How This Proven Method Can Help You Achieve Your New Year Goals with Joanna Grover [Episode #959]

This week’s topic:

In this episode of the Feel Good Podcast, Kimberly Snyder engages in a deep conversation with Joanna Grover, co-author of ‘The Choice Point.’ They explore the concept of choice points—split-second decisions that can lead us closer to our goals or derail us. Joanna discusses the power of imagery and sensory experiences in shaping behavior and overcoming challenges, emphasizing the importance of engaging multiple senses for effective change. The conversation also touches on real-life applications of these techniques, including overcoming instant gratification and visualizing future goals, such as relationships and personal achievements. In this conversation, Joanna discusses the transformative power of imagery techniques in personal growth, stress management, and improving relationships. She emphasizes the importance of starting small, overcoming limiting beliefs, and aligning one’s head and heart to navigate life more effectively. The discussion also highlights the potential of these techniques for children and their application in everyday situations, including stress and sleep management.

About Joanna Grover

Joanna Grover, LCSW, is an executive coach with two decades of experience as a cognitive behavioral therapist specializing in anxiety. She’s worked with the US Department of Commerce, Olympic athletes, and C-Suite executives, and she is a board-certified coach and member of the International Coaching Federation and the Harvard Institute of Coaching. Joanna lives in Miami. Her new book, co-authored with Jonathan Rhodes, is THE CHOICE POINT: The Scientifically Proven Method to Push Past Mental Walls and Achieve Your Goals, published earlier this year by Hachette.

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Guest Resources

Book: HE CHOICE POINT: The Scientifically Proven Method to Push Past Mental Walls and Achieve Your Goals

Episode Chapters

Chapters

00:00 Heart-Led Living and Wellness Introduction
01:52 Understanding Choice Points in Daily Life
06:03 The Power of Imagery in Overcoming Challenges
09:52 Sensory Experiences and Behavioral Change
14:03 Real-Life Applications of Imagery Techniques
17:55 Using Imagery for Instant Gratification and Long-Term Goals
22:04 Hydration and Wellness Practices
23:56 Visualizing Relationships and Future Goals
25:22 The Power of Imagery in Personal Growth
30:07 Overcoming Limiting Beliefs and Negative Thoughts
35:21 Applying Imagery Techniques in Everyday Life
39:52 Imagery for Stress Management and Sleep
42:54 Aligning Head and Heart for Better Living
46:38 The Transformative Impact of Imagery on Relationships

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Transcript:

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (00:00.238)
Welcome to the Feel Good Podcast, which is all about heart led living and wellness. When we awaken the power of our hearts and let that guide us through our daily choices and decisions, through our four cornerstones, food, body, emotional well-being and spiritual growth, we will experience the most incredible results and create more vitality, health, strength, peace.

abundance and love in our lives. I am your host, Kimberly Snyder, New York Times bestselling author, founder of Saluna, creator of the research-based Heart Aligned Meditation, wellness expert, nutritionist and international speaker. I am passionate about supporting you on your unique heart and wellness journey. Let’s get started.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (00:57.304)
I’m so excited to share my conversation with you today with Joanna Grover, who is the co-author of the book, The Choice Point, The Scientifically Proven Method to Push Past Mental Walls and Achieve Your Goals. She is a cognitive behavioral therapist, specializing in anxiety. She’s worked with Olympic athletes, executives and the US Department of Commerce.

And I have to say that I loved speaking to Joanna because whilst the book and her work is very scientifically based, it also feels very holistic to me. feels very spiritual. And a lot of it is based on this idea of holistic imagery and using our imagination and using that to propel us into the future that we want. So I’m very excited to share the show.

with you in just a moment. Before we do, little reminder to check out our website, mysaluna.com, where you can submit questions for the Q &A shows, where you can find more podcasts, articles. I’ve written thousands of blogs over the years that I think you would enjoy. There are also thousands of plant-based recipes that are simple and delicious, meditations and more. Everything is over there, so please be sure to check it out.

All right, all that being said, let’s get into our interview today with Joanna Grover. Joanna, thank you so much for joining me here today. I loved your very interesting book, The Choice Point, and it’s been sitting in my living room for some months. And I’m really excited that we were able to get our schedules work and for some time to chat today. first of all, thank you so much for coming on our show.

thank you. I’m delighted to be here. And as you pointed out, the choice point, it’s a book that takes some time to sort of percolate because it challenges, you know, our daily routines. It’s interesting when you even boil it down to these moments, these choice points, do I do this? Do I not? Because sometimes, as you know, Joanna, we get so many thousands of thoughts, we don’t really

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (03:16.601)
think about the ones that are truly impactful in our future and moving our lives forward. So can you talk a little bit about defining it more clearly, what these choice points are and how often they come up in our days and in our lives? Well, I’m glad you brought that up because the way we see choice points is there are these split seconds decisions that we make usually right before a challenge.

Am I going to go for a run or am I going to stay in bed? Am I going to order dessert or so these decisions that either take us closer to the life we want or they derail us and take us further. So we have them all day long. We don’t want you to think of every one of these decisions. Just drive yourself and the people around you crazy. But the ones that are attached to your goal and to your life purpose and meaning.

Those are the real, those are the choice points that we’re talking about. So we’re going to get into all the imagine, you know, the imagination and the imagery, which I thought was really fascinating. And it was also interesting that your forward was from Martina Navruchalova, you know, with athletes, this has been something that we’ve heard about before, but we don’t necessarily apply it to our lives of those of us who are non athletes.

But before we get there, Joanne, I wanted to ask you, there’s this part in the book where you talk about spontaneous thoughts. And I think most all of us can relate to things coming in. And like you said, maybe they’re aligned with our values. Maybe they help us. A lot of times they don’t. How much of that is informed by trauma, patterns from the past? And are we, I mean, we hear a lot about neuroplasticity and there’s so much around trauma now with your work and going into the,

the imagery again, which I’m simplifying here, but we’ll talk about in a second. Is that a tool for helping us to overcome some of these past patterns of trauma? Absolutely. Yeah. This, theory that behind the choice point is a body of science known as functional imagery training. And to boil it down to its essence, it’s basically what we elaborate on will shape our behavior. Okay. So if I’m going to elaborate on

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (05:34.977)
a negative event that happened to me in the past. mean mentally elaborate. Yeah, mentally elaborate. So in our work, what we do is we teach people that you can’t monitor the thousands of thoughts you have a day, but you can monitor the images that come along with that, the imagery. You can actually learn to change a channel.

So moving away from this, going down this road, so to speak, sometimes it feels like we’re having these conversations in our head. It’s very audio based. So you’re saying we can create a new picture, an image and move somewhere else. Exactly. Yeah. And before I did this work with Choice Points and with imagery, I was a cognitive behavioral therapist for almost 20 years.

So I dealt a lot with things. My specialty was anxiety. And what I found with this is, yeah, like instead of all the talking, images are powerful, they’re emotional and, and emotions drive our behavior. So it’s a really quick way into the mind. So one of the things you talk about is the mental mutiny versus cognitive control. What’s in the line with my values, my long-term goals.

And so I think about if I had access to your work, Joanna, how I would have used it. I healed my own eating disorder years ago when I was in high school. I was bulimic and I just went on and then I remember one day I said, I just don’t want to do this anymore. And it was really that battle of will. And it was hard, but I was able to overcome it. think what you’re mentioning here, this cognitive, the long-term goals, I don’t want to be this self-abusive person.

But let’s say in that example, and I know eating disorders, so many complexities. The mental mutiny was, this is an easy way to self-sue, this is my pattern. How might imagery have helped me or in your work with the choice point? I mean, it’s like that moment, am I going to binge and purge or am I not? I mean, this is kind of a dark example, but when I was reading your work, thought, hmm, this isn’t, it was a pattern I was in for over a year.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (07:58.127)
So I think about all the many patterns that all of us have, whether it’s abusive self-talk or self-doubt or whatever it is, going into having unhealthy relationships, so on and so forth. Well, the first thing, it’s great that you’re having that awareness, right? That you have a choice, right? You can do this or you can do that. through your imagination, we take you. The first thing we do is we take you to a future where you continue this behavior.

And what would it be like? Seeing yourself in the future. Your future self. But not just seeing, but what does it smell like? What does it taste like? What sort of things are you telling yourself? What emotions are there? And that’s usually for most people a pretty heavy experience. So then we contrast that immediately following with, okay, let’s imagine that you did tackle

you know, changing this behavior. And little by little, you got better and better. We take that future. And that future feels, for most people, a lot less heavy, it feels lighter, they feel a sense of like satisfaction or success. So now we’ve created a choice point with imagery. Again, it’s not words, because words, we can lie to ourselves all day long, right? Yeah.

But our talk is cheap. But the imagery is very powerful. And that’s really how we shape human behavior. mean, advertisers know this. now we’re really using this for improving our own behavior. it also sounds, you’re saying imagery, but it also sounds sensory because it’s not just visual. You’re talking about smells and tastes.

So it’s more like a full body. Yes. Thank you for bringing that up Kimberly because it really is. It’s not, it is, you know, it is sensory. In fact, it’s seven senses. So it’s a five that, know, plus emotion and motion, you know, seeing yourself moving in the future. How will you handle this? How will you handle this? Whether it’s a relationship with food or a person or yourself.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (10:17.807)
You know, it’s really up to you. What I love about this work is it gives someone a sense of agency so they have control over their life. And it takes hold like really quickly, which is amazing too. Yeah. So that’s like, it’s not something that like, oh, you’re to have to stick with this therapist for a long time. What we see is in six sessions, it takes hold. Really? It’s quick. So, um,

Another thing my mom used to do when I was starting to read your book, thought, is this related to back in the day Oprah used to promote these vision boards? Do you know what I’m talking about where you cut out pictures in magazines of sort of the house you want or the shape of your body or whatever you want and then so you’d see these images every day? Is that like a, know, kindergarten version of your work and research or complete?

Well, we just had a conversation the other day with Dr. Hacker, who is an Olympic coach, mental skills coach. And she she said, if anybody says visualization, someone’s going to get hurt. You know, that’s her like visualization and vision board is different than imagery, because imagery, as you said earlier, is multi sensory. Right. So if there’s a difference in the research, what’s

is if we engage, the more senses we engage, the better the outcome. then why, Joanna, is it, you know, it just seems like when you have an image, it’s tangible. But what you’re saying is all the senses in your brain together is more powerful than, you know, because sometimes we put so much, you’re having a bad day or you want to be reminded, then you can look at that picture and sort of say, OK, calls me back.

What you’re talking about is entirely formless in our minds. Yeah. I mean, a picture may be a cue. We use cues too. So that picture may be a cue to put yourself in that image, in that imagery. So I’m there, I’m in that house or I’m in, you know, whatever it is, I’m in that experience. So the picture can cue up the imagery in your head. Wow.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (12:37.613)
won’t be as powerful as putting yourself in the experience. then how long do we stay in that experience to enact real shifting? I know there’s a whole chapter here about commitment and. The interesting thing is not long. Not long is the answer. So 30 seconds. 30 seconds. So let’s use, let’s use a real life example. It wasn’t, we’ve given us an example with a client who.

head goal, she wanted to create something different. I don’t know if it’s sports, maybe that doesn’t relate to as many people in our audience, but something that’s widespread, like don’t know, a work goal or a family goal and how you took them through the steps that you mentioned in your book. So this client that comes to mind, it’s a very high performing executive.

And she found that she was taking her work home with her. So she would walk in the door and she had a stay at home husband. And it was like, everyone had to fall in line, but she had little kids. But she was walking into her home as though she was the boss and it was causing problems in their relationship. And, and also just in her own, like she didn’t feel great about it. She didn’t want to be that kind of mom. So,

When we work with imagery, we work with cues. Athletes use cues all the time. So her cue was her front door. And when she saw that and when she touched the handle, you know, the doorknob, she just for a split second went into the kind of mom that she wanted to be. Wow. And then again, it doesn’t take that long. And then she crossed that threshold.

and after taking a deep breath. And then she developed rituals like, well, I’m going to hop in the shower first and change my clothes, get on my work clothes, like really be in this, be present with my kids. But that cue and that imagery was really important to like, okay, how do I want to show up for my family? And it was all the senses. So she would feel it was tactile and smell. Yeah. And there was a certain Bush,

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (15:01.419)
outside of her home that was fragrant. when she was imagining the front door, she could like smell the fragrance, she could feel the temperature. know, again, the more senses we involve, the more powerful it is, because we’re wired to resist change. Right? No one really wants change. We say we do, but it’s temporary. if we can actually be in an immersive experience in our mind’s eye,

It’s almost as if we’re tricking the mind and body to believe that change happened. Wow. I remember the research you mentioned about obesity and how this was used with, you know, how we can make choices. Because as you said in the book, we all know we’re supposed to exercise and drink water and eat healthy, but those choices come up. Am going to eat this? Am I going eat the box of cookies? That’s true. Now we have a member of our team who,

She just, you know, through osmosis, she’s been sort of like, she doesn’t work in coaching, but on the team, but she does support work for us. And she shared that for the first time ever, she usually is so tempted by Halloween candy. Like it’s in her freezer, know, she’ll open that door and then she’ll, and she said now, cause she’s been using our method, she said she opens that freezer.

And she has no desire. She’s like really dumbfounded by it, but she has no desire to eat it because she’s elaborating on, you know, what she wants to fit into and how she wants to feel. And so the chocolate, whatever bar, Snickers bar isn’t nearly as enticing. So in your work, Joanna, would you say that elaboration happens?

as she opens the door and she’s staring at the candy or is it happening before she opens the door and exposes herself to that very, you’re like, on the edge of the decision. Do know what I mean? Versus a couple seconds before. Yeah, both, both. We’re always elaborating the earlier you can do it. so if she, she basically has like trained herself, she’s rewired her brain in a way to like, I’m not going to, you know, cause when

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (17:25.763)
When we hear or smell or taste something, we’re elaborating on it, right? If someone’s eating a pizza or we see a box pizza, we’ll start to elaborate on, well, how good that would taste or what’s on that pizza. So we’re in that experience, but we can change to anything else that we want. The decision is ours. The choice is ours. But the cue for

for a lot of people is the refrigerator door handle. That’s when they’ll begin elaborating. But the truth is we’re elaborating all day long. How do you deal with such a strong pull for instant gratification? Let’s say it’s someone’s like, I really need this glass of wine after work or the cookies or whatever it is, because the imagery and I know you talk about this and training ourselves, but it’s kind of, you know, not tangible or it’s future based versus

This is here right in front of me. So I’ll give you another story. When I was, I was the first person trained in this method in the U S and I came back and I, where, where were you trained in the United Kingdom? Oh yeah. So functional imagery training was born in the university of Plymouth in the United Kingdom. And as a therapist and a coach, I read about it and I was like, this is what I’ve been looking for.

I want to help people change. And so often as coaches and therapists, people get only so far. And the research here was like, they continue to get better. They continue to achieve. It was incredible resiliency. So I came back from my training and I asked for some volunteers that I wouldn’t charge for my services and they know that I’m learning this. So one of them was a neighbor of mine who wanted to quit smoking.

No, I had never helped anyone quit smoking before. wasn’t my jam. So I, I was like, okay, I’m going to use this method and see how it goes. And I can tell you it’s been almost five years and he’s still not smoking. And what it came down to is a sensory experience of eating a strawberry. And that’s going to sound so weird, but the choice came up.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (19:51.831)
Yeah. So, and this is his own imagination. Like we never know where someone’s imagination is in a go as coaches who work in this realm. It’s not like you have a script because people go to different places. And in his imagination, he went to a strawberry and the taste of a strawberry after a cigarette was really ashy and kind of like it, it just was a terrible texture and he couldn’t smell the strawberry and

without a cigarette, the strawberry was, it brought up like a childhood memory and he could really enjoy the taste. So that’s as simple as it was for him. Wow. And she used that over and over again. It strengthens with the one image becomes even more powerful. And he reinforced it with other things. He started to like watch other videos about quitting smoking, but over and over again, he’d come back to the strawberry and I was his neighbor. I, you know,

drop when I dropped strawberries off at his front door with a little note. So, you know, he was constantly using his, his imagery around this and being reminded. So I, that blew my mind. It was like, wow. how simple was that? You know, I didn’t have to say if you don’t stop smoking, do know what your chances are for lung cancer? Do you know what your chances are? I didn’t have to give him any data. There’s none of that.

simply gave him a sensory experience his own that was very compelling to him wow that is amazing

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (21:37.129)
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Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (23:56.296)
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Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (24:34.014)
Let’s say someone has their limiting beliefs, whatever they’re projecting out in the world, they want a relationship for instance, right? Let’s say someone has been single and they’re struggling to meet somebody. Can they use this work to visualize themselves in a relationship and the kind of person they would be and they could call that in or is your work more based on the decisions that are here and now, which of course would help you.

you know, feel empowered, you know, in any case, I think to be the kind of person you want to be, which would help with that. But do you know what I’m saying? visualize that. Yeah. So I think maybe what in part what you’re asking is, will it help you manifest that relationship? Yes, yes, exactly. Can you create a different future based reality of what you would want, whether that’s work or in relationships or whatever?

Now, here’s where we get to, like my co-author who’s a scientist would be like, you can’t measure that. So no. Yeah, right. And that’s why we’re a good team because he brings the science and I bring more of the, you know, the like, complicated. Yeah. Human and dare I say like spiritual, like, you don’t know, you don’t know where this journey will take someone. Right. So, so we do start small. I wouldn’t necessarily start with a relationship. I’d start with something.

What I found is that when people realize that it works, then you get their buy-in. And now, it’s like, wow, what else can I apply this to? And we see that time and time again. There’s a great couple, a husband and wife team that trained with us, and their imagery was to go on sabbatical and travel around the world. They didn’t start there, but that’s where it ended up. And they are. They are traveling around the world now.

Wow. Well, that makes total sense to me because you’re almost, as you say, like it becomes a reality and you shape your world, your actions. have to take inspired action, but then you work towards that. Yeah. Yeah. But it, it’s amazing how simple it is. Like we all have this ability, but no one ever taught us to tap into it. Right. Yeah. We, we, we’ve worked with a number of athletes and high performing people, but

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (26:49.52)
It works for everybody. You know, you don’t have to be a champion in a sport. The interesting thing is a lot of these champions don’t use it in their life. Like they’ll use it to prepare f