Episode 24: It's Meant to Be 50/50

What if your very best life isn’t one without negative emotions but rather one that wholeheartedly welcomes both the good and the bad? A lot of times we dream about days filled with only happiness and ease, but don't realize that those feelings wouldn’t be as meaningful if we didn't regularly experience their opposites. In this episode, I show you how believing the 50/50 rule and accepting the full emotional spectrum can actually lead to a richer, more joyul life.

Citations:

Elizabeth Gilbert's Speech to Fear

Think New Thoughts Academy:

Check out our most recent workshop in the Think New Thoughts Academy, "How To Let Go Of A Grudge." I'll show you how to relax into the uncomfortable and inconvenient realities of life and then move forward: holding on to the lessons, but letting go of the rest.

100 Thoughts for More Joy

Wanna think some new thoughts? Here are 100 of my favorites that you can try out. Be warned, though. Choosing to really, truly believe even one of these thoughts could drastically impact the way you view yourself and others, and might completely change your life. :)

Full Transcript:

You're listening to the Think New Thoughts Podcast with Emily Ricks, episode number 24. It's meant to be 50-50.

I'm Emily Ricks, and this is Think New Thoughts, a life coaching podcast to help you find more joy in your relationships.In each episode, I'll share a simple idea that will help you see things in a new way so you can love God, your neighbor, and yourself more deeply than you ever have before. If you're ready to literally change your mind, I think you'll like it here.

Hi, episode 24, you guys. I've been doing this podcast for almost six months. Someone asked me recently if it was hard to come up with stuff to say on the podcast every week, and that made me laugh because I actually love that part. But the struggle for me is having too much to say, and I have to bring myself back to my own intro.

Okay, Emily, in each episode, I'll share a simple idea that will help you see things in a new way. And I remind myself, each episode gets one simple idea. That happened to me last week I was recording the episode about emotional lasagna, and I realized I had a lot more I wanted to say about that than would fit into one episode.

So for the next two weeks, I'm going to expand on the idea of allowing negative emotions rather than resisting them. Today, we're going to talk about the 50-50 rule, and then next week, we'll dive into clean pain and dirty pain. It's going to be awesome.

So here we go. Let's think of life as a pie chart for a minute, and your emotions, positive and negative, make up the pie. If you could design your perfect life, what percentage would you have be positive emotions, and what percentage would you have be negative ones? Most people picture in their minds that the perfect life would be way more positive emotion than negative, maybe 80% positive to 20% negative.

Or actually, a lot of people would probably want 100% positive, and let's just never have to feel any of those negative ones, right? So what do you think? What do you think would be the ideal ratio of positive to negative emotions in your life? It's interesting, isn't it? If we picture the perfect Christmas, most of us probably envision a day where nothing goes wrong. No one feels sad or angry or disappointed or annoyed. The house is perfectly clean.

No one is tired or overwhelmed or bored or anything like that all day. Most people, when they think about the perfect vacation, they picture an experience where the weather is sunny the whole time, it's not too hot, it's not too cold, there's no lines to wait in, there's no delays, no complaining or fighting coming from the kids. For a lot of us, we aim for, we strive for, we dream about having as much positive emotion as possible, and as little negative emotion as possible.

That's what we think of as the ideal. And it sounds so lovely. But actually, it wouldn't be.

We don't really realize it, but part of why positive emotions feel so great is that they are in opposition to negative emotions. And if we never felt the negative emotions, happiness actually wouldn't even be possible. One of the concepts I learned in my coach training is called the 50-50 rule.

It states that as humans, 50% of the time, we will feel some version of happiness, love, confidence, peace, contentment, surprise, inspiration, excitement, those kinds of feelings. Half the time, we will feel emotions like this, that we call positive, that feel good in our bodies. And the other 50% of the time as humans, we're going to feel some version of the emotions that don't feel as good, like frustration, boredom, stress, worry, fear, disappointment, or loneliness.

That's the 50-50 rule. Half the time, we'll get to eat the yummy emotion pie. And half the time, we'll eat the pie that doesn't taste so good.

And that actually is the human experience. Now, most people, when they first hear this rule, they think of it as depressing. And they're like, no way.

I don't want to feel negative emotion half my life. And I actually still sometimes catch myself wanting to aim for a percentage that leans way more toward the positive emotions. But I love the 50-50 rule and the idea of it because it's so helpful.

So often, we layer on more and more negative emotion when we resist feeling the primary one that's on the bottom layer. Let me give you an example of what I mean. Here's the first one that comes to mind.

Let's say a person has a podcast and a commitment to publish an episode every Thursday. Do you know anyone like that? There are elements of creating my podcast that I love. I love coming up with new ideas and thinking of creative ways to express principles that I'm passionate about.

I love hearing from people that they've been listening, that they're enjoying it and benefiting from it. I love that my understanding of the tools I teach deepens and expands as I find fun ways to articulate them in an episode. And so it's fun to feel inspired and motivated and fulfilled and competent and proud of myself as I work on my podcast.

So that's half my pie, the fun emotions, the ones that feel good. And I get to feel those about 50% of the time. And the 50-50 rule has been so helpful for me to believe and remember along this journey of creating an episode every week because the truth is, the other 50% of the time that I work on my podcast, I feel negative emotions about the process.

Sometimes I feel doubtful that it's worth the time I'm putting into it. Sometimes I feel critical of myself, like my ideas are dumb or I'm not reaching enough people to warrant the effort I'm putting in. Sometimes I feel frustrated when the last episode fell into place in a certain timeframe and the next one took twice as long to outline and record.

Sometimes I feel panic when the time I set aside to record gets shifted because of sick kids or snow days or other things that come up. Sometimes I feel scared to put myself out into the world when I think about the people who are going to dislike me or dislike the way I talk, or they just won't care and they're not going to listen at all. Sometimes I feel discouraged when technology is challenging to navigate.

Sometimes I feel mad at myself that I haven't hired someone to edit the episodes and do the tech stuff for me. All of these emotions don't feel good in my body. They're not the fun part, but they are part of the pie of my experience as a whole of choosing to be a person who runs a thing.

If you embrace the 50-50 rule, you can relax into negative emotion rather than trying to resist it, which means if you relax into it, you don't create that emotional lasagna with moldy cheese that I talked about in the last episode. So when I feel frustrated, for example, that an episode isn't coming together the way I want it to yet without the 50-50 rule, then I would think, see, I knew I wasn't cut out for this. This podcast is supposed to bring joy and it's creating frustration.

So I don't even want to do this. With the 50-50 rule though, I can think, yeah, this is kind of frustrating right now. That's okay though.

Half of the emotions I'm going to experience as I work on this podcast are going to feel negative. No problem. I'm willing to do this anyway.

And I can handle some frustration as part of the process. That's fine. Without the 50-50 rule, then I would probably layer on additional negative emotions to that base layer of frustration, right? Like, oh, I shouldn't feel frustrated.

This is supposed to be fun. I should be happy all the time. Or maybe I'm not meant to do this, or maybe this isn't worth it.

If I believe that the process shouldn't include any negative emotion, then I'm going to feel resentful on top of frustrated if I experienced frustration along the way. Do you see what I'm saying? And this is true about anything you're doing in your life. It's true of parenting.

Half the time you're going to experience negative emotion. It's arduous. It's challenging.

There will be annoyance and frustration and doubt and worry along the way. And also half the time you'll get to feel love and connection and determination and hope and wonder and awe. The 50-50 rule is true about taking trips.

Half the time on a trip is just going to be like traveling, waiting in lines, just doing normal, boring stuff that isn't really that fun. But half the time you're going to be doing cool things and seeing new stuff and having a great time. It's true about being a homeowner.

Half the time you are fixing or cleaning or updating. And half the time you're actually enjoying your home. It's true about the holidays.

You guys, I wish every woman on the planet could lean into the 50-50 rule in December and just accept that half the time you and everyone else is going to feel negative emotion. And it's fine, even if it's Christmas, because we think everyone is supposed to be a hundred zero somehow magically in the month of December. And then when we're not, we have all this extra stress about it.

I truly believe if you could lean into the 50-50 rule at Christmas time and not try to create a false universe for a month of the year where everyone feels 100% positive emotions and 0% negative, your holiday stress level gets cut in half. Seriously. The 50-50 rule applies to everything in your life.

And I know it's counterintuitive, but I've found it to be true. If you can accept that half of what you're doing is going to be negative emotion and you just relax into that, then you can actually enjoy the whole thing way more than if you're layering on annoyance and negativity about the negative emotions that are part of the experience. So don't fight the reality of the 50-50 rule and try to push your negative emotions away thinking they're not supposed to be there because that just layers on more negativity.

Let your negative emotions be there. It's not a problem. It's fine.

Elizabeth Gilbert is a writer and she says anytime she decides to do something creative or interesting in her life, fear wants to come along. And she actually says her fear and her creativity are basically conjoined twins and that creativity can't take a single step forward without fear marching right alongside it. She says rather than trying to kill off her fear, she actually invites it to come with her wherever she goes.

And she has a speech that she says to fear when she embarks on a new creative adventure. So I'm going to quote a little part of that. This is Elizabeth Gilbert's speech to fear.

Dearest fear, creativity and I are about to go on a road trip together. There's plenty of room in this vehicle for all of us. So make yourself at home.

But understand this, you're not allowed to touch the roadmaps. You're not allowed to suggest detours. And above all else, my dear familiar friend, you are absolutely forbidden to drive.

And that's the end of Elizabeth Gilbert's quote. Don't you love that? I love the idea of letting an emotion like fear be there and just making room for it, but also not allowing it to drive my ultimate outcome. I love the concept of relaxing into negative emotions and just treating them as part of the family.

Coming on the road trip with me, but not letting emotions like fear or worry be the one to drive. So life is meant to be 50 50. Fear is going to come with you on any road trip, along with disappointment and sadness and insecurity and frustration and annoyance and boredom and worry and doubt and confusion and fatigue.

But if you can relax into this reality rather than pushing against it, you'll find that you also get to travel with determination, persistence, inspiration, creativity, fulfillment, energy, and focus. I don't think joy is a 100 to zero ratio of positive emotions to negative ones. Joy is actually negative and positive emotions mixed together in a way that creates a rich, full, deep human experience.

If you start to look, you can see the 50 50 rule everywhere. We get sunshine 50% of the time and darkness for the other half of our lives. Babies are sweet to hold and snuggle and they're so precious and also they cry a lot and they fill their diapers with stuff that really stinks.

Flower gardens have beautiful blooms and also half the garden is a whole lot of dirt and worms. Cookies, which taste amazing, have sugar, but also salt and raw eggs, which I would never eat by themselves. And yet if you mix all the ingredients together, you get a cookie which tastes great.

This is the 50 50 rule. Opposition and all things, yin and yang, dark and light, pleasure and pain. Life is meant to be 50 50.

You're meant to have negative emotions half the time. So try relaxing into the reality of your 50 50 experience, my friend, and see what becomes possible for you. Thanks for joining me today.