate or be, one of them was temperance. One of them was silence, which is an interesting one because he, he wrote an awful lot. One was order, one was resolution, one was frugality Industry.

Sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, humility. Interestingly, he did not embody every single one of these virtues at all times. He was not always. , as virtuous as he might have, wanted everyone to think he was or as even as virtuous as he wanted to be, but he deliberately found these 13 virtues and said, this is who I want to become.

Started building towards that, and I will make an argument here that creating the person that you want to be starts in that place. , it's very hard to create the person you want to be if you don't have any idea who you want to be. And just like Tony Robbins building the dude that he is, you or your wife or your kids or whoever.

you're gonna have to choose, okay, do I just want to drift along and become whatever I am or do I want to build the human that I want to be? And that's why, that's partly why I named this podcast The Self Mastery Podcast, because the reality is that unless we begin to master self in a lot of.

Different areas. We are just going to be whatever it is that comes along, rather than being the person that we truly want to be, the person that we want to be proud of, the person that we want to, stand up and say, this is who I am and this is why I choose to be this person. So Ben Franklin set that up when I think he was about 17.

by the way, new Year's resolutions, those are coming up pretty soon here. Take a moment, sit down, write down the virtues that you want to have and embody and begin this process of becoming the person that you want to be over the course of the next year. Number two and number three, kind of sit together and to, so determine a strategy and tactics to gain that virtue and then execute on that strategy and those tactics in a measured and daily way.

So a lot of us have heard of the 10,000 hour rule. So I was listening to the Freakonomics podcast, where Dubner and Gladwell, they talk about this woman named Suzanne Bergman. Suzanne Bergman is a psychologist, a teacher, and a supervisor in Denmark. She wanted to become a famous singer. and quote. And so I'm gonna quote a little bit of the interview that she gave to these guys.

She says, I sh I should give it a go and see if it is actually possible to improve my singing, improve my voice. I felt that I wasn't really improving enough. So as she went on, she was, working and studying, working with a coach, she said, I felt I wasn't really improving enough because I didn't get that big sound that I wanted, and my coach would.

Be cheering for me. And he said, it's right about the corner. Just continue. And then I remember it was summer and suddenly I was singing and the sound actually came in. And in a song I was able to make the big sound in a song. And that was a huge jump for me and really motivating. So the next step was to stand in front of others in sync, and that was really tough as well.

But it was still a big step to move out of the practice room into the performing in front of others and creating music that I worked on for quite a while. And I think in that process I realized that the next step would be to start recording, end quote. Guess what happened next? She recorded an album.

Guess what happened next? That album was released and it got radio play. She built a strategy around practicing. She got a coach. Then she built a daily habit of working on getting the thing that she wanted to get. This is the same thing that we can do, whether it's honesty, whether it's you want to be better at pushups, you want to be better at working out, you wanna be better at losing weight, whatever it is that you're doing.

This same process works for us, building the person that we want to be. This podcast is particularly about character. But you can use it in any form of thing that you want to get better at, but it takes those three items. It takes determining the virtue or determining the thing that you want to achieve, setting out a strategy and tactics to gain that virtue and then executed on that strategy or tactics daily.

It's that Christmas time of year. We've just gone through Thanksgiving where we've thought a lot about how thankful we are for the things that we have in our lives. Don't stop doing that. Take it through Christmas and begin the process of setting out who you want to be. For many of you who are dealing with pornography, this is a key component of overcoming your pornography use, choosing to be the person that you want to be.

What's happening. So, my littlest baby just walked in the room, so if you hear her, , that's what's going on. My, my itty bitty two year old is in the room, so, As you think about who you want to be, begin to think about the process of becoming that person. If the thing that you want to do is become more honest, then maybe the tactics and the strategies that you put down are think twice before you say anything, or don't engage in conversations about things that you don't have any real knowledge on.

Be willing to say, I don't know, whatever that looks like. All right, guys. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. I love doing this podcast and I'm really grateful for everyone who listens. If you have a minute, please feel free to go to iTunes or Spotify or whatever way you listen to your podcast. Give us a review.

That's how other people find us. We'll talk to you guys next week. Have a great week, and say goodbye, Susan. Say bye-bye. No, you gotta say it out loud. Hi. Bye . Have a great week.

Hey, thanks for listening to the Self Mastery Podcast. Every day I get requests from people who are looking to change something in their life. If that is you, if you need help overcoming your addictive behavior like pornography use, sign up for free mini session at zachspafford.com/workwithme. That's zachspafford.com/workwithme.

I'll put a link in show notes for you to follow. Also, it would mean the world to me if you were to leave a review for us. Wherever you get your podcast, it'll go a long way to helping others find us. Thanks again.

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