Ep #17: 50-50: How to Embrace the Positive and Accept the Negative

You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women podcast with Shannan Christiansen, episode number 17.

Welcome to Weight Loss for Successful Women, a podcast for women who are ready to break the diet cycle and end their struggle with weight for good. Here’s your host, Fortune 100 executive and Certified Life Coach, Shannan Christiansen.

Hello, love. I am so excited to be back today. I love these podcasts and I love recording them and spending some time with you. So, in today’s episode, we are going to talk about 50-50 and 50-50 is all about positive and negative emotion.

And you know, negative emotion is just part of everything. And so we’re going to talk a lot about that today. And as always, I will leave you with a couple of transformational questions to start taking action today. But first, of course, I want to give a listener shout-out. This is where I’ll read a review of the podcast every single week.

And this week’s shout-out goes to Lion Puppy, or Amy L, “Thank you, Shannan, I love your podcast. Your coaching has been so helpful to me. Amy L.” Thank you so much, Amy. I am loving all the reviews, ladies. I just love that you ladies are listening. And if you love this show, please rate and review the show. I would so appreciate it. and don’t forget to subscribe so every Wednesday I’ll be in your podcast library.

Loves, this week has been so amazing, wonderful, and kind of crazy. You know, we opened and closed our doors to Jumpstart. I mean, we have so many #JanuaryJumpstarters. They’re starting their first week this week. So exciting. And I had so much fun.

So all of you ladies that showed up for the free trainings, the lives, I mean, honestly, just spending time with all the ladies, it’s one of my favorite things. But, loves, let me tell you, on Thursday of the launch, my son called me in the morning and he said, “Hey, mom…” and I had my whole day planned out, full of trainings and content writing.

And he said, “My wife…” my daughter in-law, “She’s sick. Can you take her to the hospital?” And, of course, I was like, “Of course.” He was going to stay home with my grandbabies. So, I take my daughter in-law to the emergency room.

And let me just say, everything is okay. But, you know, we spent about four hours there, and they took care of her, and now she’s feeling much better and everything is good. But then, I had a few trainings, and in between all of that, I notices a bunch of fraud on one of my bank accounts.

So then, ladies, in between all of the stuff that was going on, I had to call the bank and take care of all of that. And then, ladies, on Friday – so that was Thursday. And then, on Friday, we had a team meeting. And my son, he couldn’t talk. And I was like, “Son, what’s wrong?” And he’s like, “Mom…” he barely could talk.

He almost bit his tongue off. My sweet grandbaby jumped on him and my son almost bit his own tongue off. I’m not even kidding. So, I’m like, holy-moly. And then, the cheery on top, loves – this is on Friday – my husband, right after I got off the phone with my son, my husband called me and said he was in a car accident.

Again, no one hurt, everything will be okay. But honestly, love, all of this was within two days, right in the middle of my launch. And you know, loves, everything turned out okay, but it actually leads me right into today’s topic, 50-50.

You know, our lizard brains want us to be comfortable and want us to be happy. I mean, we’re always taught that we’re searching for happiness. And our lizard brains want us to stay safe, so we’re consistently pushing against or avoiding negative or uncomfortable emotion.

We’re taught that we should be happy. And honestly, everything that we do is because we want to feel a certain way. So, you know, we fall in love because we want to feel love. I exercise because I want to feel strong and capable. We go to school and get educations because we want to feel confident. We eat to feel comfort. I mean, we have friends because we want to feel like we belong.

And, loves, when we overeat, we’re trying to feel comfortable, safe, love, sometimes we’re just trying to avoid boredom and we’re trying to feel busy. Because we’re never taught to look at our thoughts and feelings, honestly, we’ve just been on this diet rollercoaster for years.

But negative and uncomfortable emotion is the other side. Everything balances out. It’s kind of like yin and yang, positive and negative. Life is supposed to be 50-50. We’re not always supposed to be happy, and we’re striving so that we can feel happy, so we can feel that we belong, and so that we can feel all these positive emotions.

And then, we have all of this other stuff that’s negative and what we try to do is buffer. We try to push that negative emotion down. And when we do that – and for most of us who re listening to this podcast, it’s all about food. And so, we use food to push the negative emotion down.

But you know, loves, life, it’s supposed to be 50-50. And you know, I used to – when I first heard this – my brain instantly went to, “No, 70-30.” But honestly, the more deep I go into this work, the more I work on myself, I realize it’s 50-50.

Now, some days are 90-10 and some days are 10-90. But in the end, I really truly believe it all balances out. I see this so much when my Jumpstarters start. They want to be happy. They want to feel freedom. And they want to be positive all the time.

They struggle with accepting or expecting the negative 50%. I know because, loves, I did this for so much of my life. I did not want to feel the pain, so I just kept pushing it down with a cupcake. But you know, love, that it just comes up. I mean, it comes up with a greater force than when I pushed it back down.

And so, when I accept that I can feel negative or uncomfortable emotion, I’m less likely to avoid, buffer or resist it. So, when I know that I can feel frustration, irritation, shame, uncomfortable, then the less likely I am to eat the cupcake to avoid the negative emotion. I mean, Thursday and Friday, I mean, it was just a rollercoaster of emotion.

I was having so much fun with the ladies and then I had all of these other things happening. And I still realized that I could feel the negative emotion. I could feel the stress when I saw all the fraud on our bank account. I could feel stressful when I was sitting in the emergency room and I could feel uncomfortable when I was waiting to ensure that my daughter in-law was okay. And I don’t have to eat the cupcake.

And, loves, when I know that my son has a 50-50 life too, I know that I can’t protect him from it, he has to experience his 50-50 life. I’m serious when I say this, love, it saves me so much drama and worry. I mean, I wanted him to go to the hospital when he thought that he had bit his tongue pretty much off.

I wanted to take care of him. I wanted him to feel better. But I could not. He had to go through the physical pain and some stress with his tongue. So, knowing that I have a 50-50 life means that I don’t have to be perfect. I can have a bad moment; I can feel shame and take the next best action.

When I know that no feeling will ever kill me and that I have the tools to cope with anything, I have more confidence. I know that I’m going to feel negative emotion. And hear me, ladies, hear me when I say this; I expect it.

I expect negative emotion. And by expecting it, I do not buffer or avoid it or push it down like a beachball. When I know that I’ll have failure and I feel shame about it, I can grow. I can learn from it.

In growing this business, I have so many times where my lizard brain wants me to quit. The times the tech feels hard or I have to be vulnerable. But I know that this business is 50-50; 50% amazing and wonderful, like when I get an email from a client that feels like she has hope again for the first time or that’s he finally feels some love for herself, and 50% it’s learning all the tech and feeling overwhelmed.

And when we start to expect the 50-50, life gets easier. We learn that we can feel emotion. We can allow it and we can move on. It’s so freeing. I am a human. I have a human brain. And I am imperfectly perfect. I’m learning, growing, and evolving. And that is how it’s supposed to be, 50-50.

So, the transformational questions today, what if you knew that it was always going to be 50-50 and the cupcake would never change it? And number two, what if you could expect negative emotion, what would it change for you?

Okay, loves, so much love to you.

If you love this work and you want to go deeper, take my free course. It’s a free mini course. You can learn more about it at bflycoaching.com/free-course. Bye for now, loves.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Weight Loss for Successful Women. If you love what you heard today and want to learn more, come over to bflycoaching.com. That’s B – F – L – Y coaching dot com. See you next week!