Feature Filmmaker

Ep. 56 - Get Rid of Unwanted Desire

October 22, 2021 Anna Thalman
Feature Filmmaker
Ep. 56 - Get Rid of Unwanted Desire
Show Notes Transcript

In this Podcast Episode:

  • An update: we watched the first assembly of the Loved and Lost
  • Developments within the Film and Family program that we are excited to release
  • The flip side of generating motivation to do things is getting rid of desires for things we don't want to do
  • Determining which desires you want to keep or get rid of
  • Focusing on something grows it - what you focus on, you create more of
  • The biggest problem people run into when they try to get rid of desire
  • A simple solution - desire something else more
  • Focusing on the wanted starves the unwanted desire
  • Our desires feed off of our attention. Focus on it and it will grow
  • Human Nature - not judging yourself or others
  • Releasing drama gives the desire less power 
  • Why thoughts with heavier emotions stick more in your memory

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Kent Thalman:

Hi, welcome to this, podcast episode today on unwanted desire. We're happy to be with you again and have some updates here to start off the episode

Anna Thalman:

today, we finished the first assembly of our film, the loved and lost, which is the working title. And that was pretty interesting. I feel like it's kind of terrifying for me as the director to watch a first assembly. I'm feeling good. Yeah.

Kent Thalman:

You might be wondering why did it take you so long to finish the first assembly? And I'll tell you many, many reasons why I'm not going to tell you many, many reasons why. There were just many, many reasons why. I don't feel like making any excuses. It's just. It's something you should be prepared for. If you're going to make a movie with little to no money, especially if you have no money for posts to pay yourself with. So that's okay. It's something we're, we're kind of understood was going to be the case. And we were going to have to do it on our own, but, our team has grown a little bit. And as a team we're making really steady forward progress now, daily and, I feel really good about the prospects and the future of the film. The assembly of course, is trash. Like all, you know, first assemblies are, but, but it's showing the promise that I think we're hoping to see and it's going to take. It's going to come together. I'm dying. Yeah. Epic.

Anna Thalman:

And it wasn't four hours long. Like I thought it might be it's

Kent Thalman:

two hours and 40 minutes, which is about an hour longer than it needs to be. That's good.

Anna Thalman:

That's good. Cause there's lots of room to cut. So we'll keep you guys updated as we go and, uh, look forward to a teaser trailer sometime beginning of next year. So for those who are following that, that's where that's at. Okay. We are kind of getting ready to move into the distribution stage in the next few months. So with that, we're also getting some other projects in the works for next year that we're excited about. So, which we won't talk about yet, which we will not

Kent Thalman:

reveal yet, but the felon family academy is also growing and developing. And, Anna has some news on that. Well,

Anna Thalman:

I've accepted my last private client. To go through the program. And from this point forward, we're moving into a membership model, which we're really excited about. We've been recording lots of content and putting this together for the last year. And it's finally going to be ready to roll out. Sometimes soon, so imminently. Look forward to that and we'll, we'll keep you posted

Kent Thalman:

on that as well. I just want to say that like its membership means it's a one-time payment, just like always like a subscription, a subscription membership. It's just a one-time payment and you get access to all the course material and you have access to regular calls. So there will be regular group calls where you can be coached if you feel like you need that extra support, but we feel like we've developed a content of the academy in a way that is really strong. So those

Anna Thalman:

of you who have downloaded the free checklist. Go download it. It's great. We'll link to it in the show notes, and we have modules on every single item on the checklist and a bunch of bonus courses and other materials and tools to help you make your first feature film. The great thing about this membership model is that it's self-paced, you can do it on your own time and move as quickly, or as slowly as you want. And you still have the support in the group calls to ask any questions you have. Anytime you get stuck. And we still guarantee that you'll make your feature film where your money back. So that just makes it more accessible for more people. And it's, pretty good. We're excited. So let's get into the topic of

Kent Thalman:

today's podcast really wants to get into the topic.

Anna Thalman:

We're going to talk about unwanted desire, which sounds like is it an oxymoron?

Kent Thalman:

It's kind of an oxymoron, isn't it? Like, it's unwanted. Like you don't want what you

Anna Thalman:

want. It sounds like a contradiction.

Kent Thalman:

Not wanting what you want, wanting what you don't want,

Anna Thalman:

but there are times when we have desires to do things and we don't actually. In our right mind, want to do those things. So a lot of times we focus on the other side of this, which is generating motivation. You know, when we don't want to do something that we know we need to do, or we, we actually do want to do it, but, but in the moment we don't, that's a really important skill to learn it. And it will help you with this it's related to this, but the other side of the coin, Sometimes we have desires that we don't want. And we don't know, I had to get rid of,

Kent Thalman:

I think that right now, a lot of the dialogue happening sort of in our culture is we talk a lot about desires. Like they're like, it's part of your identity or it's part of who you are. And I really don't think that's true. I think every human being on the planet has experienced feeling desires for things they just don't actually want. Like there. Feel like, they feel like they want it, but they, like Anna said in their right mind sink. I'd rather just not feel these feelings and we've all felt feelings we don't want to feel. Right. And so specifically with desire, that's what I think we can talk about. How do you shift that feeling if it's something you don't want to feel and how do you determine, if it's a desire that you want to get rid of or keep. I feel like the answer to that is what is the result that it is going to lead you towards. So if you do what you desire, is it going to create a result in your life that you want or that you don't want? If it's one that you don't want, that, that identifies as a desire that you could.

Anna Thalman:

I think the reason this happens is because we have a higher and a lower brain, we have our lower brain is conditioned to. Do things in sort of an animal kingdom way to fight or flight or freeze to yeah. To seek after dopamine and adrenaline are all parts of our lower brain. And our higher brain is able to make long-term goals and conscious thought and reason. So a lot of times it actually is pretty clear. What we do want with our higher conscious brain. An example of this, just to get more concrete might be in the moment you want to eat all your Halloween candy. We're coming up on Halloween. So you want to eat all the candy, but your higher brain actually doesn't want to have a bunch of sugar in your system and the stomach ache. The next,

Kent Thalman:

depending on where you're at in your life, your higher brain might not want to eat any of the candy,

Anna Thalman:

but your lower brain mind. And so that is an example of a desire that you don't want.

Kent Thalman:

Yeah. Feeling the desire won't kill you, but maybe eating all of the candy minds. And so, um, so you look at it and you say, this is a result I don't want, I don't want to be sick. I don't want to experience like all the health repercussions and kickbacks of eating my entire bag of Halloween candy. And so what. You end up doing is sitting in a corner and thinking, I don't wanna eat my Halloween candy. I don't wanna eat my Halloween candy. I don't wanna eat my Halloween candy and that doesn't seem to help at all. Right. Then that's often what we do with most of our unwanted desires is that we think a lot about how do I get rid of this unwanted desire? Do we push

Anna Thalman:

it away? Which makes it grow stronger. Yeah. Yep. And you resist persists.

Kent Thalman:

I have been reading in random places like editorial asks, so-and-so kind of magazine articles and other random places. A lot of people suggest to these things, just push these desires deep down and push them away and draw them in a box and ship them to see and do some metaphorical Hocus Pocus, and don't feel them anymore. And they'll go away if you resist them long enough, I do agree that like some desires, if you resist them long enough, we'll go. But most of the time by resisting desires, we ended up thinking so much about them that we're actually focusing on them and what we focus on grows in our life.

Anna Thalman:

There's a difference between resisting and desire and letting it go. Resisting is pushing. You are exerting force towards that desire versus letting go, which is releasing your attachment to it. It can still be there, but it's not bothering you so much and you're not so obsessed with it or worried about

Kent Thalman:

it. Yeah. And I think letting go has a lot to do with processing it. So it's letting it in, in the way that. Let yourself feel any feeling. We've talked about this on the last episode a little bit, but processing emotion is so powerful and valuable because a desire it's a feeling, right? So, and so you can process it by sitting and letting it come in and say, what exactly am I feeling? How would I describe it? And then you can trace it to, why am I feeling this? And you can kind of start to discover the thoughts behind it. That's a very valuable sort of neutral place of mind to analyze the unwanted desire. And there's nothing wrong with doing that. And then, like Anna said, once you see it for what it really is, and you can articulate exactly what's causing the desire. You can, you can start to let it go.

Anna Thalman:

And we have a great episode on that. If you want more information about processing emotions and how to do that called come in, make yourself uncomfortable. So you can look for more details there, but. What we want to focus on today is that focusing on something grows, it, what you focus on, you create more of. So the problem people run into when they're trying so hard to get rid of desire, as you said, Kent, is that they're actually focusing more on it and growing it or pushing so hard against it, that it pushes back. The solution is simple. It sounds simple and it is somewhat simple, very simple, which is just desire something else more. And if you focus on that other desire and grow that, then the wanted desire, starves the unwanted desire because our desires feed off of our attention. So whichever one you're paying the most attention to is going to continue to grow.

Kent Thalman:

I have an example here. And so there's a man named Dallin H Oaks who was,, likely going to become a Supreme court justice of the United States, but he was a Utah state Supreme court justice and he had a glittering legal career. Now he serves as an apostle and the church of Jesus Christ of latter day saints. He gave a talk on desires, which is really interesting. And he says, as mortal beings, we have some basic physical needs. First food, second shelter, third sleep. And then he says, desires to satisfy. These needs, compel our choices and determine our actions. And he says, these three examples will demonstrate, how we sometimes override these desires with other desires that we consider more important. And he gives an example of food, shelter and sleep. And he says, for example, If you're a desire to, to fast is greater than your desire for food, it can override temporarily your desire for food. Same with, if your desire, he gives an example of a boy scout, abandoning shelter for the sake of wanting to earn a merit badge. And so he, he puts that off. And then this third example is a longer one, which I won't read, but it's about a. Utah or was it? Yeah, Utah national guard story. When the leader of this, the captain Cox was his name had to stay up all night because his unit was in danger of attack and they had to keep watch, and he had someone wake him up every hour throughout the night. And. The constant interruption of sleep. As you could imagine, if you have any experience taking care of infants is extremely difficult and someone asked him how he did it. And he says, let me just find it here. I knew that if we ever got home, I would be meeting the parents of those boys on the streets, in our small town, and I didn't want to face any of them. If their son didn't make it home because of anything I failed to do as his committee. And so this is an example of someone whose desire to not have to face a parent and tell them that his failure to wake up at night over and over and over and over again, may have contributed to the loss of one of his men or this person's child. Right. And so. These are somewhat obvious examples. I think we've all experienced, just like we've all experienced desires. We don't want to have, I think we've all experienced having strong desires that override other really, really strong desires like for food or, or even for rest or comfort, we've all experienced. I don't know a degree of exertion or exercise or something that we've exerted a huge amount of, of sacrifice and effort toward, And, and so this all just serves the point of desiring something more than the thing you currently would desire, but don't want to desire is one of the most effective ways to find something else to focus

Anna Thalman:

on. And often when I'm working with clients, this is something that they'll bring up in one way or another, an example of saying, well, I don't want to do the work. To make a feature film. Let's use that example. And I'll just say, okay, don't do it. And there's a lot of conflict that comes up because then they start to remember, oh, but I actually do for some reason. And when you can remember why you do want to do something, why you do want to stay married, why you do want to have a family, why you do want to make a feature film or whatever it is that you're pushing off for avoiding then getting back to that, why and acknowledging that you have the choice, you don't have to be doing that thing and you could just not do it. Really helps us to own our desires and kind of build up that desire for the thing that you really want. When you can remember your. So I'd like to talk about how this applies to film and family and how this might apply to you or where you might see these things in your life. On the one hand, I think that it is sort of the same problem as not feeling motivated enough to. Get started on whatever phase of production you're in, whether it's pre-production or writing the script, or calling up another person about financing

Kent Thalman:

or editing a mountain of footage that you've amassed.

Anna Thalman:

There are parts of every single stage probably where you'll experience this. And when you're wanting to increase your motivation again, it's usually because in the moment there's something else you're wanting to do. Instead, you would much rather go watch Lord of the rings every night for a week, then work on your film. Confession.

Kent Thalman:

It's inspiring. It's helping us want to make movies, man.

Anna Thalman:

That's how we're growing or desire to work on our movie. No, but you will justify things like this in your brain. This is what happens. So you'll find that in the moment. You'd much rather. Go eat a candy bar, then write another page of your script,

Kent Thalman:

endlessly through your Facebook or Instagram or whatever, social media feed.

Anna Thalman:

So it's important to remember your why, remember your reasons, why you want to do things, practice those, focus on those and grow that desire. And if you think about it like dating. It's not really a problem when you're dating to feel attracted to more than the one person that you're dating. Like you're gonna be noticing all the options in the world and you might feel attracted to some of them and you might be interested in some of them, but if your desire for the one person overrides all of them, then it doesn't matter. Right, because you're going to stay with that person and you're not going to risk that relationship. And so we want

Kent Thalman:

them more or most. Yes.

Anna Thalman:

And so it's the same way you don't have to kill all your desires or resist them or shun them or hate them. You don't have to judge yourself. Or think a lot of bad thoughts about it or about that person. If we're using the dating example, you don't have to say, well, I'd probably be miserable with that person and they're really not attractive. And they probably, you

Kent Thalman:

know yeah. And it just gets more dramatic when you're married even. And you start to say like, well, I bet they're actually just like a terrible human, you know, I bet they're probably just bad people. That actually doesn't help reduce any of the desire like that. You might feel for someone that's like an attractive person,

Anna Thalman:

that part of your brain that's

Kent Thalman:

like, you don't know that. Well, you're kind of lying to yourself right in line. Doesn't usually work. But if you're just like, well, I can still just think that that's probably a great person and honestly increasing our capacity for true love. I think. Helps us feel good about strangers and feel like, you know, I, I probably are a good person and they'd probably be friends with them, man. I have, you know, if, if that love is coming from the right place in you and you're growing that true love for the person you actually want to be with to Anna's point, that's what you're focusing on. So you focus on improving your relationships instead of just like talking bad about other options. And this is. This is a congruent for lots of other things, right? Options of what we could do this evening or options of whatever is you, you focus on why you want the thing that you've decided upon or committed to whether that's a relationship or a task. And it really reminds me of one of my favorite mark Twain quotes. I don't know if mark Twain actually said this it's this weird old Claymation that I used to watch growing up with this kid walks into his personal library. It's full of books. And they said, these are classics. And she said, what's a classic. And mark Twain says something. Everybody wants to have read, but nobody wants to read. And I feel like that's relating to all of us making these feature films, many of us are like, what's the feature film, something everybody wants to have made, but nobody wants to make, it's just a big, heavy task. It's not always super easy, but then once you've done it, you've, it's this thing that brings a lot of results into your life that you wanted. Right. I just want to go back to that, that the results that you want in your life. R how you judge the desires, whether you want to keep them or discard them. And the desires are going to come from your thoughts, but you don't always have to go backwards to the thought, unless you're processing, look to the result to decide if you want to keep or discard the desire and then adjust your thoughts to set you on course for the result. And then the feelings will change naturally, as you adjust your thoughts, because thoughts always reflect. The result and

Anna Thalman:

vice versa. Yeah. If you're thinking about the feeling, which one feels better than most likely, you're going to choose the one that feels better in the moment, which usually is not aligned with the longterm results you want in your life. That just is a human tendency. And you don't have to trick yourself out of the desire or lie to yourself or any of that. In fact, releasing a lot of the drama around. Is good because whenever we have thoughts that are attached to strong emotions, they actually are lodged deeper and stronger into our brain. Our brain is working hard to sort through all of the constant information coming in and decide what's most important. Thoughts that we have, or the things that we notice that are attached to high emotion, the brain is going to categorize as very important. So if you have a lot of drama around, oh my gosh, I'm married and I'm feeling attracted to someone else. If we're going back to that example, then your brain is going to notice that and say, this is really important. This is really important. This is a problem. We should kill this desire. We need to get rid of it. We need to think about it all the time. Instead of just being like, yeah. It's okay. That is an attractive person. So what finger traps or there? That probably is a great person. That's okay. It's totally normal. Usually these desires that we have our natural human nature desires. There's nothing wrong with them. We don't have to judge ourselves for them and we can just. Release them, let them go, let them pass, notice them and keep going. And if it is really something that's bothering you, then again, focus on what you do want and first own your, that it is your choice. So again, with this marriage one, if you thought, well, I could never be with that person. The reality is you could, you could leave your spouse. It's possible that you could pursue that relationship. Why don't you, do you want to, and then you start to remember,

Kent Thalman:

oh no. Why don't I, well, because of blank, you know, you'll answer the question and then you'll start to think of all the reasons. Right. But you can't start thinking of those reasons, unless you actually admit that there are things that you have choices in your life. It's like when we parent. We often tell our kids, like you can't do that when actually they can. And we tell ourselves this too, no, you can't do that. It's like what? Our brain deep down knows like, it's like a toddler, right? It's like it. Yeah. I can, I'll prove it to you. I can do that thing. You're never going to trick your brain. You're never going to trick your toddler either and, and, or your teenager for that matter. And so you have to admit to yourself and to the other people that you might have responsibility for, you could do this. This is an option you could choose to try to develop some relationship with this person that would maybe not be something you would deem appropriate. You could choose to try and cheat on your spouse. You could choose to steal that thing. You could choose to hit your sister. You know, you could choose to do any of these things. Those are within your choice. Why would you choose that? Why don't you want to choose that? Why wouldn't you, you know, and then you answer those questions and you start to see. Oh, you realize the why. And then at the same time you say what would happen if you did choose it. Right. And you look at the result down the road and that's maybe part of the why, like, well, that's why I wouldn't. And so, results, I think are one of the best ways to judge decisions and desires it really helps us to process. Let go of certain things and then focus on other things that are more important and move forward. And I really have been thinking a lot about this idea of moving forward in life and how so much of our anguish in life is caused by either getting stuck in what feels like the present or getting stuck in the past and looking forward and just kind of saying, what do I need to do next? You know, you have to accept the present and move forward towards the future. And that really is the, some of the easiest ways to shift your focus and really find progress in your life and find a little more peace.

Anna Thalman:

Yeah. And I like this, this marriage example we're going with, because it's a bit extreme, a little more so than a cupcake or wanting to watch a movie at night. But. The last thing you'd want to do to just complete the example is focus on what you do want. So when you decide, I want to stay in my marriage. For example, this aligns with my long-term results that I want. And it's the higher brain part of me that wants that. Then you focus on that and you don't have to kill the other desires. You just have to make the desire. For what you want the most greater than the other desires. And so the more you build that, the more, the other desires just don't matter because you will do what you desire most. So what you desire most is going to lead naturally and the rest, it won't matter unless it's competing.

Kent Thalman:

Yeah. Well, I have no further questions.

Anna Thalman:

That's our episode for today. Hopefully it's helpful as you try to achieve the things you really want in your film career and in your family life.

Kent Thalman:

Yeah. And, you can think about how it would be easy to just, you know, continue doing the same things you do every day. And how part of you really wants to do. Maintain mediocrity in your life and not find any progress, but when you process that emotion and focus on what you really desire, you'll realize that you'll want to visit invisible mansion.com forward slash film and family, and check out the Fillon family academy, which will help you progress forward in your life and find, so much more satisfaction in progress.

Anna Thalman:

That's true. What are you waiting for? If you haven't made a feature film yet? Do you want to enough? Are you going to do it? Okay. We'll see you next time.