Lesson's From "The Gap and The Gain"

I want to share some of the wisdom from that book."The Gap and The Gain" by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy. Listen in if you want to change the way you look at progress and achieving goals. 

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Transcript

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I'm Jamal and Stefan.

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And this is Want2Want it episode number 85, Lessons from the Gap and the Gain.

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Welcome to want to want it a podcast for women of the church of Jesus Christ of latter day saints who are ready to ignite not only their sexual desire, but all of their desires to create a more fulfilling life and marriage. I'm jamielynn Stephan. I'm a certified life coach, a wife, and a mother of seven children. I'm excited to share my personal journey to desire with you and teach you how to desire more as well

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Hello, everybody. Welcome to the podcast today. We are finished wedding weekend at our house. We are not cleaned up from wedding weekend yet, but the wedding went fantastic. The weather was perfect. Everything worked out. I'm exhausted, but it was super fun, actually. And like one of my sisters said, we've had a lot of COVID weddings in our family, some kind of on the tail end of COVID, and so it was nice to be able to have kind of something that felt normal again. But it was a lot of fun, a lot of work, good times had by all. So Today I want to share some of the wisdom and insights and just a bunch of quotes and some commentary, I guess for me, from the book called The Gap and the Gain. And it's a book that was written by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy. Well, I guess really Benjamin Hardy wrote the book. It's Dan Sullivan's teachings, so there's some of his quotes in it, but Benjamin Hardy put the book together, really, and did most of the writing for it. Anyways, I read this book over a year ago, but today I thought it would be a really good reminder for me to go through some of it and see what I had underlined and see some of the comments that I made to Remind me of what I'd learned then and Maybe things that I had forgotten now. So because I was doing that, I thought it would be great to share a little bit of it with you. So to start, let me use Dan Sullivan's words to explain to you what the gap is and what the gain is. Okay, so here's what he says. Your future growth and progress are now based in your understanding about the difference between the two ways in which you can measure yourself. Against an ideal, which puts you in what I call the gap, and against your starting point, which puts you in the gain, appreciating all that you've accomplished. Okay, so let me explain that a little differently, okay? Let's say that you have a goal to run 10 kilometers in one hour. That's the ideal. That's what you really want because right now you can't even run nonstop for 10 kilometers, and when you go out to do a 10 kilometer walk run, it takes you over 90 minutes to complete. So your ideal is to run 10 kilometers in an hour. So you start training. And about four weeks into your training, your friend asks you, how's your training going? How are you doing getting towards this goal of running 10 kilometers in an hour? Now, let's say that you're currently mostly running your 10 kilometers in about an hour and 20 minutes. So if you are what Dan Sullivan calls being in the gap, if you're in the gap, you're going to compare where you are now to where you want to be or to that ideal. So you may say, well, I'm still running super slow actually, and I still have to cut 20 minutes off of my time. So you're comparing where you are now to the ideal that you haven't yet achieved, and it really doesn't feel that good. You're focused on the gap between where you are and where you want to be. But if you decided that you wanted to be in the gain, you would focus more on here's where I started and here's where I am now. So in this case, you would tell your friend, Well, I'm actually running the entire 10 kilometers now, and I've cut 10 minutes off of my time. This is focusing on what you've gained. You know you're not to your ideal yet, but you're celebrating and appreciating all that you've accomplished so far. Even the fact that you're further ahead than you would have been had you never started. Okay, so when Dan Sullivan talks about the two ways that we can measure ourself, right, he says, you can measure yourself against the ideal, which puts you in the gap, or you can measure yourself against the starting point, which puts you in the gain, because it's appreciating how far you've come from where you started. So when we live in the gap, when we live always comparing where we are to the ideal, then any form of progress actually feels like a letdown. Right? Like I'm not there yet. But when we live in the gain, we measure ourselves backwards against where we were before. And so we're focused on what we have actually done and accomplished. This puts us into a frame of mind that's more positive. We have more gratitude and appreciation. We have more hope. It's more encouraging. It gives us momentum. I really like to hike, but when I hike, I can get really kind of stuck looking forward the whole time, and sometimes, especially when the peak is not in sight, it can feel kind of discouraging, like we still have so far to go, so I do love it when I can take a break and look back, because sometimes if the trees are sparse, or the elevation is high enough, I can see down to where I began and I always can think like, wow, look how far I've already come. That's the idea of living in the gain. It's comparing myself to where I started instead of some ideal that sometimes is totally unachievable. Right? Now, you all know that I am really into choosing your thoughts deliberately, and that's really what the gap and the gain is all about. It's about choosing to see what has been gained and make that more of the focus than what gap still needs to be crossed. Now, it's not because you have to ignore the gap. I think it's okay to say, I've come this far and I still want to reach higher and I'm still going to go for it. But it's so much easier to cope with the gap when you live your life more focused on the gain. By looking back on a hike and seeing how far I've already come, it gives me the belief that I can get to the top. We need to see the gain to keep the faith that we can make it even closer to that ideal or to the goal that we've set. I think about the work I've done as a mom to become more patient. Now, the ideal that I think I have set up for myself is probably impossible, because that mother is perfect. And when I compare my current patience level with that saintly mother, I am very discouraged. I am really probably not doing good at all. But, when I compare it to myself ten years ago, I am really making marked improvements. And that helps me believe that I can still make more improvement going forward. So, living in the gain helps us think more positively and therefore we feel more positive emotions. And that is so much more helpful to keep us growing and improving, right? Like I've talked about before, you can't hate yourself better. Positive emotions are going to keep you moving forward way more effectively. When we live in the gap, we are needy. We are in scarcity, we lack, when we're in the gap, we're looking at the ideal as the thing that we need to make us happy or to feel worthy or complete or to believe that we're enough. it's a focus on something outside of us being the thing that we really, really need. So in the book it says, when you're in the gap, you're avoiding here while trying to get there. But you're never actually arriving there, okay? Because this is what happens to us when you're in the gap. There's no pleasure here, right? Because we're always thinking it's going to be better there. And often my coach will say, what if there isn't better than here? And when we're in the gain, it helps us appreciate here, and we can still want to go there, but we can see where we've come from and here feels better. When you're in the gain, you want something, but you don't need it. You can be happy right where you are. And so you can aim for your goals without this unhealthy attachment to them. Because achieving the goal doesn't hold your self esteem or your self worth. In the game, you have enough, you are enough, like, it's very abundant, like, you are just good as you are right now. But you can still want more, just for experience and for growth, or even just for fun, because you already are good enough right now. Being in the game is more self determining, because you're only ever comparing yourself against yourself, rather than when you're in the gap and you're comparing yourself to something outside of you. When you're living in the gain, you set goals that mean something to you. Not goals you think you need to have because everyone else is doing it or someone else expects it of you. As the book reminds us, social media is largely designed to put people into the gap. Now, I'm not sharing that to say that all social media is so toxic, but be on to it. If being in the gap is being in lack, Then it is a good marketing strategy to make people think they need more and need to be more. So if you're scrolling through social media and feeling badly about yourself because you're now comparing yourself to everyone else on there, you are in the gap in an instant. You can turn that around by focusing on all the good you've accomplished in your life and how far you've come and get yourself back into the gain. Benjamin Hardy says, Your happiness as a person is dependent on what you measure yourself against. And I think he's right. People always say that comparison is the thief of joy. I think that is true. Unless you're comparing yourself from where you started to where you are now. Another idea they talk about in The Gap and The Gain is the idea of mental subtraction. So, mental subtraction is thinking of the absence of the good things in your life. So, here's what the book says. Research shows that imagining the absence of a positive event in your life has a more powerful effect on you than simply looking back on that positive event. Okay, so, when you look back, maybe you look back at your wedding. You know, I think about my daughter's wedding this weekend and it was super, super fun, So she can look back and just like remember that, but if she was to think to herself, what would my life be like if I didn't have my wedding day, right? And the absence of that. Has a very powerful effect on us. Okay, it goes on to say Likewise imagining the absence of an important person in your life can be more powerful than simply appreciating the fact that they are in your life One study found that mentally subtracting a material possession you've previously enjoyed Increases your happiness with that item More than simply thinking back on when you purchased it So mental subtraction is taking a moment to imagine that you didn't have what you have right now. Like, what if you've never met your husband? What if you hadn't gone on that trip? What if you could no longer see, or hear? Benjamin Harding goes on to say... Being in the gain is appreciating everything in your life, including the progress you've made as a person. It's about measuring yourself against where you were before. It's about seeing everything in your life as a gain. By imagining that your achievements and progress never occurred, you can see how far you've actually come. So here's an example from my own life, which I've probably shared this before, but years ago, I wanted to start a daily exercise routine. I had struggled with it for so long. I was so, so inconsistent. And until someone introduced me to Beachbody's 10 Minute Trainer, I had a really hard time being consistent. So 10 Minute Trainer was a series of 5 or 6 10 minute workouts. 10 minutes. I could do that. I had time for 10 minutes, and no matter what, if I felt like I was dying, I think I could bear it for 10 minutes, and that was it. And, as luck would have it, there was a 10 minute yoga on the disc. That was my go to on really low energy days. So if I had a super bad night, or if I was just not feeling it, I would do the 10 minute yoga. So I started my 10 minute trainer and I did it five or six days a week very consistently. Now, admittedly, I was super embarrassed about my 10 minute trainer workout videos, because I always had the ideal in my head. And the idea was this person who loved to exercise and who wanted to work out for an hour a day, at least. So even though the 10 minute trainer was making a change to my body, I was always looking at it from the gap perspective. I was always looking at it compared to where I thought I needed to be. And so I had no pride in what I was accomplishing. And I. I often would tell myself it probably really wasn't making any difference. It was kind of a joke, right? Like you do 10 minutes of exercise a day. That's kind of a joke. Then one day after I'd been doing 10 minute trainer for over a year, my husband and I went on a hike in New Zealand and climbed Mount Doom. So any of you who are Lord of the Rings fans, know that the film was shot in New Zealand, and Mount Ruapehu was the volcano used in the film as Mount Doom. And I will tell you, that climb is no joke. And there comes a point where you are really just bear crawling up the mountain, and it was dang hard work. But, I beat my husband to the top. And I was shocked, and I actually think he was as well, because he was Always stronger and faster than me, but my legs could handle the burn longer than his could so I got to the top of the volcano first And suddenly, my 10 minute trainer slipped out of the gap and into the gain. Because I knew that my year or so of 10 minutes a day was the reason that I had made it to the top as fast as I did. And I knew that if I hadn't started that the year before, that that climb would have been way more torturous for me. And so when I mentally subtracted my 10 minute trainer and thought about what the climb would have been like without it, suddenly I was so grateful for it. I'm so grateful to me for sticking to it. I let a lot of the shame I had about doing only 10 minutes of exercise a day fade away because suddenly I saw how far I had come because of it and how far behind I would have been if I hadn't just started. And now, 11 years later, my exercise has evolved and changed and I've become mentally and physically stronger and I literally owe it to 10 Minute Trainer. And I'm so thankful that I had the opportunity to see how far I had come, even though I felt so far from the ideal, because it renewed my commitment to 10 minutes a day and created a habit of consistent exercise that has changed my relationship with exercise forever. Now, I know that we are humans, and so as humans we are never going to live 100 percent of our lives in the gain. Again, that's the ideal, but probably not completely realistic. But I think we can get closer to living our lives in the gain. One thing that they suggest in the book is to give yourself 5 minutes to sit in the gap, and then move on. So I remember when my daughter was on her mission and she sent a letter home, there had been an emergency transfer. So she had And this area that she was in and moved to a new area. So she had to leave her companion and this area that she loved so much. And she was so sad. And her mission president sat with her as she expressed her very, very deep disappointment. And then he said, Sister, you have one minute to be disappointed and to mourn your area. And your minute is up. And even though I think she was kind of shocked by how direct he was, she said it was so good for her. And I can see that. He was giving her permission to feel sad, and then telling her to move on. And that's what they suggest in the book. If you feel yourself in the gap, which you will, where disappointment or frustration or sadness are, set yourself a timer for five minutes and let yourself So really feel it, just sit in the gap and then after your five minutes are over, move yourself back into the game. Go back to watching for how far you've come, how things have worked out, how you're further ahead than you used to be. This is such a good practice because we get so And if we don't pull ourselves out, if we don't have that mission president saying time's up, we can stay there for a really long time. I just wanted to end this podcast with a few direct quotes that may not totally seem related, but that I just really loved in this book. So here we go. Number one, there's only one way to measure success. You measure success backward by looking at where you are now compared to where you were before. Number two. Writing what you are grateful for is very powerful. But perhaps even more powerful is writing down specific wins you had that day. Writing three wins from the day not only boosts your gratitude, but simultaneously boosts your confidence. Writing down three wins daily is one of the most effective ways to stay out of the gap. You will feel like you're always winning and making progress. It keeps you in a state of momentum and confidence. After you've written your three wins for the day, write down the three wins you'd like to accomplish the next day. But no more than three. This next quote is from Byron Katie. This is what they shared in the book. Life is simple. Everything happens for you, not to you. Everything happens at exactly the right moment, neither too soon nor too late. You don't have to like it. It's just easier if you do. Number four, you're either winning or learning. And I love that quote. I've heard that a lot since I took my coach training. You're either succeeding or you're learning. You're either winning or you're learning. And it is such a good quote. Even this past weekend with my daughter's wedding, I just sat down after it was all done and wrote out pages of things that I had learned. Now, maybe for some people they would be considered failures, but for me I just decided that these are just lessons learned and they're going to make things better and easier for the next wedding that I have to do. So you're either winning or learning. Number five. Successful people don't control events. They control their response to events. Okay, so good. We can't control the circumstances, right? But we get to choose our thought, we get to choose how we want to feel, how we want to act. Number six, being in the gain is not simply about seeing life on the bright side. Being in the gain is about taking every experience life throws at you and transforming it to serve you. Right? So even things that were hard, you can look at and say, this is happening for me. And how can I use it to transform me? Being in the gain empowers you to take an experience and be better, not bitter. I love that. Being in the Gain empowers you to take any experience and be better, not bitter. And the last quote is one from Ernest Hemingway. There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility is being superior to your former self. I hope you guys have enjoyed this little dive into The Gap and The Gain. It's certainly a worthwhile read if you have a book you're looking for that's a little more of the self help type. I hope you have a great week everybody. Bye.

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Thanks for listening today. If you like what you hear on the podcast, and you'd like to learn more, feel free to head over to my website. Jamilin Stephan coaching.com or find me on Instagram or Facebook at Jamileh. step in coaching.