Epidsode 5: The 50/50

I am excited to be with you today! I have so many things that I want to share with you! Each week I am practicing constraint by dishing out only 15 minutes or less of the golden nuggets that have transformed my life. Today, I am going to introduce a new theory to you which I will call the 50/50. I learned this concept from Brooke Castillo, the creator and owner of The Life Coach School. The 50/50 is simply that life is not supposed to be, nor will it be more than 50% positive or 50% percent negative. I love the idea but I have some clients that push against this. They insist that their life is more positive than negative or another person might insist that their own life is more negative than positive - I am here to tell you that the exact breakdown has much to do with your perspective. Whichever way you want to slice it, the good news is that if you are noticing there are negative or unfavorable things in your life that nothing has gone wrong! Welcome to earth! Really hard things happen here like death and divorce and natural disasters…… and so do breathtakingly beautiful things like a baby's first smiles, and love's first kiss. The list can go on, but if you are truly out there living there are going to be good and bad things that happen consistently. The thing is that when we focus on the negative and think about how bad it is we make the experience of it worse than it has to be - just like my hero Viktor Frankle taught. To accept that negative things are part of life is to normalize them - Accepting and normalizing difficult things is a way to stop fighting against them and in the resistance make the bad things bigger. If you think about it, to live a full life, you will actually want to experience negative emotions. Who wants to be happy when someone you love dies? Mourning the people, stages, and sometimes things we lose in this life is a way of honoring what we have had - to me it is one of the highest forms of love and gratitude. I know that when I go through difficult things, I experience all kinds of emotions of, doubt, judgment, fear, and sometimes even shifts into physical pain - like when I prepared to run a half marathon last week after not having run for over 10 years, The fact that I did experience all of those emotions and physical pain made the accomplishing of the goal that much more triumphant. There was more confidence where there was once doubt. There was more gratitude for my body’s capacity where there was once judgment for its limitations. There was joy in the movement where there was once fear that I couldn't do it anymore. What I am saying is that If it had been easy = the reward would have been less. If there was no negative - how would we know when something was positive? We would be living in such a small bandwidth of life that we would miss out on the goodness that is possible in this life. Let me share with you a time that the 50/50 has helped me personally to stay more neutral during trying times. When my 3rd daughter was graduating from highschool, and the graduation was over and the party was done we were going to be preparing for my oldest daughter’s wedding a month or so later, and it was my birthday to boot on the day the phone call came that told me my dad was having heart attack symptoms and needed to be on his way to the hospital. I hung up the phone with that feeling of fear and dread that sits hard and heavy in your stomach. I had so many good things happening that already felt like a little more than my emotions could handle, and this health situation felt like a threat to all of them. Would I have to miss some of them, what was the right thing to do, what did I need to do right then, why was this happening to me right now? And when I got to that question, I had an answer - of course it is happening to you - and even now - because life is 50/50- Of course it is happening - this is earth life and you are no different than anyone else - How do you want to handle it today? When I asked and continue to ask myself this question - The golden question I gave you in Episode 2 - How do I want to handle it today - or what am I going to do about it - I put myself in the driver's seat of my own life controlling what I can control with the best of my abilities. The awareness that things are not only going to go wrong, but are actually supposed to, is a gift you give yourself because it brings peace by clearing the fight out of you and gets you to the baseline of acceptance - You will know you are not accepting the fifty/fifty of life if you think thoughts like these: Why is this happening to me? Why does this always happen to me? This is not fair. I never get ahead. I always get knocked down. Nobody else gets hit as much as we do. I shouldn’t have to deal with this. Do you ever think thoughts like this or something similar? T hese thoughts are the kind of thoughts that keeps us stuck focusing on being a victim of circumstances instead of accepting them and then deciding what to choose to do that is in our control. It leads us to think of life like it is a bully that only picks on us which is an isolating and scary feeling. The concept of 50/50 immediately levels the playing field. All people will experience 50% negative and 50% positive throughout the course of their lives and sometimes in the same day or same hour, your brain can not be trusted when it tries to tell you that others have way more of the positive than you do. It is more correct to notice that you just are not privy to their negative 50. Hang with me while I tell you a story from a Chinese parable that dates back to the 2nd century B.C- This story is an example of how taoism, considered one of the world's major religions, views fortune and misfortune, and is a perfect flow into navigating our lives with the concept of the 50/50 and accepting what is. Son - has a horse Horse runs away-Who Knows if this is good or bad - Comes back with a bunch more –Who Knows if this is good or bad - Gets bucked off and hurt-Who Knows if this is good or bad - Spared from going to war -Who Knows if this is good or bad - I LOVE this parable! It highlights that in the good things there are seeds of bad things and in the bad there are seeds of the good. In other words it is an even 50/50 split. So let me end by inviting you to do a quick scan of your life. Where do you think you are on the scale of 50% negative and 50% positive? Does your brain believe you are more or less one of them? Do you think it is supposed to be different than that? Do you ever catch yourself being mad when negative things happen to you? Like the universe is out to get you? Or like negative things must be a judgment from God? What would it be like for you if you made peace with the plus and minuses of your life and called the balance sheet neutral? IF you were not fighting against what is currently the reality of your life, kids that are needy of your attention and resources, a job you don’t love, a family member you think should be different than they are, a rough fiscal year, a marriage that is not all roses all the time, physical ailments that have to be dealt with, questions that don’t have answers, or a new stage in your life that feels confusing, just to name a few - If you were not fighting against these kinds of crunchy things and wishing they were different - how much space would you free up in your mind and heart by simply accepting them and then asking yourself what do you want to do about them? You could also borrow a thought from our Chinese parable’s father - and tell yourself that you don’t know if what is going on is good or bad - time will tell - so chill out for a bit and let time do its work for you. In that simple analysis and question to self - you could neutralize a chunk of your negative 50% of life , and when you get to neutral - you have a chance to start looking around at what is working for you and what is good today. Start a list right now on the notes app on your phone of what is working, what is the part of life that is 50% great right now. Let’s keep this list running and growing through Thanksgiving - I can tell you that with a list like that in your mind and in your heart - you can’t help but love the life you are creating daily a little more than you did yesterday. That’s all I got today, friends! Thanks for spending your time with me. I hope I went on a good walk with you, rode in your car to somewhere you wanted to go, stood by you while you cooked dinner or folded the laundry, or maybe even shared in a moment with someone you love. No matter how I got to tag along, I am honored to be included and hope it was counted in the positive side of your day! Don’t forget to follow, leave a rating or a review, and share with your friends and family! You might not know where someone is in the flow of their negative/positive ratio today, but there is a 50% chance of hard things at some point - so help me get this information to them sooner rather than later!